NSF Award
2323795
Combating misinformation in the digital age has been a challenging subject with significant social implications, as misinformation continues to impact contentious contemporary events from elections to responses to pandemics. Despite decades of research, misinformation remains a serious threat as most technical mitigation methods focus on improving detection accuracy and fail to consider social and emotional perspectives. This project assists in enhancing information integrity by identifying influencing communities, agents, and culturally resonant information to identify tipping points in public dialogue on controversial issues and offering venues of user-centric interventions at scale.<br/><br/>This project moves away from source-centric accuracy detection and debunking to focus on user-centric interventions that integrates psychological and socio-cultural constructs, computational theories, and machine learning (ML) algorithms to prototype interventions for testing. The first focus of research has the goal of analyzing and identifying social norm emergence--the shared beliefs or acceptable behaviors of communities, and tipping points when beliefs are about to change rapidly. The second focus of this research is to uncover the cultural contexts of belief, personalized to each individual, to optimzie the receptivity of scientific evidence in online network dissemination. The third pillar (Interaction) provides human-in-the-loop visual analytics framework to support users in verifying and making users' own decisions as to what they belief. Underpinning this work is the development and testing of novel deep learning models based on topology ML, which effectively predict heterogeneous social norm emergence for timely intervention, identify top trusted features for engagement, and temporal explainable artificial intelligence for transparent interaction with users. The involvement of leading misinformation mitigation and journalism education organizations such as the Poynter Institute helps to ensure social impacts in the field.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
