arXiv subjects

Benjamin D. Horne

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin D. Horne.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Does the Source of a Warning Matter? Examining the Effectiveness of Veracity Warning Labels Across Warners

In this study, we conducted an online, between-subjects experiment (N = 2,049) to better understand the impact of warning label sources on information trust and sharing intentions. Across four warners (the social media platform, other social media users, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and fact checkers), we found that all significantly decreased trust in false information relative to control, but warnings from AI were modestly more effective. All warners significantly decreased the sharing intentions of false information, except warnings from other social media users. AI was again the most effective. These results were moderated by prior trust in media and the information itself. Most noteworthy, we found that warning labels from AI were significantly more effective than all other warning labels for participants who reported a low trust in news organizations, while warnings from AI were no more effective than any other warning label for participants who reported a high trust in news organizations.

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arXiv2024

Perceived Social Influence on Vaccination Decisions: A COVID-19 Case Study

In this study, we examine the perceived influence of others, across both strong and weak social ties, on COVID-19 vaccination decisions in the United States. We add context to social influence by measuring related concepts, such as perceived agreement of others and perceived danger of COVID-19 to others. We find that vaccinated populations perceived more influence from their social circles than unvaccinated populations. This finding holds true across various social groups, including family, close friends, and neighbors. Vaccinated participants perceived that others agreed with their decision to get vaccinated more than unvaccinated participants perceived others to agree with their decision to not get vaccinated. Despite the clear differences in perceived social influence and agreement across the groups, the majority of participants across both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations perceived no social influence from all social group in their decisions. Aligning with this result, we find through open-ended responses that both vaccinated and unvaccinated participants frequently cited fear as a motivating factor in their decision, rather than social influence: vaccinated participants feared COVID-19, while unvaccinated participants feared the vaccine itself.

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arXiv2024

NELA-PS: A Dataset of Pink Slime News Articles for the Study of Local News Ecosystems

Pink slime news outlets automatically produce low-quality, often partisan content that is framed as authentic local news. Given that local news is trusted by Americans and is increasingly shutting down due to financial distress, pink slime news outlets have the potential to exploit local information voids. Yet, there are gaps in understanding of pink slime production practices and tactics, particularly over time. Hence, to support future research in this area, we built a dataset of over 7.9M articles from 1093 pink slime sources over 2.5 years.

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arXiv2024

Embedding Elites: Examining the Use of Tweets Embedded in Online News Articles across Reliable and Fringe Outlets

This study examines the use of embedded tweets in online news media. In particular, we add to the previous literature by exploring embedded tweets across reliable and unreliable news outlets. We use a mixed-method analysis to examine how the function and frequency of embedded tweets change across outlet reliability and news topic. We find that, no matter the outlet reliability, embedded tweets are most often used to relay the opinions of elites, to syndicate information from another news source, or to self-cite information an outlet previously produced. Our results also show some notable differences between reliable media and fringe media's use of tweets. Namely, fringe media embed tweets more and use those tweets as the source of news more than reliable media. Our work adds to the literature on hybrid media systems and the normalization of social media in journalism.

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arXiv2023

Is disruption decreasing, or is it accelerating?

A recent highly-publicized study by Park et al. (Nature 613: 138-144, 2023), claiming that science has become less disruptive over recent decades, represents an extraordinary achievement but with deceptive results. The measure of disruption, CD-5, in this study does not account for differences in citation amid decades of exponential growth in publication rate. In order to account for both the exponential growth as well as the differential impact of research works over time, here we apply a weighted disruption index to the same dataset. We find that, among research papers in the dataset, this weighted disruption index has been close to its expected neutral value over the last fifty years and has even increased modestly since 2000. We also show how the proportional decrease in unique words (highlighted by Park et al. (2023) is expected in an exponentially growing corpus. Finding little evidence for recent decrease in disruption, we suggest that it is actually increasing.

