Search results for "misinformation"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
Learning Versus Knowing
2006
Many studies have shown that voters do learn about political issues from televised debates. Because debaters may not be interested in educating voters but in gaining votes, this does not necessarily mean that debate viewers improve their knowledge (i.e., learning something that is correct). Instead, they may become misinformed by watching a debate. Taking the second debate in the 2002 German general election as an example, we first compare people’s knowledge about economic facts before and after the debate with the actual situation as represented by official statistics. In a second step, we trace back the change or stability of their assessments of the state of the economy to candidates’ s…
Exploratory study of the hoaxes spread via WhatsApp in Spain to prevent and/or cure COVID-19
2021
Objective: To review the hoaxes’ characteristics spread through WhatsApp in Spain during COVID-19 lockdown and identify what kind of substances were promoted for consumption or application. Method: A phone number was activated to receive hoaxes via WhatsApp. A total of 2353 messages were collected, and among those 584 different hoaxes were identified and validated, between March 18 and April 18, 2020. From these 584 hoaxes, a sub-sample of 126 was selected, exclusively related to the object of study, and a content analysis table with fourteen registration fields was applied. Besides, the averages and medians of the quantitative fields were extracted. Results: Most of the messages received w…
Rotavirus and the web: analysis of online conversations in Italy during 2020
2021
Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea among children worldwide. In 2017, Italy included rotavirus vaccination in its National Immunization Program. The use of social media monitoring, an efficient tool to understand vaccine hesitancy, has increased in recent years; however, only a few examples of such monitoring are available for Italy. Present study analyzed content on online sources, including social media, to identify factors contributing to Italian parents' decisions to vaccinate or not their children against rotavirus. Blogmeter Suite was used to search and analyze conversations related to rotavirus in Italian on online sources during 2020. These data were compared with…
Fake News Spreaders Detection: Sometimes Attention Is Not All You Need
2022
Guided by a corpus linguistics approach, in this article we present a comparative evaluation of State-of-the-Art (SotA) models, with a special focus on Transformers, to address the task of Fake News Spreaders (i.e., users that share Fake News) detection. First, we explore the reference multilingual dataset for the considered task, exploiting corpus linguistics techniques, such as chi-square test, keywords and Word Sketch. Second, we perform experiments on several models for Natural Language Processing. Third, we perform a comparative evaluation using the most recent Transformer-based models (RoBERTa, DistilBERT, BERT, XLNet, ELECTRA, Longformer) and other deep and non-deep SotA models (CNN,…
Correctness of judicial information and impartiality of the judge: the distortions of the media criminal trial
2022
This analysis, which focuses on the difficult relationship between criminal justice and judicial information, examines only some of the most controversial aspects, starting with an undisputed premise, namely that over time the function of communication in judicial matters has changed, evolving from informative to formative. I will reflect on the hiatus between the real justice as exercised in courtrooms and justice perceived by the public through media narratives, paying particular attention to the distortions of the so-called media trial and the resulting bias in the exercise of judicial power. Finally, we will consider possible solutions, which, in a perspective of striking a balance betw…
Positive Learning in the Internet Age: Developments and Perspectives in the PLATO Program
2019
The Internet has become the main informational entity, i.e., a public source of information. The Internet offers many new benefits and opportunities for human learning, teaching, and research. However, by providing a vast amount of information from innumerable sources, it also enables the manipulation of information; there are countless examples of disseminated misinformation and false data in mass and social media. Much of the information presented online is conflicting, preselected, or algorithmically obscure, often colliding with fundamental humanistic values and posing moral or ethical problems.
Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Sentiment Analysis from June 2011 to April 2019
2021
Vaccine hesitancy was one of the ten major threats to global health in 2019, according to the World Health Organisation. Nowadays, social media has an important role in the spread of information, misinformation, and disinformation about vaccines. Monitoring vaccine-related conversations on social media could help us to identify the factors that contribute to vaccine confidence in each historical period and geographical area. We used a hybrid approach to perform an opinion-mining analysis on 1,499,227 vaccine-related tweets published on Twitter from 1st June 2011 to 30th April 2019. Our algorithm classified 69.36% of the tweets as neutral, 21.78% as positive, and 8.86% as negative. The perce…
Causality-based Social Media Analysis for Normal Users Credibility Assessment in a Political Crisis
2019
Information trustworthiness assessment on political social media discussions is crucial to maintain the order of society, especially during emergent situations. The polarity nature of political topics and the echo chamber effect by social media platforms allow for a deceptive and a dividing environment. During a political crisis, a vast amount of information is being propagated on social media, that leads up to a high level of polarization and deception by the beneficial parties. The traditional approaches to tackling misinformation on social media usually lack a comprehensive problem definition due to its complication. This paper proposes a probabilistic graphical model as a theoretical vi…
The Validity of Social Media-Based Career Information
2018
The use of social media expands the availability and sources of career information. However, the authorship of this information has changed from traditional print media and multimedia sources created by experts to social media–based career information created by the users themselves. Although variability in career information validity has been an issue for some time, rapid growth in the use of social media creates some unique challenges. The ease with which social media–based career information can spread creates the potential for rapid widespread dissemination of disinformation and biased perceptions. Potential sources of invalidity include intentional bias (with or without profit motive),…
Social media use to improve communication on children and adolescent’s health: the role of the Italian Paediatric Society influencers
2021
Abstract Background Fake news on children’s and adolescent health are spreading. Internet availability and decreasing costs of media devices are contributing to an easy access to technology by families. Public health organizations are working to contrast misinformation and promote scientific communication. In this context, a new form of communication is emerging social media influencers. Aim of this study is to evaluate the role of paediatric influencers (PI) in communicating information about children and adolescents’ health. Materials and methods A group of PI was enrolled from December 2019 to January 2020 by a scientific commission nominated by the Italian Paediatric Society (SIP). PI w…