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Misinformation is "sticky" in nature, requiring a considerable effort to undo its influence. One such effort is debunking or exposing the falsity of information. As an abundance of misinformation is on social media, platforms do bear some debunking responsibility in order to preserve their trustworthiness as information providers. A subject of interpretation, platforms poorly meet this responsibility and allow dangerous health misinformation to influence many of their users. This open route to harm did not sit well with health professional users, who recently decided to take the debunking into their own hands. To study this individual debunking effort - which we call 'Debunk-It-Yourself (DIY)' - we conducted an exploratory survey n=14 health professionals who wage a misinformation counter-influence campaign through videos on TikTok. We focused on two topics, nutrition and mental health, which are the ones most often subjected to misinformation on the platform. Our thematic analysis reveals that the counterinfluence follows a common process of initiation, selection, creation, and "stitching" or duetting a debunking video with a misinformation video. The 'Debunk-It-Yourself' effort was underpinned by three unique aspects: (i) it targets trending misinformation claims perceived to be of direct harm to people's health; (ii) it offers a symmetric response to the misinformation; and (iii) it is strictly based on scientific evidence and claimed clinical experience. Contrasting the 'Debunk-It-Yourself' effort with the one TikTok and other platforms (reluctantly) put in moderation, we offer recommendations for a structured response against the misinformation's influence by the users themselves.

In this study, we tested users' perception of accuracy and engagement with TikTok videos in which ChatGPT responded to prompts about "at-home" abortion remedies. The chatbot's responses, though somewhat vague and confusing, nonetheless recommended consulting with health professionals before attempting an "at-home" abortion. We used ChatGPT to create two TikTok video variants - one where users can see ChatGPT explicitly typing back a response, and one where the text response is presented without any notion to the chatbot. We randomly exposed 100 participants to each variant and found that the group of participants unaware of ChatGPT's text synthetization was more inclined to believe the responses were misinformation. Under the same impression, TikTok itself attached misinformation warning labels ("Get the facts about abortion") to all videos after we collected our initial results. We then decided to test the videos again with another set of 50 participants and found that the labels did not affect the perceptions of abortion misinformation except in the case where ChatGPT explicitly responded to a prompt for a lyrical output. We also found that more than 60% of the participants expressed negative or hesitant opinions about chatbots as sources of credible health information.

The scientific effort devoted to health misinformation mostly focuses on the implications of misleading vaccines and communicable disease claims with respect to public health. However, the proliferation of abortion misinformation following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade banning legal abortion in the US highlighted a gap in scientific attention to individual health-related misinformation. To address this gap, we conducted a study with 60 TikTok users to uncover their experiences with abortion misinformation and the way they conceptualize, assess, and respond to misleading video content on this platform. Our findings indicate that users mostly encounter short-term videos suggesting herbal "at-home" remedies for pregnancy termination. While many of the participants were cautious about scientifically debunked "abortion alternatives," roughly 30% of the entire sample believed in their safety and efficacy. Even an explicit debunking label attached to a misleading abortion video about the harms of "at-home" did not help a third of the participants to dismiss a video about self-administering abortion as misinformation. We discuss the implications of our findings for future participation on TikTok and other polarizing topics debated on social media.

In this paper we investigate what folk models of misinformation exist through semi-structured interviews with a sample of 235 social media users. Work on social media misinformation does not investigate how ordinary users - the target of misinformation - deal with it; rather, the focus is mostly on the anxiety, tensions, or divisions misinformation creates. Studying the aspects of creation, diffusion and amplification also overlooks how misinformation is internalized by users on social media and thus is quick to prescribe "inoculation" strategies for the presumed lack of immunity to misinformation. How users grapple with social media content to develop "natural immunity" as a precursor to misinformation resilience remains an open question. We have identified at least five folk models that conceptualize misinformation as either: political (counter)argumentation, out-of-context narratives, inherently fallacious information, external propaganda, or simply entertainment. We use the rich conceptualizations embodied in these folk models to uncover how social media users minimize adverse reactions to misinformation encounters in their everyday lives.

