Showing posts with label misinformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misinformation. Show all posts

Monday, July 13, 2026

Fake Snake Oil Makes About Face


If I sell my snake oil as "fake snake oil", does that make it less deceptive? Or to a lesser degree, if my snake oil is so obviously fake that no normal person would misinterpret it as having any value whatsoever, does that make it less deceptive?

Watching the detectors: Researchers probe efficacy — and danger — of AI detection tools
May 2026, phys.org

  • I wonder if ai wrote that title (not one but two em dashes)
  • This is pretty damning on a whole industry that doesn't really work yet but is being forced into the market regardless.
  • The writeup doesn't provide a link to the original article, and I suspect we're all being misled, and I don't mean by this article, I mean by the whole business. 



It only takes one fake web page to fool AI shopping bots, study finds
Jun 2026, phys.org

The researchers built a simulation tool called FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments) to test 12 to evaluate web content pollution in AI models. They identified the main brand being discussed on selected pages and swapped it for a fake one. They did this for 225 products spanning 15 categories. After rewriting these pages, they tested whether LLMs would fall for the deception and include a fake brand in their recommendations.

"Across 12 commercial and open-weight LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%"

via UC Santa Cruz: Minghao Luo et al, One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2606.13610


The consequences of relying on AI for accurate news
Jun 2026, phys.org

Participants who relied on AI systems to verify facts actually got worse at detecting misinformation on their own when their chatbots were taken away.

The authors also point out that the original human-created news content used to train the AI models is increasingly unreliable and/or biased, further exacerbating the problem.

Jesus we are f*cked 

via MIT Media Lab: Anku Rani et al, Dialogues with AI Reduce Beliefs in Misinformation but Build No Lasting Discernment Skills, Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2026). DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3790656


Polymarket's viral videos showed people winning big, but the bets were fake
Jun 2026, Ars Technica

“In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.”

Makihara, a college student, posted a video in January “that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word ‘McDonald’s’ that month.” But trade data showed that no one on Polymarket won such a bet in January, according to the Journal. This was one of 145 bets that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket between January and May, but all of those bets were fake, the article said.

“Many of the videos share a template: The creators open Polymarket, place a bet, and frequently refer to their winnings as ‘free money.’ Dozens of social-media creators have posted videos with almost identical formats. Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website.”

via Wall Street Journal investigaiton (of all places)



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Monday, March 24, 2025

Facts, Fakes, Fake Facts and Psychological Operators

 

Brainwashing an entire population is hard work!

News consumers are more influenced by political alignment than by truth, study shows
Nov 2024, phys.org

The study is based on research conducted in 2020 with a sample of the voting-age U.S. population matched to the demographics of the census, and made up news headlines whereas earlier studies relied on existing ones. They also used a cover story about memory and communication, and even included foil questions, so that participants would not be aware of the nature of the study.

Both supporters and opponents believed those that aligned with their views more than they believed true headlines that did not align with their views.

"We found that the strongest predictors of bias include extreme views of Trump, a one-sided media diet, and belief in the objectivity and lack of bias of a person's own political side relative to the other side." 

In one measure of bias, the researchers assessed people's beliefs about their political side's objectivity as compared to the other side. Ironically, those most confident in their political side's lack of bias were the most biased.

In addition, the effect of partisan bias was stronger for real news than fake news. That is, people were more likely to disbelieve true information that challenged their political worldview than to accept false information that confirmed their worldview.

"We saw it on both political sides and even among people who scored well on a reasoning test. We were a bit surprised to see how widespread this tendency was. People were engaging in a lot of resistance to inconvenient truths."

"Everyone thinks it's the other person who is the problem."

But this very important point can't be overlooked, dropped halfway through the press article:

One contributing factor for this state of affairs, the researchers suggest, is increased consumption of partisan media.

And just for good measure, let's recall that as of 2010 Citizen's United allows private industry to contribute campaign funds to those running for public office. (As in, who's paying for that partisan media? Yes, that's who.) 

via: Department of Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford: Michael C. Schwalbe et al, When politics trumps truth: Political concordance versus veracity as a determinant of believing, sharing, and recalling the news., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024). DOI: 10.1037/xge0001650



Brief scientific literacy interventions may quash new conspiracy theories
Dec 2024, phys.org

Americans in states with higher scientific literacy scores were less likely to believe in conspiracies and had higher COVID-19 vaccination uptake rates over the time period.

via Penn State's Smeal College of Business: Nathan Allred et al, Conspiracy Beliefs and Consumption: The Role of Scientific Literacy, Journal of Consumer Research (2024). DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucae024


A tangled web: Social media analysis suggests coordinated messaging among fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbon industries
Jan 2025, phys.org

Power rises to the top: "Our study suggests that climate obstruction in different industries is more coordinated than is generally recognized...these different companies in different sectors are using the same strategic messaging to promote a distorted image of their environmental responsibility."

