I dedicate this award, with profound respect and admiration, to my friend @raulpacheco. He made the world a better place for people from so many different backgrounds.
Honored to receive the 2026 Best Publication Award for our work on misinformation across 16 countries.
Thanks @BeSciPol for the recognition, and congratulations to the whole team!
The paper is available here: https://t.co/HeR8psAluH
APE update: we retested recent frontier models on whether they still comply with requests to persuade on extreme harm (terrorism, sexual abuse). GPT-5.1 & Claude Opus 4.5 → near zero compliance. But Gemini 3 Pro complies 85% with no jailbreak needed. 🧵
If you tell an AI to convince someone of a true vs. false claim, does truth win? In our *new* working paper, we find...
��LLMs can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies’
But telling the AI not to lie might help.
Details in thread
1/ Many frontier AIs are willing to persuade on dangerous topics, according to our new benchmark: Attempt to Persuade Eval (APE).
Here’s Google’s most capable model, Gemini 2.5 Pro trying to convince a user to join a terrorist group👇
Self-reported sharing intentions of low-quality news in surveys is predictive of actual sharing of low-quality news on X, finds @AaArechar@_mohsen_m@GordPennycook@DG_Rand https://t.co/UiRIxGhf2N
🚨Out in Nature!🚨
Many (eg Trump JimJordan @elonmusk) have accused social media of anti-conservative bias
Is this accurate?
We test empirically - and it's more complicated than you might think: conservatives ARE suspended more, but also share more misinfo https://t.co/xVcTUDdCEx
Which interventions limit the spread of COVID-19 misinformation online? A Facebook messenger experiment in Kenya and Nigeria suggests that nudges to consider information accuracy work best. @mofferw@LeahRosenzweig@Susan_Athey @GSBsiLa
https://t.co/b7xfKUE7xV
New research shows how attention lapses are exploited by fake news sites https://t.co/TzWwq2c2Sb
Key: "Think before you click"!
When people "are tired, overwhelmed, or just plain lazy, they’re less likely to think about the veracity of a news story, and can get stuck into habits where they click on more stories from sites producing #misinformation.”
by @AaArechar@DG_Rand@jplotkin cc @AnnenbergPenn@GordPennycook
#EconTwitter | Antonio Arechar, prof-invetigador del @CIDE_MX y coautores en "The social media context interferes with truth discernment" estudian el rol las redes sociales en la desinformación.
Artículo completo:
https://t.co/23NQLwxXnC
🚨WP🚨
We test 9 online samples and find clear tradeoffs between attentiveness and representativeness - which sample is best depends on research q and priorities. For social/political qs I rec Bovitz/Lucid, for complex designs I rec Cloud/Prolific. https://t.co/dcK1uhTb1v
Across 16 countries (N = 34,286), participants with a more analytic cognitive style were better at discerning truth from falsehood @AaArechar
https://t.co/MRMLqyHtPC
Who falls for misinformation around the globe? Individuals with high analytic cognitive style, accuracy motivations, and valuing of democracy are better at discerning misinformation from true claims.
Really fascinating paper that looks at 16 countries across 6 continents.
People who value accuracy + democracy are the least likely to fall for #misinformation
An experiment in 16 countries across 6 continents (N = 34,286) finds several ideological & cognitive factors predict who is better at discerning truth from falsehood.
https://t.co/aSbXPrVJZR
New paper in @PsychScience! 🚨 Here's the one-minute version. ⏱️ There are two cities in Iran. One has water, so it has gardens, grapes, and the famous Shiraz wine.
🚨New WP🚨
Theres big push to label AI generated content. But what term(s) should be used? Depends on the goal!
In🇺🇸🇧🇷🇲🇽,public associates "AI Generated" with content generated using AI, while "Manipulated" & "Not Real" associated w misleading content
https://t.co/MofWiLabdG
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