Critical Digital Literacy
The promotion of digital literacy combined with critical thinking (SubProject#2) is arguably the most efficient way to tackle “fake news” and disinformation online. It has been proven to work in Finland, where five years after introducing such programs, the country has declared victory in the fight against “fake news”. Inspired by Finland’s example, this sub-project aims at promoting critical digital literacy in Qatar. We plan to achieve this through a general media literacy platform that would teach citizens and residents of Qatar how to recognize “fake news” and propaganda techniques. The platform will have lessons and exploration capabilities. It will feature tools to analyze news, social media posts, or any custom text in Arabic and English, and it would make explicit the propaganda/persuasion techniques of the discussed issues.
The tool will look for persuasion techniques such as appeal to emotions (e.g., fear, prejudices, smears, etc.) as well as logical fallacies (e.g., black & white fallacies, bandwagon, etc.). By interacting with the platform, users will become aware of the ways they can be manipulated by “fake news”, and thus they would be less likely to act based on it and also less likely to share it further, which is critical for limiting the potential impact of organized disinformation campaigns online. We will further study the role of critical digital literacy on people’s resilience to online manipulation and influence, whether legitimate, e.g., in e-commerce, or malicious, e.g., in social engineering and phishing. This literacy will also cover understanding the influence of the algorithms and the designs used in digital media, i.e., we will go beyond the literacy of how to recognize threats and how to respond to them to understand the underlying mechanics of influence and deception online.
It can be a valid argument, typically made by social media companies, that people shall be primarily responsible for managing their traits, weaknesses, worries, stress, and jealousy, whether in physical or online worlds. Generally, self-regulation is expected from users of social media. However, we argue that social media design can become too immersive and, at times, addictive. Hence, we argue that social media shall reduce triggers leading to a loss of control over their usage. Digital addiction is associated with reduced productivity and distracting sleep. Fear of missing out (FoMO) is one manifestation of how users become overly preoccupied with online spaces. We have argued that a thoughtful design process shall equip users with tools to manage it, e.g. creative versions of auto-reply, coloring schemes, and filters. Such a design can benefit those who are highly susceptible to peer pressure and possess low impulse control.
Objectives
To build a high-quality corpus annotated with propaganda and its techniques.
To develop a system for detecting the use of propaganda and its techniques in text in Arabic and English with a focus on Qatar and social media.
To develop an online platform for teaching critical digital literacy and then use the platform to study the role of critical digital literacy on people’s resilience to online manipulation and influence.
Meet Critical Digital Literacy Team members...
FIROJ ALAM
Critical Digital Literacy
WAJDI ZAGHOUANI
GEORGE MIKROS
GIOVANNI DA SAN MARTINO
MARAM HASANAIN
FATEMA AHMAD
ELISA SARTORI
University of Padova
MUAADH NOMAN
Publications
Gurgun, Selin; Cemiloglu, Deniz; Close, Emily Arden; Phalp, Keith; Nakov, Preslav; Ali, Raian
In: Technology in Society, vol. 76, pp. 102444, 2024.
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title = {Why do we not stand up to misinformation? Factors influencing the likelihood of challenging misinformation on social media and the role of demographics},
author = {Selin Gurgun and Deniz Cemiloglu and Emily Arden Close and Keith Phalp and Preslav Nakov and Raian Ali},
year = {2024},
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Gurgun, Selin; Noman, Muaadh; Arden-Close, Emily; Phalp, Keith; Ali, Raian
How Would I Be Perceived If I Challenge Individuals Sharing Misinformation? Exploring Misperceptions in the UK and Arab Samples and the Potential for the Social Norms Approach Proceedings Article
In: International Conference on Persuasive Technology, pp. 133–150, Springer 2024.
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Hasanain, Maram; Ahmed, Fatema; Alam, Firoj
Can GPT-4 Identify Propaganda? Annotation and Detection of Propaganda Spans in News Articles Journal Article
In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.17478, 2024.