Details: 125,300 unique tweets posted from 2008–2023 by the main Twitter accounts of nine key players in the US fossil energy/plastics/agrichemical trade: ExxonMobil, Chevron, American Petroleum Institute, Dow, Dupont de Nemours, Inc, American Chemistry Council, Corteva Agriscience, FMC Corp, American Farm Bureau

via Northeastern University: PLOS Climate (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000370


New AI tool detects fake news with 99% accuracy
Jan 2025, phys.org

The method developed by the researchers uses an "ensemble voting" technique, which combines the predictions of multiple different machine learning models to give an overall score.

(Too bad we don't actually care; see above.)

via Keele University School of Computer Science and Mathematics: Patricia Asowo et al, An Ensemble Modelling of Feature Engineering and Predictions for Enhanced Fake News Detection, Artificial Intelligence XLI (2024). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-77918-3_16


Meta-analysis uncovers public's skill in detecting fake news, but skepticism towards true news persists
Mar 2025, phys.org

While their findings suggest that most people can accurately judge the veracity of news, they also showed that people are slightly better at spotting false news than true news. In other words, most of the people who took part in the studies appeared to be better skilled at rating false news as false than rating true news as true.

"A small majority of people show this trend (59%). The implication of this finding is that we should focus more on increasing the acceptance of true news. Currently, a lot of efforts are dedicated to making people skeptical of (false) news, however, our data shows that there may be more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of false news."

I also remember the study about how mainstream news being skeptical of a science fact are more influential than a fake news site spreading obvious fake shit, for example BBC saying there may be a small risk of myocarditis for example, even if they have a million other articles that say vaccines are safe. There is a risk of myocarditis, but the risk of dying, or becoming disabled, from Covid due to lack of vaccination is far, far higher. See here or here.

via Jan Pfänder et al, Spotting false news and doubting true news: a systematic review and meta-analysis of news judgements, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02086-1.

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Saturday, February 8, 2025

How Humans Work


Having been human for some time now, there's lots of quirks of human behavior that have been explained, and the world is a less confusing place as a result.

Yet there are some that remain. Such as - when you're driving in traffic and look at a person in another car, but in such a way that there's no way they could see you looking at them, and yet they somehow know, and stare right back at you. Or when you get caught looking at someone and try to avert your eyes, but you can tell you got caught. Or the reverse, just as common. How on earth do we do this? ESP? That's been my only explanation, which is to say, I've got no explanation. Until now:

Team succeeds in determining the exact moment when the brain detects another person's gaze direction
Jul 2024, phys.org

They succeeded in determining with unprecedented precision the exact moment at which the direction of gaze is detected using an electroencephalogram (EEG) and machine learning.

The brain first perceives the more global visual cues, i.e. the orientation of the head, before focusing on the more local information. Hierarchical organization then allows for integration of eye region and head orientation information.

(And this is why "side eye" is a creepy, uncanny valley thing; it's a mismatch of head direction and eye direction.)

via University of Geneva: Domilė Tautvydaitė et al, The Timing of Gaze Direction Perception: ERP Decoding and Task Modulation, NeuroImage (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2024.120659



Study links social and non-social synchrony to romantic attractiveness
Jul 2024, phys.org

Some people are super synchronizers, and super synchronizers are consistently rated as more attractive.

The ability to synchronize stems from fundamental sensorimotor abilities and that this adaptability might be perceived as beneficial in romantic contexts. ("Romantic Contexts")

Synchronized physiological states between two people can facilitate the regulation of bodily systems, ultimately enabling more fulfilling interactions between them.

The researchers first carried out an initial online experiment involving 144 participants. These participants were asked to watch short videos in which a male and a female actor interacted with each other, exhibiting either a low or high physiological and behavioral synchrony.

After watching this video, they were asked to rate the attractiveness of the male and female actors. The researchers found that greater synchrony between the actors in the videos increased the attractiveness ratings provided by the study participants. 