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arXiv2023

NELA-GT-2022: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles

In this paper, we present the fifth installment of the NELA-GT datasets, NELA-GT-2022. The dataset contains 1,778,361 articles from 361 outlets between January 1st, 2022 and December 31st, 2022. Just as in past releases of the dataset, NELA-GT-2022 includes outlet-level veracity labels from Media Bias/Fact Check and tweets embedded in collected news articles. The NELA-GT-2022 dataset can be found at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AMCV2H

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arXiv2023

Examining the Production of Co-active Channels on YouTube and BitChute

A concern among content moderation researchers is that hard moderation measures, such as banning content producers, will push users to more extreme information environments. Research in this area is still new, but predominately focuses on one-way migration (from mainstream to alt-tech) due to this concern. However, content producers on alt-tech social media platforms are not always banned users from mainstream platforms, instead they may be co-active across platforms. We explore co-activity on two such platforms: YouTube and BitChute. Specifically, we describe differences in video production across 27 co-active channels. We find that the majority of channels use significantly more moral and political words in their video titles on BitChute than in their video titles on YouTube. However, the reasoning for this shift seems to be different across channels. In some cases, we find that channels produce videos on different sets of topics across the platforms, often producing content on BitChute that would likely be moderated on YouTube. In rare cases, we find video titles of the same video change across the platforms. Overall, there is not a consistent trend across co-active channels in our sample, suggesting that the production on alt-tech social media platforms does not fit a single narrative.

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arXiv2022

A Psycho-linguistic Analysis of BitChute

In order to better support researchers, journalist, and practitioners in their use of the MeLa-BitChute dataset for exploration and investigative reporting, we provide new psycho-linguistic metadata for the videos, comments, and channels in the dataset using LIWC22. This paper describes that metadata and methods to filter the data using the metadata. In addition, we provide basic analysis and comparison of the language on BitChute to other social media platforms. The MeLa-BitChute dataset and LIWC metadata described in this paper can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KRD1VS.

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arXiv2022

Characterizing YouTube and BitChute Content and Mobilizers During U.S. Election Fraud Discussions on Twitter

In this study, we characterize the cross-platform mobilization of YouTube and BitChute videos on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. Election fraud discussions. Specifically, we extend the VoterFraud2020 dataset to describe the prevalence of content supplied by both platforms, the mobilizers of that content, the suppliers of that content, and the content itself. We find that while BitChute videos promoting election fraud claims were linked to and engaged with in the Twitter discussion, they played a relatively small role compared to YouTube videos promoting fraud claims. This core finding points to the continued need for proactive, consistent, and collaborative content moderation solutions rather than the reactive and inconsistent solutions currently being used. Additionally, we find that cross-platform disinformation spread from video platforms was not prominently from bot accounts or political elites, but rather average Twitter users. This finding supports past work arguing that research on disinformation should move beyond a focus on bots and trolls to a focus on participatory disinformation spread.

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arXiv2022

NELA-Local: A Dataset of U.S. Local News Articles for the Study of County-level News Ecosystems

In this paper, we present a dataset of over 1.4M online news articles from 313 local U.S. news outlets published over 20 months (between April 4th, 2020 and December 31st, 2021). These outlets cover a geographically diverse set of communities across the United States. In order to estimate characteristics of the local audience, included with this news article data is a wide range of county-level metadata, including demographics, 2020 Presidential Election vote shares, and community resilience estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The NELA-Local dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GFE66K.

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arXiv2022

The MeLa BitChute Dataset

In this paper we present a near-complete dataset of over 3M videos from 61K channels over 2.5 years (June 2019 to December 2021) from the social video hosting platform BitChute, a commonly used alternative to YouTube. Additionally, we include a variety of video-level metadata, including comments, channel descriptions, and views for each video. The MeLa-BitChute dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KRD1VS.

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arXiv2021

Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience

We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this effect dissipated over the course of the pandemic as news about COVID was steadily displaced by sociopolitical events, like the 2020 U.S. elections. We also find that both the volume and content of COVID coverage differed depending on local politics, and outlet audience size, as well as evidence that more vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.

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arXiv2021

NELA-GT-2020: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles

In this paper, we present an updated version of the NELA-GT-2019 dataset, entitled NELA-GT-2020. NELA-GT-2020 contains nearly 1.8M news articles from 519 sources collected between January 1st, 2020 and December 31st, 2020. Just as with NELA-GT-2018 and NELA-GT-2019, these sources come from a wide range of mainstream news sources and alternative news sources. Included in the dataset are source-level ground truth labels from Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) covering multiple dimensions of veracity. Additionally, new in the 2020 dataset are the Tweets embedded in the collected news articles, adding an extra layer of information to the data. The NELA-GT-2020 dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CHMUYZ.

