Scammed! Animals 'led by the nose' to leave plants alone

University of Sydney researchers have shown it is possible to shield plants from the hungry maws of herbivorous mammals by fooling them with the smell of a variety they typically avoid.

Findings from the study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution show tree seedlings planted next to the decoy smell solution were 20 times less likely to be eaten by animals.

"This is equivalent to the seedlings being surrounded by actual plants that are unpalatable to the herbivore. In most cases it does trick the animals into leaving the plants alone," said PhD student Patrick Finnerty, the study's lead author from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences Behavioural Ecology and Conservation Lab.

"Herbivores cause significant damage to valuable plants in ecological and economically sensitive areas worldwide, but killing the animals to protect the plants can be unethical," he said.

"So, we created artificial odours that mimicked the smell of plant species they naturally avoid, and this gently nudged problematic herbivores away from areas we didn't want them to be.

"Given that many herbivores use plant odour as their primary sense to forage, this method provides a new approach that could be used to help protect valued plants globally, either in conservation work or protecting agricultural crops."

The experiment, conducted in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in Sydney, used the swamp wallaby as model herbivore.

The researchers selected an unpalatable shrub in the citrus family, Boronia pinnata, and a palatable canopy species, Eucalyptus punctata, to test the concept.

The study compared using B. pinnata solution and the real plant and found both were equally successful at protecting eucalyptseedlings from being eaten by wallabies.

As part of his doctoral research, Mr Finnerty has also tested the method successfully with African elephants, but that fieldwork does not form part of this research paper.

Previous attempts to use repellent substances, such as chilli oil or motor oil, to control animal consumption of plants have inherent limitations, Mr Finnerty said.

"Animals tend to habituate to these unnatural cues and so deterrent effects are only temporary," he said.

"By contrast, by mimicking the smell of plants herbivore naturally encounter, and avoid in day-to-day foraging, our approach works with the natural motivators of these animals, with herbivores less likely to habituate to these smells."

Researchers took this idea and used solutions that produce these undesired aromas.

"As a management tool to protect palatable plants, our technique offers many advantages over real plants as a repellent," Mr Finnerty said.

"Our approach should be transferable to any mammalian, or potentially invertebrate, herbivore that relies primarily on plant odour information to forage and could protect valued plants globally, such as threatened species."

Current solutions to herbivore-related problems often involve costly and environmentally impactful measures such as lethal control or fencing.

The new research introduces an alternative low-cost, humane strategy based on understanding herbivores' foraging cues, motivations and decisions.

"Plant browsing damage caused by mammalian herbivore populations like deer, elephants and wallabies is a growing global concern," said senior study author Professor Clare McArthur.

"This damage is one of the greatest limiting factors in areas of post-fire recovery and revegetation, destroying more than half the seedlings in these areas. It also threatens endangered plants and causes billions of dollars of damage in forestry and agriculture globally.

Read more at Science Daily

Evaluating the truthfulness of fake news through online searches increases the chances of believing misinformation

Conventional wisdom suggests that searching online to evaluate the veracity of misinformation would reduce belief in it. But a new study by a team of researchers shows the opposite occurs: Searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, offer insights into the impact of search engines' output on their users -- a relatively under-studied area.

"Our study shows that the act of searching online to evaluate news increases belief in highly popular misinformation -- and by notable amounts," says Zeve Sanderson, founding executive director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the paper's authors.

The reason for this outcome may be explained by search-engine outputs -- in the study, the researchers found that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

"This points to the danger that 'data voids' -- areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality, or even outright false, news and information -- may be playing a consequential role in the online search process, leading to low return of credible information or, more alarming, the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results," observes lead author Kevin Aslett, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida and a faculty research affiliate at CSMaP.

In the newly published Nature study, Aslett, Sanderson, and their colleagues studied the impact of using online search engines to evaluate false or misleading views -- an approach encouraged by technology companies and government agencies, among others.

To do so, they recruited participants through both Qualtrics and Amazon's Mechanical Turk -- tools frequently used in running behavioral science studies -- for a series of five experiments and with the aim of gauging the impact of a common behavior: searching online to evaluate news (SOTEN).

