Publications

2024

1. CSCW

   Did the Roll-Out of Community Notes Reduce Engagement With Misinformation on X/Twitter?

   Yuwei Chuai, Haoye Tian, Nicolas Pröllochs, and Gabriele Lenzini

   In CSCW, 2024

   Abs

   

   Developing interventions that successfully reduce engagement with misinformation on social media is challenging. One intervention that has recently gained great attention is X/Twitter’s Community Notes (previously known as "Birdwatch"). Community Notes is a crowdsourced fact-checking approach that allows users to write textual notes to inform others about potentially misleading posts on X/Twitter. Yet, empirical evidence regarding its effectiveness in reducing engagement with misinformation on social media is missing. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to analyze whether the introduction of the Community Notes feature and its roll-out to users in the U.S. and around the world have reduced engagement with misinformation on X/Twitter in terms of retweet volume and likes. We employ Difference-in-Differences (DiD) models and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to analyze a comprehensive dataset consisting of all fact-checking notes and corresponding source tweets since the launch of Community Notes in early 2021. Although we observe a significant increase in the volume of fact-checks carried out via Community Notes, particularly for tweets from verified users with many followers, we find no evidence that the introduction of Community Notes significantly reduced engagement with misleading tweets on X/Twitter. Rather, our findings suggest that Community Notes might be too slow to effectively reduce engagement with misinformation in the early (and most viral) stage of diffusion. Our work emphasizes the importance of evaluating fact-checking interventions in the field and offers important implications to enhance crowdsourced fact-checking strategies on social media.

2. arXiv

   From News Sharers to Post Viewers: How Topic Diversity and Conspiracy Theories Shape Engagement With Misinformation During a Health Crisis?

   Yuwei Chuai, Jichang Zhao, and Gabriele Lenzini

   2024

   
3. arXiv

   Community-based fact-checking reduces the spread of misleading posts on social media

   Yuwei Chuai, Moritz Pilarski, Thomas Renault, David Restrepo-Amariles, Aurore Troussel-Clément, and 2 more authors

   2024

   
4. arXiv

   Is Fact-Checking Politically Neutral? Asymmetries in How U.S. Fact-Checking Organizations Pick Up False Statements Mentioning Political Elites

   Yuwei Chuai, Jichang Zhao, Nicolas Pröllochs, and Gabriele Lenzini

   2024

   
5. arXiv

   Community Fact-Checks Trigger Moral Outrage in Replies to Misleading Posts on Social Media

   Yuwei Chuai, Anastasia Sergeeva, Gabriele Lenzini, and Nicolas Pröllochs

   2024

   

2023

1. ICWE

   Using Emotions and Topics to Understand Online Misinformation

   Yuwei Chuai, Arianna Rossi, and Gabriele Lenzini

   In International Conference on Web Engineering, 2023

   

2022

1. FPHY

   Anger can make fake news viral online

   Yuwei Chuai, and Jichang Zhao

   Frontiers in Physics, 2022

   Abs

   

   Fake news that manipulates political elections, strikes financial systems, and even incites riots is more viral than real news online, resulting in unstable societies and buffeted democracy. While factor that drives the viral spread of fake news is rarely explored. In this study, it is unexpectedly found that the easier contagion of fake news online is positively associated with the greater anger it carries. The same results in Twitter and Weibo indicate that this correlation is independent of the platform. Moreover, mutations in emotions like increasing anger will progressively speed up the information spread. Increasing the occupation of anger by 0.1 and reducing that of joy by 0.1 are associated with the generation of nearly six more retweets in the Weibo dataset. Offline questionnaires reveal that anger leads to more incentivized audiences in terms of anxiety management and information sharing and accordingly makes fake news more contagious than real news online. Cures such as tagging anger in social media could be implemented to slow or prevent the contagion of fake news at the source.

2. DSAA

   What really drives the spread of COVID-19 Tweets: a revisit from perspective of content

   Yuwei Chuai, Yutian Chang, and Jichang Zhao

   In 2022 IEEE 9th International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), 2022