In the age of mass information and misinformation, the corporate duty of developers of browsers, social media, and search engines are falling short of the minimum standards of responsibility. The tools and technologies are already available to combat misinformation online but the desire to integrate these tools has not taken enough priority to warrant action. This paper presents an effective an...

The misinformation effect is a well-established phenomenon in false memory literature, with debated explanations. The present study adopts an activation-based account of the misinformation effect in order to support the hypothesis that true and suggested information can coexist in memory. After exposure to misinformation, participants were primed with semantic associates of either the true or s...

Relational learning has been proposed to cope with the interdependency among linked instances in a network, and it is a fundamental tool to categorize social network users for various tasks. However, the emerging widespread of misinformation in social networks, information that is inaccurate or false, poses novel challenges to utilizing social media data. Malicious users may actively manipulate...

History educators often use popular films in the classroom to teach critical thinking through an exercise that involves identifying historical inaccuracies in the films. We investigated how this exercise affects the acquisition of true and false historical knowledge. In two experiments, subjects studied texts about historical topics and watched clips from corresponding films. Each film containe...

The current study investigated how lexical priming and negation affects encoding and retrieval of information. Studies have shown people encode and retrieve misinformation from memory, but the mechanisms of encoding and retrieval are not well understood. To address this, an eye-tracking paradigm was designed to examine probabilistic activation during retrieval of accurate or inaccurate informat...

The Internet plays a large role in disseminating anti-vaccination information. This paper builds upon previous research by analyzing the arguments proffered on anti-vaccination websites, determining the extent of misinformation present, and examining discourses used to support vaccine objections. Arguments around the themes of safety and effectiveness, alternative medicine, civil liberties, con...

In this paper, we study the Misinformation Containment (MC) problem. In particular, taking into account the faster development of misinformation detection techniques, we mainly focus on the limiting the misinformation with known sources case. We prove that under the Competitive Activation Model, the MC problem is NP-hard and show that it cannot be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio ...

Social media, featuring rich user-generated information, is becoming an important component of daily life. It has also become a fertile ground for misinformation (inaccurate information) due to lack of quality control mechanisms. This study proposed and directly tested three predictor categories – personality, motivation, and perceived characteristic of information – to understand users’ misinf...

Misinformation can be easily spread with the click of a button, but cause irreversible harm and negatively impact news consumers’ ability to discern false information. Some prior work suggests that older adults may engage (read, share, or believe) misinformation at higher rates than others. However, engagement explanations vary. In an effort understand adults' better, we investigate experiences...

BACKGROUND Online drug information compendia (ODIC) are valuable tools that health care professionals (HCPs) and consumers use to educate themselves on pharmaceutical products. Research suggests that these resources, although informative and easily accessible, may contain misinformation, posing risk for product misuse and patient harm. OBJECTIVE Evaluate drug summaries within ODIC for accurac...