The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:
 

• The effect of SOTEN on belief in both false or misleading and true news directly within two days an article's publication (false popular articles included stories on COVID-19 vaccines, the Trump impeachment proceedings, and climate events)
• Whether the effect of SOTEN can change an individual's evaluation after they had already assessed the veracity of a news story
• The effect of SOTEN months after publication
• The effect of SOTEN on recent news about a salient topic with significant news coverage -- in the case of this study, news about the Covid-19 pandemic

A fifth study combined a survey with web-tracking data in order to identify the effect of exposure to both low- and high-quality search-engine results on belief in misinformation.

By collecting search results using a custom web browser plug-in, the researchers could identify how the quality of these search results may affect users' belief in the misinformation being evaluated.

The study's source credibility ratings were determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online.

Across the five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation.

This occurred whether it was shortly after the publication of misinformation or months later.

This finding suggests that the passage of time -- and ostensibly opportunities for fact checks to enter the information ecosystem -- does not lessen the impact of SOTEN on increasing the likelihood of believing false news stories to be true.

Moreover, the fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

"The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in empirically tested interventions and search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research," concludes Joshua A. Tucker, professor of politics and co-director of CSMaP, another of the paper's authors.

Read more at Science Daily

Red-flagging misinformation could slow the spread of fake news on social media

The dissemination of fake news on social media is a pernicious trend with dire implications for the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, research shows that public engagement with spurious news is greater than with legitimate news from mainstream sources, making social media a powerful channel for propaganda.

A new study on the spread of disinformation reveals that pairing headlines with credibility alerts from fact-checkers, the public, news media and even AI, can reduce peoples' intention to share. However, the effectiveness of these alerts varies with political orientation and gender. The good news for truth seekers? Official fact-checking sources are overwhelmingly trusted.

The study, led by Nasir Memon, professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Sameer Patil, visiting research professor at NYU Tandon and assistant professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington, goes further, examining the effectiveness of a specific set of inaccuracy notifications designed to alert readers to news headlines that are inaccurate or untrue.

The work, "Effects of Credibility Indicators on Social Media News Sharing Intent," published in the Proceedings of the 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, involved an online study of around 1,500 individuals to measure the effectiveness among different groups of four so-called "credibility indicators" displayed beneath headlines:

• Fact Checkers: "Multiple fact-checking journalists dispute the credibility of this news"
• News Media: "Major news outlets dispute the credibility of this news"
• Public: "A majority of Americans disputes the credibility of this news"
• AI: "Computer algorithms using AI dispute the credibility of this news"

"We wanted to discover whether social media users were less apt to share fake news when it was accompanied by one of these indicators and whether different types of credibility indicators exhibit different levels of influence on people's sharing intent," says Memon. "But we also wanted to measure the extent to which demographic and contextual factors like age, gender, and political affiliation impact the effectiveness of these indicators."

Participants -- over 1,500 U.S. residents -- saw a sequence of 12 true, false, or satirical news headlines. Only the false or satirical headlines included a credibility indicator below the headline in red font. For all of the headlines, respondents were asked if they would share the corresponding article with friends on social media, and why.

"Upon initial inspection, we found that political ideology and affiliation were highly correlated to responses and that the strength of individuals' political alignments made no difference, whether Republican or Democrat," says Memon. "The indicators impacted everyone regardless of political orientation, but the impact on Democrats was much larger compared to the other two groups."

The most effective of the credibility indicators, by far, was Fact Checkers: Study respondents intended to share 43% fewer non-true headlines with this indicator versus 25%, 22%, and 22% for the "News Media," "Public," and "AI" indicators, respectively.

Effects of Political Affiliation

The team found a strong correlation between political affiliation and the propensity of each of the credibility indicators to influence intention to share. In fact, the AI credibility indicator actually induced Republicans to increase their intention to share non-true news:

• Democrats intended to share 61% fewer non-true headlines with the Fact Checkers indicator (versus 40% for Independents and 19% for Republicans)
• Democrats intended to share 36% fewer non-true headlines with the News Media indicator (versus 29% for Independents and 4.5% for Republicans)
• Democrats intended to share 37% fewer non-true headlines with the Public indicator, (versus 17% for Independents and 6.7% for Republicans)
• Democrats intended to share 40% fewer non-true headlines with the AI indicator (versus 16% for Independents)
• Republicans intended to share 8.1% more non-true news with the AI indicator

Republicans are less likely to be influenced by credibility indicators, more inclined to share fake news on social media.

