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Research Note

The origin of public concerns over AI supercharging misinformation in the 2024 U.S. presidential election

Harry Yaojun Yan, Garrett Morrow, Kai-Cheng Yang and John Wihbey

We surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults to understand concerns about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) during the 2024 U.S. presidential election and public perceptions of AI-driven misinformation. Four out of five respondents expressed some level of worry about AI’s role in election misinformation.

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Research Note

Conspiracy Theories

Understanding climate change conspiracy beliefs: A comparative outlook

Daniel Stockemer and Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau

Are climate change conspiracy theories widespread across the world, or do we find climate change conspiracy beliefs more so in some countries than in others? This research note explores the prevalence of conspiracy beliefs that identify climate change as a hoax across eight geographically and culturally diverse countries.

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A playbook for mapping adolescent interactions with misinformation to perceptions of online harm

Gowri S. Swamy, Morgan G. Ames and Niloufar Salehi

Digital misinformation is rampant, and understanding how exposure to misinformation affects the perceptions and decision-making processes of adolescents is crucial. In a four-part qualitative study with 25 college students 18–19 years old, we found that participants first assess the severity of harms (e.g.,

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Conservatives are less accurate than liberals at recognizing false climate statements, and disinformation makes conservatives less discerning: Evidence from 12 countries

Tobia Spampatti, Ulf J. J. Hahnel and Tobias Brosch

Competing hypotheses exist on how conservative political ideology is associated with susceptibility to misinformation. We performed a secondary analysis of responses from 1,721 participants from twelve countries in a study that investigated the effects of climate disinformation and six psychological interventions to protect participants against such disinformation.

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Trump, Twitter, and truth judgments: The effects of “disputed” tags and political knowledge on the judged truthfulness of election misinformation

John C. Blanchar and Catherine J. Norris

Misinformation has sown distrust in the legitimacy of American elections. Nowhere has this been more concerning than in the 2020 U.S. presidential election wherein Donald Trump falsely declared that it was stolen through fraud. Although social media platforms attempted to dispute Trump’s false claims by attaching soft moderation tags to his posts, little is known about the effectiveness of this strategy.

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GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation

Jutta Haider, Kristofer Rolf Söderström, Björn Ekström and Malte Rödl

Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research.

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Playing Gali Fakta inoculates Indonesian participants against false information

Matthew J. Facciani, Denisa Apriliawati and Tim Weninger

Although prebunking games have shown promise in Western and English-speaking contexts, there is a notable lack of research on such interventions in countries of the Global South. In response to this gap, we developed Gali Fakta, a new kind of media literacy game specifically tailored for an Indonesian audience.

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Framing disinformation through legislation: Evidence from policy proposals in Brazil

Kimberly Anastácio

This article analyzes 62 bills introduced in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies between 2019–2022 to understand how legislators frame disinformation into different problems and their respective solutions. The timeframe coincides with the administration of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. The study shows a tendency from legislators of parties opposed to Bolsonaro to attempt to criminalize the creation and spread of health-related and government-led disinformation.

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Attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines may have “spilled over” to other, unrelated vaccines along party lines in the United States

Mark LaCour and Zebulon Bell

This study used data from pre- and post-COVID surveys to examine vaccine attitudes in the United States. We found evidence consistent with an ideological “spillover” effect: Liberals’ attitudes became more positive towards non-COVID vaccines (flu, MMR, HPV, chickenpox) and conservatives’ attitudes became more negative.

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Taking the power back: How diaspora community organizations are fighting misinformation spread on encrypted messaging apps

Joao V. S. Ozawa, Samuel Woolley and Josephine Lukito

We applied a mixed-methods approach with the goal of understanding how Latinx and Asian diaspora communities perceive and experience the spread of misinformation through encrypted messaging apps in the United States. Our study consists of 12 in-depth interviews with leaders of relevant diaspora community organizations and a computer-assisted content analysis of 450,300 messages published on Telegram between July 2020 and December 2021.

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