Massive amounts of misinformation have been observed to spread in uncontrolled fashion across social media. Examples include rumors, hoaxes, fake news, and conspiracy theories. At the same time, several journalistic organizations devote significant efforts to high-quality fact checking of online claims. The resulting information cascades contain instances of both accurate and inaccurate informa...

An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the gap in the political views between people that engage with the so called ”fake news”. A possible factor responsible for this gap is opinion polarization, which may prompt the general public to classify content that they disagree or want to discredit as fake. In this work, we ...

With their blistering expansion in recent years, popular online social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Bebo, have become not only one of the most effective channels for viral marketing but also the major news sources for many people nowadays. Alongside these promising features, however, comes the threat of misinformation propagation which can lead to undesirable effects. Due to the sheer nu...

Objective: There is an extensive corpus of knowledge about how misinformation may distort autobiographical memories. A diagnostic error can be conceptualised as a form of misinformation. Methods: The authors discuss the case of a 58-year-old woman who was given a misdiagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Results: The patient was deeply convinced that the diagnosis was correct, even when she was conf...

Verbally recalling the appearance of a perpetrator and the details of an event can sometimes hinder later eyewitness memory performance. In two experiments, we investigated the effects of verbally recalling a face on people's ability to resist subsequent misinformation about that face. Participants watched a video of a theft and then completed either a recall test or a distractor activity. Afte...

This paper presents the research of the influence of cognitive, behavioral, representational factors on the susceptibility of the participants in social networks to misinformation, as well as on the activity of the nodes in this regard. The importance of this research consists of method of blocking the propaganda. This is very important because when people involuntarily acquire information some...

In the current study, we examined the influence of schema consistency on contradictory and additive misinformation. Sixty-four participants were shown a series of still photographs of common scenes (e.g., a kitchen), were later exposed to narratives containing misinformation, and were then tested on their memory of the photographic scenes. In addition, participants were asked to reflect on thei...

Misinformation is considered a threat to our democratic values and principles. The spread of such content on social media polarizes society undermines public discourse by distorting perceptions generating unrest while lacking the rigor traditional journalism. Transformers transfer learning proved be state-of-the-art methods for multiple well-known natural language processing tasks. In this pape...

This article demonstrates how misinformation concerning autism and vaccinations was created and suggests that social workers may be perfectly poised to challenge pseudoscience interpretations. Utilizing social network theory, this article illustrates how erroneous research, mass media, and public opinion led to a decreased use of vaccinations in the United States and a seven-fold increase in me...