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CSE 291/DSC 291: Information Manipulation: Trustworthiness of Information in Cyberspace

Syllabus (in progress)

Unless explicitly marked as Optional, all readings are considered required.

Date
 Topic
Jan 10
 Introduction and course mechanics

Please fill out the area interest form by Jan 11th: https://forms.gle/ZtUMgi6w37GwLh6XA.

Jan 12
 Overview of the problem

Chapter 1 of Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Guess, Andrew M., and Benjamin A. Lyons. Misinformation, disinformation, and online propaganda. In N. Persily & J. Tucker (Eds.), Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jan 17
 Prevalence of misinformation

Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science 359(6380): 1146-1151.
Andrew Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler (2020). Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 U.S. election. Nature Human Behaviour 4: 472-480.

Paper for group presentation (skim, except for presenting group):
Feng, Song, Li, Chakrabarti and Chetty, Investigating How University Students in the United States Encounter and Deal With Misinformation in Private WhatsApp Chats During COVID-19, USENIX SOUPS, 2022.

Jan 19
 Belief in misinformation

Jianing Li and Michael W. Wagner (2020). The Value of Not Knowing: Partisan Cue-Taking and Belief Updating of the Uninformed, the Ambiguous, and the Misinformed. Journal of Communication 70(5): 646-669.
Lane Cuthbert and Alexander Theodoridis (2022). Do Republicans really believe Trump won the 2020 election? Our research suggests that they do. The Washington Post, January 7, 2022.

Jan 24
 Psychological drivers of misinformation belief

Ullrich Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Philipp Schmid, Lisa K. Fazio, Nadia Brashier, Panayiota Kendeou, Emily K. Vraga, and Michelle A. Amazeen. (2022) The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction. Nature Reviews Psychology 1, no. 1 (2022): 13-29.
Benjamin A. Lyons, Jacob M. Montgomery, Andrew M. Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler (2021). Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences June 8, 2021 118 (23)

Paper for group presentation (skim, except for presenting group):
Lisa Fazio, Raunak Pillai, and Deep Patel (2022). The effects of repetition on belief in naturalistic settings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(10, 2604-2613.

Jan 26
 Motivated reasoning

Peterson, Erik, and Shanto Iyengar. Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information-Seeking Behavior: Motivated Reasoning or Cheerleading? American Journal of Political Science 65.1 (2021): 133-147.
Pennycook, Gordon, and David G. Rand. Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition 188 (2019): 39-50.

Jan 31
 Echo chambers

Sunstein, Cass R. Democracy and filtering." Communications of the ACM 47.12 (2004): 57-59.
Barbera, P. (2020). Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization. In N. Persily & J. Tucker (Eds.), Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paper for group presentation (skim, except for presenting group):
Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science 348.6239 (2015): 1130-1132.

Feb 2
 Elite cues and beliefs in misinformation

Clayton, Katherine, Nicholas T. Davis, Brendan Nyhan, Ethan Porter, Timothy J. Ryan, and Thomas J. Wood. Elite rhetoric can undermine democratic norms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 23 (2021): e2024125118.
Mildenberger, Matto, and Dustin Tingley. Beliefs about climate beliefs: the importance of second-order opinions for climate politics. British Journal of Political Science 49.4 (2019): 1279-1307.

Optional (elite cues and trust in scientific experts) Hamilton, Lawrence C., and Thomas G. Safford. Elite cues and the rapid decline in trust in science agencies on COVID-19. Sociological Perspectives 64.5 (2021): 988-1011. Funk, Cary, Meg Hefferon, Brian Kennedy, and Courtney Johnson. Trust and mistrust in Americans’ views of scientific experts. Pew Research Center 2 (2019): 1-96.

Feb 7
 Social media incentives and their effect on the spread of misinformation

Tufekci, Zeynep. YouTube, the great radicalizer. The New York Times 10.3 (2018): 2018.
Hussein, Eslam, Prerna Juneja, and Tanushree Mitra. Measuring misinformation in video search platforms: An audit study on YouTube. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4.CSCW1 (2020): 1-27.
Hosseinmardi, Homa, Amir Ghasemian, Aaron Clauset, Markus Mobius, David M. Rothschild, and Duncan J. Watts. Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 32 (2021): e2101967118.

