This paper introduces a multi‑branch fusion framework that combines transformer‑based semantics, rhetorical cues, stance representations, and psychologically motivated proxies to detect health misinformation and characterize its spread on online social networks. The authors propose an interpretable Cognitive Propagation Score (CPS) derived from text cues that estimate argument complexity, emotional intensity, and virality potential, aiding diffusion‑risk reasoning when engagement data are missing. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (Constraint, COVID‑19_FNIR, Monkeypox) demonstrate near‑perfect classification and ranking performance, with ablation studies showing complementary gains from psychological and rhetorical components.
By Mkululi Sikosana, Sean Maudsley-Barton, Oluwaseun Ajao
Cancer-related discussions on social media provide an important space for information exchange and peer support, but also facilitate the spread of misinformation that may influence prevention, screening, and treatment decisions. Existing research on cancer misinformation often relies on narrow definitions, small-scale datasets, or binary labeling frameworks.
The rapid spread of false and misleading health information through digital platforms has become a major public health challenge, particularly during infectious disease outbreaks where delayed verification can influence public behaviour and hinder effective disease control. Although recent advances in automated health misinformation detection have shown encouraging results, most existing approaches rely heavily on global biomedical resources and often fail to capture the local context needed to verify claims in developing countries.
FakeSpotter is a new tool that estimates the viral misinformation risk of textual content by measuring structural fingerprints of misinformation instead of directly judging truthfulness. It operates across linguistic, narrative, logical, and critical‑thinking dimensions, using repeated large language model assessments and domain‑specific logistic regression classifiers for both short and long texts. In a labeled corpus of 764 texts, FakeSpotter achieved macro F1 scores of 0.788 for short texts and 0.793 for long texts, and its interpretive layer offers explainable outputs such as feature‑based scores, signal agreement, and a caution index for social listening.
By Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani
arXiv:2510. 18908v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) provide rich data for analyzing public discourse, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
By Wangjiaxuan Xin, Shuhua Yin, Shi Chen, Yaorong Ge
arXiv:2606. 08376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly deployed across socially consequential domains, reports of AI-related harms and failures have grown in frequency and diversity.
By Leihan Zhang, Wecheng Ye, Xianlong Ma, Haochuan Liu, Yang Li, Qianyu Zhang, Jinliang Chen, Qiang Yan