Doing your own research and other impossible acts of epistemic superheroism

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an "infodemic” of misinformation and conspiracy theory. This article points to three explanatory factors: the challenge of forming accurate beliefs when overwhelmed with information, an implausibly individualistic conception of epistemic virtue, and an adversarial information environment that suborns epistemic dependence. Normally we cope with the problems of informational excess by relying on other people, including sociotechnical systems that mediate testimony and evidence. But when we attempt to engage in epistemic "superheroics” - withholding trust from others and trying to figure it all out for ourselves – these can malfunction in ways that make us vulnerable to forming irrational beliefs. Some epistemic systems are prone to coalescing audiences around false conspiracy theories. This analysis affords a new perspective on philosophical efforts to understand conspiracy theories and other epistemic projects prone to collective irrationality.

Characterizing the nature of trust & misinformation on Twitter

We analyze a dataset from Twitter of misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider this dataset from the intersection of two important but, heretofore, largely separate perspectives: misinformation and trust. We apply existing direct trust measures to the dataset to understand their topology, and to better understand if and how trust relates to spread of misinformation online. We find evidence for small worldness in the misinformation trust network;outsized influence from broker nodes;a digital fingerprint that may indicate when a misinformation trust network is forming;and, a positive relationship between greater trust and spread of misinformation. © 2022 IEEE.

Panmemic inoculation: How Taiwan is nerfing the pandemic with cute humour

The article outlines the Taiwanese government’s strategy of using cute and humorous messages in its official communication via social media during the initial phase of COVID-19. Subjected to Chinese influence campaigns on social media, the government devised playful memes to ‘inoculate’ the public against disinformation and rumours. While the images contained important information, what made them appealing, memorable and spreadable as memes was their self-depre-cating humour and cute aesthetics. Adopting the memetic logic of replication, the communication strategy devised such benign, non-aggressive humour as part of a broad, holistic approach towards improving Taiwan’s democracy with technology-assisted, consensus-based decision-making. This strategy entailed wider-reaching social effects. Informed by an analysis of memes as a genre of cultural artefacts, the article traces how government-sponsored cute aesthetics resonated in society through being shared, imitated and repurposed. For example, government repre-sentatives such as ‘digital minister’ Audrey Tang and Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung became memetic icons animated through fan art. In this realm of increasingly self-referential social intimacy, ordinary citizens and the government co-created not only immunity to misinformation but also an affective community of Taiwanese national proportions. © 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language.

A Framework for Automatic Fake Content Identification

Fake news emerged as a challenge for society now a day. Easy accessibility and low cost to the internet makes the fake news propagation task easy. In the Covid-19 pandemic situation, it is required to reduce the proliferation of misleading content to reduce its severe impact. Many existing works are based on lexico-syntactic features using a small training sample size. To address this issue, this study used the Gossip-cop dataset for evaluation. Various supervised techniques of the ML model and advanced deep learning techniques are implemented for intense research. Dataset is crawled from Gossipcop fact-checking websites. The dataset consists of 4,947fake news with text and 16,694 real news. The result of these algorithms helps in differentiating false content from reliable news and improved the accuracy achieved using existing techniques. © 2021 IEEE.

Participant engagement with a short, wordless, animated video on COVID-19 prevention: a multi-site randomized trial.

COVID-19 misinformation has spread rapidly across social media. To counter misinformation, we designed a short, wordless and animated video (called the CoVideo) to deliver scientifically informed and emotionally compelling information about preventive COVID-19 behaviours. After 15 163 online participants were recruited from Germany, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the USA, we offered participants in the attention placebo control (APC) and do-nothing arms the option to watch the CoVideo (without additional compensation) as post-trial access to treatment. The objective of our study was to evaluate participant engagement by quantifying (i) the proportion of participants opting to watch the CoVideo and (ii) the duration of time spent watching the CoVideo. We quantified the CoVideo opt-in and view time by experimental arm, age, gender, educational status, country of residence and COVID-19 prevention knowledge. Overall engagement with the CoVideo was high: 72% of the participants [CI: 71.1%; 73.0%] opted to watch the CoVideo with an average view time of 138.9 out of 144.0 s [CI: 138.4; 139.4], with no statistically significant differences by arm. Older participants (35-59 years) and participants with higher COVID-19 prevention knowledge had higher view times than their counterparts. Spanish participants had the highest opt-in percentage whereas Germans exhibited the shortest view times of the five countries. Short, wordless and animated storytelling videos, optimized for 'viral spread' on social media, can enhance global engagement with COVID-19 prevention messages by transcending cultural, language and literary barriers.