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url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.17478.pdf},
year = {2024},
date = {2024-01-01},
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journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.17478},
abstract = {The use of propaganda has spiked on mainstream and social media, aiming to manipulate or mislead users. While efforts to automatically detect propaganda techniques in textual, visual, or multimodal content have increased, most of them primarily focus on English content. The majority of the recent initiatives targeting medium to low-resource languages produced relatively small annotated datasets, with a skewed distribution, posing challenges for the development of sophisticated propaganda detection models. To address this challenge, we carefully develop the largest propaganda dataset to date, ArPro, comprised of 8K paragraphs from newspaper articles, labeled at the text span level following a taxonomy of 23 propagandistic techniques. Furthermore, our work offers the first attempt to understand the performance of large language models (LLMs), using GPT-4, for fine-grained propaganda detection from text. Results showed that GPT-4's performance degrades as the task moves from simply classifying a paragraph as propagandistic or not, to the fine-grained task of detecting propaganda techniques and their manifestation in text. Compared to models fine-tuned on the dataset for propaganda detection at different classification granularities, GPT-4 is still far behind. Finally, we evaluate GPT-4 on a dataset consisting of six other languages for span detection, and results suggest that the model struggles with the task across languages. Our dataset and resources will be released to the community.},
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Hasanain, Maram; El-Shangiti, Ahmed; Nandi, Rabindra Nath; Nakov, Preslav; Alam, Firoj
QCRI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques Detection Using Multilingual Models Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), pp. 1237–1244, Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, 2023.
@inproceedings{hasanain-etal-2023-qcri,
title = {QCRI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques Detection Using Multilingual Models},
author = {Maram Hasanain and Ahmed El-Shangiti and Rabindra Nath Nandi and Preslav Nakov and Firoj Alam},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.172},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2023.semeval-1.172},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-07-01},
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booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)},
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publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
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abstract = {Misinformation spreading in mainstream and social media has been misleading users in different ways. Manual detection and verification efforts by journalists and fact-checkers can no longer cope with the great scale and quick spread of misleading information. This motivated research and industry efforts to develop systems for analyzing and verifying news spreading online. The SemEval-2023 Task 3 is an attempt to address several subtasks under this overarching problem, targeting writing techniques used in news articles to affect readers' opinions. The task addressed three subtasks with six languages, in addition to three ``surprise'' test languages, resulting in 27 different test setups. This paper describes our participating system to this task. Our team is one of the 6 teams that successfully submitted runs for all setups. The official results show that our system is ranked among the top 3 systems for 10 out of the 27 setups.},
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Galassi, Andrea; Ruggeri, Federico; Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto; Alam, Firoj; Caselli, Tommaso; Kutlu, Mucahid; Struss, Julia Maria; Antici, Francesco; Hasanain, Maram; Köhler, Juliane; Korre, Katerina; Leistra, Folkert; Muti, Arianna; Siegel, Melanie; Deniz, Turkmen. Mehmet; Wiegand, Michael; Zaghouani, Wajdi
Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! Lab Task 2 on Subjectivity in News Articles Proceedings Article
In: Aliannejadi, Mohammad; Faggioli, Guglielmo; Ferro, Nicola; Vlachos,; Michalis, (Ed.): Working Notes of CLEF 2023–Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2023.
@inproceedings{clef-checkthat:2023:task2,
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author = {Andrea Galassi and Federico Ruggeri and Alberto Barrón-Cedeño and Firoj Alam and Tommaso Caselli and Mucahid Kutlu and Julia Maria Struss and Francesco Antici and Maram Hasanain and Juliane Köhler and Katerina Korre and Folkert Leistra and Arianna Muti and Melanie Siegel and Turkmen. Mehmet Deniz and Michael Wiegand and Wajdi Zaghouani},
editor = {Mohammad Aliannejadi and Guglielmo Faggioli and Nicola Ferro and Vlachos and Michalis},
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Martino, Giovanni Da San; Alam, Firoj; Hasanain, Maram; Nandi, Rabindra Nath; Azizov, Dilshod; Nakov, Preslav
Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! Lab Task 3 on Political Bias of News Articles and News Media Proceedings Article
In: Aliannejadi, Mohammad; Faggioli, Guglielmo; Ferro, Nicola; Vlachos,; Michalis, (Ed.): Working Notes of CLEF 2023–Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2023.