Patil says that while fact-checkers are the most effective kind of indicator, regardless of political affiliation and gender, fact-checking is a very labor-intensive. He says the team was surprised by the fact that Republicans were more inclined to share news that was flagged as not credible using the AI indicator.

"We were not expecting that, although conservatives may tend to trust more traditional means of flagging the veracity of news," he says, adding that the team will next examine how to make the most effective credibility indicator -- fact-checkers -- efficient enough to handle the scale inherent in today's news climate.

"This could include applying fact checks to only the most-needed content, which might involve applying natural language algorithms. So, it is a question, broadly speaking, of how humans and AI could co-exist," he explains.

The team also found that males intended to share non-true headlines one and half times more than females, with the differences largest for the Public and News Media indicators.

Men are less likely to be influenced by credibility indicators, more inclined to share fake news on social media. But indicators, especially those from fact-checkers, reduce intention to share fake news across the board.

Read more at Science Daily

'Fake news' increases consumer demands for corporate action

New research finds that "fake news" inspires consumers to demand corrective action from companies -- even if the company is a victim of the fake news story. The study also supports the idea that most people feel they are better at detecting fake news than other people are -- and found that fake news increases calls for improved digital media literacy.

"The idea that I am less influenced by fake news than you are is an example of something called the third-person effect," says Yang Cheng, first author of the study and an assistant professor of communication at North Carolina State University.

"The third-person effect predicts that people tend to perceive that mass media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves, and we found that this effect is pronounced among consumers who use social media. We also found that the third-person effect plays a significant role in how people respond to fake news online."

For this study, the researchers enlisted 661 study participants from across the United States who identified as being Coca-Cola consumers. The researchers first gave the participants an example of a fake news story that circulated in Facebook in 2016, which (falsely) claimed that Coca-Cola had recalled bottles of its Dasani-brand water due to the presence of aquatic parasites. The researchers then asked study participants a range of questions designed to ascertain how the participants felt about fake news and what they felt should be done to address it.

"The strongest finding was that consumers expect corporations to take responsibility for combating fake news, even if the company in question was a victim of the fake news story," Cheng says. "This is news that public relations professionals can use. It highlights the need for communication professionals to step up and take an active role in responding to fake news items. That could mean collaborating with reporters to provide them with accurate information, or making correct information directly available to the public, or both. But it suggests that simply being quiet and waiting for the crisis to blow over may be unwise.

"Anyone can spread fake news on social media, and the expectation from consumers is that affected companies should play an active role in addressing it."

The study also found that consumers wanted more to be done to improve media literacy, and that media users should be taught how to evaluate media critically.

The researchers also found that the most powerful factor in triggering these responses from consumers appeared to be the third-party effect. In other words, the people who were most confident in their ability to detect fake news felt most strongly that other people would be influenced by fake news. And highly-confident consumers were the most likely to call for corrective action from corporations and improved media literacy efforts.

Read more at Science Daily

How social media makes it difficult to identify real news

There's a price to pay when you get your news and political information from the same place you find funny memes and cat pictures, new research suggests.

The study found that people viewing a blend of news and entertainment on a social media site tended to pay less attention to the source of content they consumed -- meaning they could easily mistake satire or fiction for real news.

People who viewed content that was clearly separated into categories -- such as current affairs and entertainment -- didn't have the same issues evaluating the source and credibility of content they read.

The findings show the dangers of people getting their news from social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, said study author George Pearson, a senior lecturer and research associate in communication at The Ohio State University.

"We are drawn to these social media sites because they are one-stop shops for media content, updates from friends and family, and memes or cat pictures," Pearson said.

"But that jumbling of content makes everything seem the same to us. It makes it harder for us to distinguish what we need to take seriously from that which is only entertainment."

The study appears online in the journal New Media & Society.

For the study, Pearson created a fictional social media site called "Link Me." The 370 participants saw four webpages with either two or four posts each. Each post consisted of a headline and short paragraph summarizing the story, as well as information on the source of the post.

The sources were designed to be either high or low credibility, based on their name and description. (The sources' credibility was tested in a previous study to make sure people understood.)

For example, one high-credibility source was called "Washington Daily News" and was described as a "professional news organization renowned for high-quality and objective journalism."

One low-credibility source in the study was called "Hot Moon" and described as "a collective of nonprofessional writers."

All posts were based on real articles or public social media posts taken from Reddit or Tumblr.