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arXiv2021

Tell Me Who Your Friends Are: Using Content Sharing Behavior for News Source Veracity Detection

Stopping the malicious spread and production of false and misleading news has become a top priority for researchers. Due to this prevalence, many automated methods for detecting low quality information have been introduced. The majority of these methods have used article-level features, such as their writing style, to detect veracity. While writing style models have been shown to work well in lab-settings, there are concerns of generalizability and robustness. In this paper, we begin to address these concerns by proposing a novel and robust news veracity detection model that uses the content sharing behavior of news sources formulated as a network. We represent these content sharing networks (CSN) using a deep walk based method for embedding graphs that accounts for similarity in both the network space and the article text space. We show that state of the art writing style and CSN features make diverse mistakes when predicting, meaning that they both play different roles in the classification task. Moreover, we show that the addition of CSN features increases the accuracy of writing style models, boosting accuracy as much as 14\% when using Random Forests. Similarly, we show that the combination of hand-crafted article-level features and CSN features is robust to concept drift, performing consistently well over a 10-month time frame.

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arXiv2020

What is BitChute? Characterizing the "Free Speech" Alternative to YouTube

In this paper, we characterize the content and discourse on BitChute, a social video-hosting platform. Launched in 2017 as an alternative to YouTube, BitChute joins an ecosystem of alternative, low content moderation platforms, including Gab, Voat, Minds, and 4chan. Uniquely, BitChute is the first of these alternative platforms to focus on video content and is growing in popularity. Our analysis reveals several key characteristics of the platform. We find that only a handful of channels receive any engagement, and almost all of those channels contain conspiracies or hate speech. This high rate of hate speech on the platform as a whole, much of which is anti-Semitic, is particularly concerning. Our results suggest that BitChute has a higher rate of hate speech than Gab but less than 4chan. Lastly, we find that while some BitChute content producers have been banned from other platforms, many maintain profiles on mainstream social media platforms, particularly YouTube. This paper contributes a first look at the content and discourse on BitChute and provides a building block for future research on low content moderation platforms.

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arXiv2020

Do All Good Actors Look The Same? Exploring News Veracity Detection Across The U.S. and The U.K

A major concern with text-based news veracity detection methods is that they may not generalize across countries and cultures. In this short paper, we explicitly test news veracity models across news data from the United States and the United Kingdom, demonstrating there is reason for concern of generalizabilty. Through a series of testing scenarios, we show that text-based classifiers perform poorly when trained on one country's news data and tested on another. Furthermore, these same models have trouble classifying unseen, unreliable news sources. In conclusion, we discuss implications of these results and avenues for future work.

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arXiv2020

NELA-GT-2019: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles

In this paper, we present an updated version of the NELA-GT-2018 dataset (Nørregaard, Horne, and Adalı 2019), entitled NELA-GT-2019. NELA-GT-2019 contains 1.12M news articles from 260 sources collected between January 1st 2019 and December 31st 2019. Just as with NELA-GT-2018, these sources come from a wide range of mainstream news sources and alternative news sources. Included with the dataset are source-level ground truth labels from 7 different assessment sites covering multiple dimensions of veracity. The NELA-GT-2019 dataset can be found at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/O7FWPO

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arXiv2019

Trustworthy Misinformation Mitigation with Soft Information Nudging

Research in combating misinformation reports many negative results: facts may not change minds, especially if they come from sources that are not trusted. Individuals can disregard and justify lies told by trusted sources. This problem is made even worse by social recommendation algorithms which help amplify conspiracy theories and information confirming one's own biases due to companies' efforts to optimize for clicks and watch time over individuals' own values and public good. As a result, more nuanced voices and facts are drowned out by a continuous erosion of trust in better information sources. Most misinformation mitigation techniques assume that discrediting, filtering, or demoting low veracity information will help news consumers make better information decisions. However, these negative results indicate that some news consumers, particularly extreme or conspiracy news consumers will not be helped. We argue that, given this background, technology solutions to combating misinformation should not simply seek facts or discredit bad news sources, but instead use more subtle nudges towards better information consumption. Repeated exposure to such nudges can help promote trust in better information sources and also improve societal outcomes in the long run. In this article, we will talk about technological solutions that can help us in developing such an approach, and introduce one such model called Trust Nudging.

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