In a follow up experiment, some participants were asked to interact with potential partners in a speed dating experiment, and complete a tapping task designed to measure their synchronization, while using a wearable device called the Empatica E4 wristband which measured the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the secretion of sweat and changes in electrodermal activity.

via Hebrew University: M. Cohen et al, Social and nonsocial synchrony are interrelated and romantically attractive, Communications Psychology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-024-00109-1


The Big 5 is a Lie! And now we're all rethinking the effectiveness of surveillance advertising; it's quite possible that someone is lying to us.

Team uncovers the complex social life of rats, with potential implications for human psychiatry
Oct 2024, phys.org 

I'm only here for this:

Another unexpected result was that there was relatively little correlation between the "personality" traits defined in standard personality and social tests (commonly used in drug or behavioral research) and the actual behavior observed within the real groups.

via Department of Biological Physics and Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University: Máté Nagy et al, Long-term tracking of social structure in groups of rats, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-72437-5

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Friday, December 20, 2024

Inside the World of the LSD User


The spread of misinformation varies by topic and by country in Europe, study finds
May 2024, phys.org

Researchers analyzed news activity on Twitter (now X) in France, Germany, Italy and the UK from 2019 to 2021, including a focus on news about Brexit, the coronavirus, and the COVID vaccines. Each news source they analyzed was rated as either "reliable" or "questionable" based upon their NewsGuard score.
  • Across all four countries, the vast majority of users only ever consumed reliable news sources on each of the three topics.
  • But in every country and in each topic, there was always a small percentage of users who only ever consumed questionable news sources - with very few people consuming a mix of both reliable and questionable sources.
  • Germany had the highest ratio of questionable news retweets to reliable news retweets on all three topics, with France in second, followed by Italy, and the UK had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets overall.
  • Italy had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets for the topic of the coronavirus - but had the highest percentage of people consuming only questionable news sources on Brexit.

"Cultural nuances" will be important when it comes to fighting misinformation.

via Ca' Foscari University of Venice: News and misinformation consumption: A temporal comparison across European countries, PLoS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302473

Image credit: 3D printed vacuum system traps dark matter - University of Nottingham - Jun 2024


Study finds avoiding social media before an election has little to no effect on people's political views
May 2024, phys.org

35,000 Facebook and Instagram users who were paid to stay off the platforms in the run-up to Election Day.

I'm thinking about the overall social influence, like if you're not online but your friends are, it's all the same. So if they did this study by taking only the friends of the people chosen, then we would see an effect? (Friendship Paradox)

via Stanford: Gentzkow, Matthew, The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2321584121.


Mental disorders may spread in young people's social networks
May 2024, phys.org

Contagion - 700,000 ninth-grade pupils born between 1985 and 1997 from 860 Finnish schools followed for 11 years (largest and most comprehensive so far on the spread of mental disorders in social networks).

The number of classmates diagnosed with a mental disorder was associated with a higher risk of receiving a mental disorder diagnosis later in life.

The connection observed in the study is not necessarily causal. "It may be possible, for instance, that the threshold for seeking help for mental health issues is lowered when there are one or more people in your social network who have already sought help for their problems" (beneficial contagion).

via University of Helsinki: Jussi Alho et al, Transmission of Mental Disorders in Adolescent Peer Networks, JAMA Psychiatry (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.1126

Dual-species Rydberg array combining rubidium and cesium atoms to enhance quantum computing - BernienLab at University of Chicago - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests less conformity leads to more innovation
May 2024, phys.org

These methods reveal something crazy - how easy it could be to manipulate a big part of a population just by doing some very small adjustments to the recommendation algorithms, and the idea of synthetic networks cycling through the real networks as a kind of social regulator.