After viewing the site, participants were asked a variety of questions. Pearson was most interested in whether they paid more attention to the posts about current affairs topics than those in other categories, such as entertainment.

"That would suggest that they were paying attention to the sources of the posts and understanding what was news and what was not," Pearson said.

The results showed that when the content was not grouped by distinct topics -- in other words, news posts appeared on the same page with entertainment posts -- participants reported paying less attention to the source of the content.

"They were less likely to verify source information to ensure that it was a credible source," he said.

That may be one reason why satirical and other types of fake news get shared by people who evidently think it is real, Pearson said.

For example, in 2018 the website React365 posted an article about a cruise ship disaster in Mexico that killed at least 32 people. The article generated more than 350,000 engagements on Facebook.

The misinformation was quickly debunked by Snopes.com, which noted that react365's homepage clearly showed it was a prank website where people could upload their own fictitious stories.

Pearson said one of the problems is that many social media sites present content in the exact same way, no matter the source.

"There is no visual distinction on Facebook between something from the New York Times and something from a random blog. They all have the same color scheme, same font," he said.

One solution would be for social media companies to develop tools to distinguish content.

But until that happens, it is up to users to pay more attention to where their news is coming from -- as difficult as that may be, Pearson said.

Read more at Science Daily

The catch to putting warning labels on fake news

After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook began putting warning tags on news stories fact-checkers judged to be false. But there's a catch: Tagging some stories as false makes readers more willing to believe other stories and share them with friends, even if those additional, untagged stories also turn out to be false.

That is the main finding of a new study co-authored by an MIT professor, based on multiple experiments with news consumers. The researchers call this unintended consequence -- in which the selective labeling of false news makes other news stories seem more legitimate -- the "implied-truth effect" in news consumption.

"Putting a warning on some content is going to make you think, to some extent, that all of the other content without the warning might have been checked and verified," says David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study.

"There's no way the fact-checkers can keep up with the stream of misinformation, so even if the warnings do really reduce belief in the tagged stories, you still have a problem, because of the implied truth effect," Rand adds.

Moreover, Rand observes, the implied truth effect "is actually perfectly rational" on the part of readers, since there is ambiguity about whether untagged stories were verified or just not yet checked. "That makes these warnings potentially problematic," he says. "Because people will reasonably make this inference."

Even so, the findings also suggest a solution: Placing "Verified" tags on stories found to be true eliminates the problem.

The paper, "The Implied Truth Effect," has just appeared in online form in the journal Management Science. In addition to Rand, the authors are Gordon Pennycook, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Regina; Adam Bear, a postdoc in the Cushman Lab at Harvard University; and Evan T. Collins, an undergraduate researcher on the project from Yale University.

BREAKING: More labels are better

To conduct the study, the researchers conducted a pair of online experiments with a total of 6,739 U.S. residents, recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Participants were given a variety of true and false news headlines in a Facebook-style format. The false stories were chosen from the website Snopes.com and included headlines such as "BREAKING NEWS: Hillary Clinton Filed for Divorce in New York Courts" and "Republican Senator Unveils Plan To Send All Of America's Teachers Through A Marine Bootcamp."

The participants viewed an equal mix of true stories and false stories, and were asked whether they would consider sharing each story on social media. Some participants were assigned to a control group in which no stories were labeled; others saw a set of stories where some of the false ones displayed a "FALSE" label; and some participants saw a set of stories with warning labels on some false stories and "TRUE" verification labels for some true stories.

In the first place, stamping warnings on false stories does make people less likely to consider sharing them. For instance, with no labels being used at all, participants considered sharing 29.8 percent of false stories in the sample. That figure dropped to 16.1 percent of false stories that had a warning label attached.

However, the researchers also saw the implied truth effect take effect. Readers were willing to share 36.2 percent of the remaining false stories that did not have warning labels, up from 29.8 percent.

"We robustly observe this implied-truth effect, where if false content doesn't have a warning, people believe it more and say they would be more likely to share it," Rand notes.

But when the warning labels on some false stories were complemented with verification labels on some of the true stories, participants were less likely to consider sharing false stories, across the board. In those circumstances, they shared only 13.7 percent of the headlines labeled as false, and just 26.9 percent of the nonlabeled false stories.

"If, in addition to putting warnings on things fact-checkers find to be false, you also put verification panels on things fact-checkers find to be true, then that solves the problem, because there's no longer any ambiguity," Rand says. "If you see a story without a label, you know it simply hasn't been checked."