Paper for group presentation (skim, except for presenting group):
Brown, Megan A., James Bisbee, Angela Lai, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker. Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Algorithmic Bias: How YouTube Recommends Content to Real Users. SSRN 4114905 (2022).

Feb 9
 Profiting from the production of misinformation

Emmanouil Papadogiannakis, Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Evangelos P. Markatos, Nicolas Kourtellis, Who Funds Misinformation? A Systematic Analysis of the Ad-related Profit Routines of Fake News sites, 2022.
Nick Robins-Early, Disinformation for profit: scammers cash in on conspiracy theories, The Guardian, Feb 2022.
Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Kluhspies, How Google's Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World, ProPublica, Oct 2022.

Feb 14
 International sources -- information warfare, election meddling, extremeism, etc.

DiResta, Renee, Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney, Ryan Fox, Jonathan Albright, and Ben Johnson. The tactics & tropes of the Internet Research Agency. (2019).
Sheera Frenkel and Tiffany Hsu. Facebook, Twitter and Others Remove Pro-U.S. Influence Campaign. The New York Times. August 24, 2022. Paper for group discussion (skim, except for presenting group):
: Cirone, Alexandra, and William Hobbs. Asymmetric flooding as a tool for foreign influence on social media. Political Science Research and Methods (2022): 1-12.

Feb 16
 Technological innovation and misinformation

Shao et al,The spread of low-credibility content by social bots, Nature Communications, 2018.
Matteo Wong, We Haven't Seen The Worst of Fake News, The Atlantic, Dec 2022.
Guest lecturer (2:45-3:20): Jake Shapiro (Professor of Politics and International Affairs @ Princeton)

Feb 21
 Does misinformation affect political behavior?

Enders, Adam M., et al. On the relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs, misinformation, and vaccine hesitancy. Plos one 17.10 (2022): e0276082.
Aral and Eckles, Protecting elections from social media manipulation., Science, Aug 2019.

Paper for group discussion (skim, except for presenting group): Eady, G., Paskhalis, T., Zilinsky, J. et al. Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior. Nat Commun 14, 62 (2023).

Feb 23
 Does misinformation affect political behavior? (part 2)
Feb 28
 Content-based interventions

Robert Gorwa, Reuben Binns and Christian Katzenbach, Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. Big Data & Society, 2020.
Max Fisher, Inside Facebook's Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech, NY Times, 2018.

Paper for group discussion (skim, except for presenting group): Ben Kaiser, Jerry Wei, Eli Lucherini, Kevin Lee, J. Nathan Matias and Jonathan Mayer, Adapting Security Warnings to Counter Online Disinformation, USENIX Security, 2021.

Mar 2
 Impact of content moderation on misinformation

Shagun Jhaver, Christian Boylston, Diyi Yang, and Amy Bruckman. 2021. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2, Article 381 (October 2021), 30 pages.
Klinenberg, Danny. Does Deplatforming Work? Unintended consequences of banning far-right content creators.

Optional: Jhaver, Shagun, Amy Bruckman, and Eric Gilbert. Does transparency in moderation really matter? User behavior after content removal explanations on Reddit. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3.CSCW (2019): 1-27.

Mar 7
 Fact checking

Ethan Porter, Yamil Velez and Thomas Wood, Correcting COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in Ten Countries, 2022 (be careful printing, you don't want to print the attached appendix)
Gordeon Pennycook, Zip Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonia Arechar, Dean Eckles and David Rand, Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online, Nature, March 2021.

Optional: John M. Carey, Andrew M. Guess, Peter J. Loewen, Eric Merkley, Brendan Nyhan, Joseph B. Phillips & Jason Reifler, The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on COVID-19 misperceptions in the United States, Great Britain and Canada, Nature Human Behavior, February 2022.

Paper for group discussion (skim, except for presenting group):
: Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler (2015). The Effect of Fact-checking on Elites: A Field Experiment on U.S. State Legislators. American Journal of Political Science 59(3): 628–640.

Mar 9
 Media literacy Badrinathan, Sumitra. Educative interventions to combat misinformation: Evidence from a field experiment in India. American Political Science Review 115.4 (2021): 1325-1341.
Andrew Guess, Michael Lerner, Benjamin Lyons, Jacob M. Montgomery, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, and Neelanjan Sircar (2020). A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(27): 15536–15545.
Mar 14
 Project presentations (part 1)
Mar 16
 project presentations (part 2)