Warning users about misinformation on social media is not a simple usability task. Soft moderation has to balance between debunking falsehoods and avoiding moderation bias while preserving the social media consumption flow. Platforms thus employ minimally distinguishable warning tags with generic text under a suspected misinformation content. This approach resulted in an unfavorable outcome where the warnings "backfired" and users believed the misinformation more, not less. In response, we developed enhancements to the misinformation warnings where users are advised on the context of the information hazard and exposed to standard warning iconography. We ran an A/B evaluation with the Twitter's original warning tags in a 337 participant usability study. The majority of the participants preferred the enhancements as a nudge toward recognizing and avoiding misinformation. The enhanced warning tags were most favored by the politically left-leaning and to a lesser degree moderate participants, but they also appealed to roughly a third of the right-leaning participants. The education level was the only demographic factor shaping participants' preferences. We use our findings to propose user-tailored improvements in the soft moderation of misinformation on social media.

The COVID-19 pandemic enabled "quishing", or phishing with malicious QR codes, as they became a convenient go-between for sharing URLs, including malicious ones. To explore the quishing phenomenon, we conducted a 173-participant study where we used a COVID-19 digital passport sign-up trial with a malicious QR code as a pretext. We found that 67 % of the participants were happy to sign-up with their Google or Facebook credentials, 18.5% to create a new account, and only 14.5% to skip on the sign-up. Convenience was the single most cited factor for the willingness to yield participants' credentials. Reluctance of linking personal accounts with new services was the reason for creating a new account or skipping the registration. We also developed a Quishing Awareness Scale (QAS) and found a significant relationship between participants' QR code behavior and their sign-up choices: the ones choosing to sign-up with Facebook scored the lowest while the one choosing to skip the highest on average. We used our results to propose quishing awareness training guidelines and develop and test usable security indicators for warning users about the threat of quishing.

As yet another alternative social network, Gettr positions itself as the "marketplace of ideas" where users should expect the truth to emerge without any administrative censorship. We looked deep inside the platform by analyzing it's structure, a sample of 6.8 million posts, and the responses from a sample of 124 Gettr users we interviewed to see if this actually is the case. Administratively, Gettr makes a deliberate attempt to stifle any external evaluation of the platform as collecting data is marred with unpredictable and abrupt changes in their API. Content-wise, Gettr notably hosts pro-Trump content mixed with conspiracy theories and attacks on the perceived "left." It's social network structure is asymmetric and centered around prominent right-thought leaders, which is characteristic for all alt-platforms. While right-leaning users joined Gettr as a result of a perceived freedom of speech infringement by the mainstream platforms, left-leaning users followed them in numbers as to "keep up with the misinformation." We contextualize these findings by looking into the Gettr's user interface design to provide a comprehensive insight into the incentive structure for joining and competing for the truth on Gettr.

We studied whether the origins of math anxiety can be related to a biologically supported framework of stress induction: (un)controllability perception, here indicated by self-reported independent efforts in mathematics. Math anxiety was tested in 182 children (8- to 11-year-olds). "Latent factor modeling" was used to test hypotheses on plausible causal processes and mediations within competing models in quasi-experimental contrasts. Uncontrollability perception in mathematics, or (in)dependence of efforts, best fit the data as an antecedent of math anxiety. In addition, the relationship of math anxiety with gender was fully mediated by adaptive perception of control (i.e. controllability). That is, young boys differ from girls in terms of their experience of control in mathematics learning. These differences influence math anxiety. Our findings are consistent with recent suggestions in clinical literature according to which uncontrollability makes women more susceptible to fear and anxiety disorders.

This study examined performance on transitive inference problems in children with developmental dyscalculia (DD), typically developing controls matched on IQ, working memory and reading skills, and in children with outstanding mathematical abilities. Whereas mainstream approaches currently consider DD as a domain-specific deficit, we hypothesized that the development of mathematical skills is closely related to the development of logical abilities, a domain-general skill. In particular, we expected a close link between mathematical skills and the ability to reason independently of one's beliefs. Our results showed that this was indeed the case, with children with DD performing more poorly than controls, and high maths ability children showing outstanding skills in logical reasoning about belief-laden problems. Nevertheless, all groups performed poorly on structurally equivalent problems with belief-neutral content. This is in line with suggestions that abstract reasoning skills (i.e. the ability to reason about content without real-life referents) develops later than the ability to reason about belief-inconsistent fantasy content. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90DWY3O4xx8 (Contains 2 figures, 3 tables, and 1 footnote.)