Policy implications

The findings come with one additional twist that Rand emphasizes, namely, that participants in the survey did not seem to reject warnings on the basis of ideology. They were still likely to change their perceptions of stories with warning or verifications labels, even if discredited news items were "concordant" with their stated political views.

"These results are not consistent with the idea that our reasoning powers are hijacked by our partisanship," Rand says.

Rand notes that, while continued research on the subject is important, the current study suggests a straightforward way that social media platforms can take action to further improve their systems of labeling online news content.

Read more at Science Daily

New tool uses AI to flag fake news for media fact-checkers

A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool could help social media networks and news organizations weed out false stories.

The tool, developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo, uses deep-learning AI algorithms to determine if claims made in posts or stories are supported by other posts and stories on the same subject.

"If they are, great, it's probably a real story," said Alexander Wong, a professor of systems design engineering at Waterloo. "But if most of the other material isn't supportive, it's a strong indication you're dealing with fake news."

Researchers were motivated to develop the tool by the proliferation of online posts and news stories that are fabricated to deceive or mislead readers, typically for political or economic gain.

Their system advances ongoing efforts to develop fully automated technology capable of detecting fake news by achieving 90 per cent accuracy in a key area of research known as stance detection.

Given a claim in one post or story and other posts and stories on the same subject that have been collected for comparison, the system can correctly determine if they support it or not nine out of 10 times.

That is a new benchmark for accuracy by researchers using a large dataset created for a 2017 scientific competition called the Fake News Challenge.

While scientists around the world continue to work towards a fully automated system, the Waterloo technology could be used as a screening tool by human fact-checkers at social media and news organizations.

"It augments their capabilities and flags information that doesn't look quite right for verification," said Wong, a founding member of the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute. "It isn't designed to replace people, but to help them fact-check faster and more reliably."

AI algorithms at the heart of the system were shown tens of thousands of claims paired with stories that either supported or didn't support them. Over time, the system learned to determine support or non-support itself when shown new claim-story pairs.

"We need to empower journalists to uncover truth and keep us informed," said Chris Dulhanty, a graduate student who led the project. "This represents one effort in a larger body of work to mitigate the spread of disinformation."

From Science Daily

Fake news feels less immoral to share when we've seen it before

People who repeatedly encounter a fake news item may feel less and less unethical about sharing it on social media, even when they don't believe the information, research indicates.

In a series of experiments involving more than 2,500 people, Daniel A. Effron, a London Business School associate professor of organizational behavior, and Medha Raj, a PhD student at the University of Southern California, found that seeing a fake headline just once leads individuals to temper their disapproval of the misinformation when they see it a second, third, or fourth time.

The findings, published in Psychological Science, have important implications for policymakers and social media companies trying to curb the spread of misinformation online, Effron says.

"We suggest that efforts to fight misinformation should consider how people judge the morality of spreading it, not just whether they believe it," he says.

Across five experiments, Effron and Raj asked online survey participants to rate how unethical or acceptable they thought it would be to publish a fake headline, and how likely they would be to "like," share, and block or unfollow the person who posted it.

As they expected, the researchers found that participants rated headlines they had seen more than once as less unethical to publish than headlines they were shown for the first time. Participants also said they were more likely to "like" and share a previously seen headline and less likely to block or unfollow the person who posted it. What's more, they did not rate previously seen headline as significantly more accurate than new ones.

"Thus, our main results cannot be explained by a tendency to misremember false headlines as true," the researchers write.

Effron and Raj note that efforts to curtail misinformation typically focus on helping people distinguish fact from fiction. Facebook, for example, has tried informing users when they try to share news that fact-checkers have flagged as false. But such strategies may fail if users feel more comfortable sharing misinformation they know is fake when they have seen it before.

The researchers theorize that repeating misinformation lends it a "ring of truthfulness" that can increase people's tendency to give it a moral pass, regardless of whether they believe it. Merely imagining misinformation as if it were true can have a similar effect. Effron's earlier research shows that people are more likely to excuse a blatant falsehood after imagining how it could have been true if the past had been different.

"The results should be of interest to citizens of contemporary democracies," Effron adds. "Misinformation can stoke political polarization and undermine democracy, so it is important for people to understand when and why it spreads."

Read more at Science Daily