Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Small: Targeting Challenges in Computational Disinformation Research to Enhance Attribution, Detection, and Explanation

The use of social media has accelerated information sharing and instantaneous communications. The low barrier to entering social media enables more users to participate and keeps them engaged longer, incentivizing individuals with a hidden agenda to spread disinformation online to manipulate information and sway opinion. Disinformation, such as fake news, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories, has increasingly become a hindrance to the functioning of online social media as an effective channel for trustworthy information. Cases are emerging where deliberately fabricated disinformation is weaponized to divide people and create detrimental societal effects. Therefore, it is imperative to understand disinformation and systematically investigate how to improve resistance against it, considering the tension between the need for information and security and protection from disinformation. The project aims to study the scientific underpinnings of disinformation and develop a computational framework to attribute, detect, and explain disinformation to inform policymaking. The project involves fundamentally transforming the process to combat disinformation by developing new knowledge and a systematic computational framework to address major (provenance, data, and explanaibility) challenges of detecting online disinformation. The techniques developed combine interdisciplinary theories and computational algorithms to help policymakers and social media users address disinformation. The project outcomes help advance state-of-the-art research on disinformation and introduce style-based and graph-based optimization methods that can determine the source of disinformation and its characteristics, disinformation detection methods requiring minimal data or supervision by harnessing multimodal data and high-level social context relations, and interpretable detection techniques that rely on well-established psychological and cognitive theories, and enable human interactions to enhance detection and explanation. More broadly, the project contributes to data mining, machine learning, graph mining, and text mining research as well social science research in communication and journalism on credibility, transparency, and disinformation mitigation. 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.