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    TIB's visual analytics group at MediaEval '20: Detecting fake news on corona virus and 5G conspiracy
    (Aachen, Germany : RWTH Aachen, 2020) Cheema, Gullal S.; Hakimov, Sherzod; Ewerth, Ralph; Hicks, Steven
    Fake news on social media has become a hot topic of research as it negatively impacts the discourse of real news in the public. Specifi-cally, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise of inaccurate and misleading information due to the surrounding controversies and unknown details at the beginning of the pandemic. The Fak-eNews task at MediaEval 2020 tackles this problem by creating a challenge to automatically detect tweets containing misinformation based on text and structure from Twitter follower network. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses BERT embeddings and a shallow neural network for classifying tweets using only text, and discuss our findings and limitations of the approach in text-based misinformation detection.
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    Stewardship of global collective behavior
    (Washington, DC : National Acad. of Sciences, 2021) Bak-Coleman, Joseph B.; Alfano, Mark; Barfuss, Wolfram; Bergstrom, Carl T.; Centeno, Miguel A.; Couzin, Iain D.; Donges, Jonathan F.; Galesic, Mirta; Gersick, Andrew S.; Jacquet, Jennifer; Kao, Albert B.; Moran, Rachel E.; Romanczuk, Pawel; Rubenstein, Daniel I.; Tombak, Kaia J.; Van Bavel, Jay J.; Weber, Elke U.
    Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.