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Disinformation’s spread: bots, trolls and all of us
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“The public reaction to Moltbook-the willingness to attribute consciousness to statistically generated text, the financial frenzy of a memecoin rallying 1,800% on the premise of machine sentience-reveals as much about human psychology 19,20,32 as about artificial intelligence.”
From The Moltbook Illusion: Separating Human Influence from Emergent Behavior in AI Agent Societies (2026) · cites this paper as [32]
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Pennycook, G., McPhetres, J., Zhang, Y., Lu, J. G., & Rand, D. G. (2020) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/0956797620939054 · Cited by 1,715
The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views
Johnson, N. F., Velásquez, N., Restrepo, N. J., Leahy, R., Gabriel, N., Oud, S. E., Zheng, M., Manrique, P. D., Wuchty, S., & Lupu, Y. (2020) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1 · Cited by 734
Pennycook, G., McPhetres, J., Zhang, Y., Lu, J. G., & Rand, D. G. (2020) · doi:10.31234/osf.io/uhbk9 · Cited by 390
A decade of social bot detection
Cresci, S. (2020) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/3409116 · Cited by 323
“Kate Starbird recently discussed a related issue in an inspiring piece on Nature [28].”
BackgroundGoing viral: How a single tweet spawned a COVID-19 conspiracy theory on Twitter
Gruzd, A., & Mai, P. (2020) · Big Data & Society · doi:10.1177/2053951720938405 · Cited by 208
Metadata
- Authors
- Starbird, K.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- Corresponding author
- Starbird, Kate
- ORCID
- Starbird, Kate
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2019-07-24
- Volume
- 571
- Issue
- 7766
- Pages
- 449-449
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2963910833
- Cited by
- 203
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 18 · 2025: 33 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 38 · 2021: 33 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 4
- FWCI
- 49.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Keywords
- disinformation, online manipulation, bots, trolls, misinformation spread, online disinformation
- MeSH terms
- Administrative Personnel, Algorithms, Democracy, Goals, Humans, Deception, Politics, Research Personnel, Social Media
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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