  • The Matthew effect aka "rich-get-richer effect" increases centralization in the network, which destroys the niches protecting minority opinions, reducing sociodiversity.
  • "Networks that promote sociodiversity have structural features that protect minority opinions"
  • "Unfollowing a few VIPs can help to promote sociodiversity"

via Complexity Science Hub and ETH Zurich: Andrea Musso et al, How networks shape diversity for better or worse, Royal Society Open Science (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.230505


Misleading COVID-19 headlines from mainstream sources did more harm on Facebook than fake news
May 2024, phys.org

They showed thousands of survey participants the headlines from 130 vaccine-related stories - including both mainstream content and known misinformation - and tested how those headlines impacted their intentions to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Researchers also asked a separate group of respondents to rate the headlines across various attributes, including plausibility and political leaning. They matched that against 13,206 vaccine-related URLs and the number of users who viewed each.
  • Misleading content from mainstream news sources - rather than outright misinformation or "fake news" - was the primary driver of vaccine hesitancy on Facebook.
  • "Vaccine-skeptical" content was potentially misleading but not flagged as misinformation by Facebook fact-checkers.
  • One factor reliably predicted impacts on vaccination intentions: the extent to which a headline suggested that the vaccine was harmful to a person's health.
  • The most-viewed was an article was from a well-regarded mainstream news source, and its clickbait" headline was highly suggestive and implied that the vaccine was likely responsible.
  • (That's significant since the vast majority of viewers on social media likely never click out to read past the headline.)
  • Contrary to popular perceptions, the researchers estimated that vaccine-skeptical content reduced vaccination intentions 46 times more than misinformation flagged by fact-checkers.
  • Even though flagged misinformation was more harmful when seen, it had relatively low reach.
  • Gray-area content is less harmful per exposure but is seen far more often, thus it's more impactful overall.
(Also, what does this mean about actual advertising metrics?)

via MIT Sloan School of Management: Jennifer Allen, Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3451.


Advertisers may be inadvertently funding misinformation
Jun 2024, phys.org

(I think we're starting to see a pattern here.)

5,000 websites (1,250 were misinformation websites); 42,000 unique advertisers; nine million instances of advertising companies appearing on news websites from 2019 to 2021. 

The companies advertising on misinformation websites accounted for anywhere from 46% to 82% of overall companies in their respective industries.

Companies that used digital advertisement platforms were 10 times more likely to appear on misinformation websites than those that did not.

Authors propose two low-cost, scalable interventions: 
  • Improve transparency for advertisers about where their ads appear 
  • Make it easier for consumers to identify which companies advertise on misinformation outlets through information disclosures and company rankings

via Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and Stanford: Wajeeha Ahmad et al, Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07404-1

Entangling pairs of photons using 1.2 micrometer niobium oxide dichloride - Leevi Kallioniemi at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests ambivalence and polarized views can promote political violence
Jun 2024, phys.org

Time to get confused! 

Previous research has shown that ambivalence about a political issue typically leads people to avoid taking moderate actions such as voting or donating money in support of that issue.

And that's why these findings for extreme behaviors surprised the researchers.

Here, researchers found that ambivalence can actually lead some people - especially those with polarized views - to be more supportive of extreme actions.

The reason? Ambivalence creates discomfort in those with extreme views by making them feel weak or insecure about their beliefs - and that can lead them to compensate.

"When people have these polarized views on a political topic, but also feel some conflict about that belief - that is really a potent combination."

"Those who are conflicted are more willing to give their money to extreme organizations."

"Those who have extreme views, but still feel conflicted about them, feel a need to prove themselves, to show that their beliefs are real and strong."

via Ohio State University: Joseph Siev, Ambivalent attitudes promote support for extreme political actions, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn2965.

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Monday, October 7, 2024

The Friend Network


Targeting friends to induce social contagion can benefit the world, says new research
May 2024, phys.org

The study evaluated a strategy that exploits the so-called "friendship paradox" of human social networks. That theory suggests that on average, your friends have more friends than you do. As the theory goes, the individuals nominated as friends potentially wield more social influence than those who identify them.

For the study, the researchers utilized the friendship paradox in the delivery of a proven 22-month education package promoting maternal, child, and neonatal health in 176 isolated villages in Honduras.

The researchers found that delivering the intervention to a smaller fraction of households in each village via the friendship targeting strategy led to the same level of behavioral adoption as would have been achieved by treating all the households.

People were either selected randomly within each village to receive the intervention or they were randomly chosen to nominate their friends, who were subsequently picked at random. 

"We found that targeting people's friends for an intervention induced significant social contagion, creating cascades of beneficial health practices to people who didn't receive the intervention." 

For many outcomes, using the friendship-nomination targeting method to reach 20% of households in a village affected outcomes the same as administering the intervention to every household.

Yes, Facebook knows this very well.

via Yale and Temple University: Edoardo M. Airoldi et al, Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adi5147



Study shows relatively low number of superspreaders responsible for large portion of misinformation on Twitter
May 2024, phys.org

10 months of data; 2,397,388 tweets; 448,103 users; parsed by low-credibility information status.

A third of the low-credibility tweets had been posted by people using just 10 accounts, and just 1,000 accounts were responsible for posting approximately 70% of such tweets.

via Indiana University: Matthew R. DeVerna et al, Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302201

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Monday, October 31, 2022

We Are The Climate Change


Investigation examines fossil fuel industry influence at elite American universities
Sep 2022, phys.org

Memetics Supreme -
Investigative journalist Paul Thacker examines how oil and gas companies have funded research to try to weaken messages on climate change, capture academia, and protect their interests, much like tobacco companies did half a century ago.

As one example, Thacker reports how a paper published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) helped alter American energy policy and kicked off a fracking boom.

Thacker describes how, at the turn of the century, a fresh crop of research centers to confront global warming began popping up at prestigious American universities including Princeton, Stanford and MIT.

Ironically, he reports that the seeds for these academic centers were planted by fossil fuel companies, echoing a scheme by tobacco companies in the 1950s to counter research showing smoking was harmful, by funding university-based scientists.

Princeton extended its partnership with ExxonMobil two years ago.

Ben Franta, a Stanford student who is finalizing his Ph.D. on the history of climate disinformation, claims that professors began criticizing him for raising problems and possibly threatening their funding. 

Stanford did not answer questions.

via an investigation by the British Medical Journal: Investigation: Stealing from the tobacco playbook, fossil fuel companies pour money into elite American universities, The BMJ (2022). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.o2095

Totally unrelated image credit: AI Art - Cosmic Horrors in My Cereal - 2022


Oil giant Shell appoints renewables head as boss
Sep 2022, BBC News

It's Me Not You - "Shell filed its appeal against the ruling in March this year, with Mr van Beurden previously saying that Shell should not be responsible for reducing its customers' emissions."


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Monday, April 16, 2018

Mimetic Security 101


I ran network address through this bias-checking site, and we're all good. Just kidding; it's too popular and I can't get in.

Fake News is really called misinformation, for those who are keeping track of these things. And people are pulling out all the stops trying to get a hold on it. And by 'pulling out all the stops' I mean 'making algorithms do that sh**'.

Data scientist Zach Estela trained a neural network to scan a webpage and determine the type of news it promulgates. He forms the code for his News Bias Classifier using a couple projects already in the business of sniffing out these different information types. One is called OpenSources, and it's curated by humans whose purpose is to squash the Dubiosity Monster that is our current infostream. They read articles and tag them.

These are their taglots:
Fake News, Satire, Extreme Bias, Conspiracy Theory, Rumor Mill, State News, Junk Science, Hate News, Clickbait, Proceed With Caution, Political, Credible*
*Check out their site for their definitions of these types

And check out their methods; Network Address (.blogspot) is a bit disheartened to see this particular method:
Step 1: Title/Domain Analysis.
If “.wordpress” “.com.co” appear in the title -- or any slight variation on a well known website-- this is usually a sign there is a problem.

But the Art teacher in me likes this:
Step 5: Aesthetic Analysis.
Like the style-guide, many fake and questionable news sites utilize very bad design. Are screens are cluttered and they use heavy-handed photo-shopping or born digital images?

Next source used for this fake news detector is a semantic analysis tool called Media Bias Fact Check dedicated to educating the public on media bias and deceptive news practices.

I was drawn to some of their terminology, well, the meta-terminology they use to check news/information sources on the web:

Loaded Language (Words): (also known as loaded terms or emotive language) is wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes. Such wording is also known as high-inference language or language persuasive techniques.
Purr Words:  words used to describe something that is favored or loved.
Snarl Words: words used when describing something that a person is against or hates.

Notes:
Sick of Seeing Spam on His Facebook so He Built a Fake News Detector
Mar 2017, VICE

Text Analysis
Sentiment Analysis at Textbox
Fake News Detector at Fakebox

And here's some corresponding references about language and persuasion, from the sentiment analysis page:
Bolinger, Dwight. Language-the loaded weapon: the use and abuse of language today. Routledge, 2014.
Matthews, Jack. “The effect of loaded language on audience comprehension of speeches.” Communications Monographs 14.1-2 (1947): 176-186.
S.I. Hayakawa, Alan Hayakawa. “Language in Thought and Action: Fifth Edition.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

Post Script
Where would we be without Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere

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