@inproceedings{clef-checkthat:2023:task3,
title = {Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! Lab Task 3 on Political Bias of News Articles and News Media},
author = {Giovanni Da San Martino and Firoj Alam and Maram Hasanain and Rabindra Nath Nandi and Dilshod Azizov and Preslav Nakov},
editor = {Mohammad Aliannejadi and Guglielmo Faggioli and Nicola Ferro and Vlachos and Michalis},
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Nakov, Preslav; Alam, Firoj; Martino, Giovanni Da San; Hasanain, Maram; Nandi, Rabindra Nath; Azizov, Dilshod; Panayotov, Panayot
Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! Lab Task 4 on Factuality of Reporting of News Media Proceedings Article
In: Aliannejadi, Mohammad; Faggioli, Guglielmo; Ferro, Nicola; Vlachos,; Michalis, (Ed.): Working Notes of CLEF 2023–Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2023.
@inproceedings{clef-checkthat:2023:task4,
title = {Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! Lab Task 4 on Factuality of Reporting of News Media},
author = {Preslav Nakov and Firoj Alam and Giovanni Da San Martino and Maram Hasanain and Rabindra Nath Nandi and Dilshod Azizov and Panayot Panayotov},
editor = {Mohammad Aliannejadi and Guglielmo Faggioli and Nicola Ferro and Vlachos and Michalis},
year = {2023},
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Alam, Firoj; Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto; Cheema, Gullal S.; Hakimov, Sherzod; Hasanain, Maram; Li, Chengkai; M’ıguez, Rubén; Mubarak, Hamdy; Shahi, Gautam Kishore; Zaghouani, Wajdi; Nakov, Preslav
Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! Lab Task 1 on Check-Worthiness in Multimodal and Multigenre Content Proceedings Article
In: Aliannejadi, Mohammad; Faggioli, Guglielmo; Ferro, Nicola; Vlachos,; Michalis, (Ed.): Working Notes of CLEF 2023–Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2023.
@inproceedings{clef-checkthat:2023:task1,
title = {Overview of the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! Lab Task 1 on Check-Worthiness in Multimodal and Multigenre Content},
author = {Firoj Alam and Alberto Barrón-Cedeño and Gullal S. Cheema and Sherzod Hakimov and Maram Hasanain and Chengkai Li and Rubén M'ıguez and Hamdy Mubarak and Gautam Kishore Shahi and Wajdi Zaghouani and Preslav Nakov},
editor = {Mohammad Aliannejadi and Guglielmo Faggioli and Nicola Ferro and Vlachos and Michalis},
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Noman, Muaadh; Gurgun, Selin; Phalp, Keith; Nakov, Preslav; Ali, Raian
Challenging others when posting misinformation: a UK vs. Arab cross-cultural comparison on the perception of negative consequences and injunctive norms Journal Article
In: Behaviour & Information Technology, pp. 1–21, 2023.
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Hasanain, Maram; Ahmed, Fatema; Alam, Firoj
Large Language Models for Propaganda Span Annotation Journal Article
In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.09812, 2023.
@article{hasanain2023large,
title = {Large Language Models for Propaganda Span Annotation},
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Abdelali, Ahmed; Mubarak, Hamdy; Chowdhury, Shammur Absar; Hasanain, Maram; Mousi, Basel; Boughorbel, Sabri; Kheir, Yassine El; Izham, Daniel; Dalvi, Fahim; Hawasly, Majd; others,
Benchmarking arabic ai with large language models Journal Article
In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.14982, 2023.
@article{abdelali2023benchmarking,
title = {Benchmarking arabic ai with large language models},
author = {Ahmed Abdelali and Hamdy Mubarak and Shammur Absar Chowdhury and Maram Hasanain and Basel Mousi and Sabri Boughorbel and Yassine El Kheir and Daniel Izham and Fahim Dalvi and Majd Hawasly and others},
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Dalvi, Fahim; Hasanain, Maram; Boughorbel, Sabri; Mousi, Basel; Abdaljalil, Samir; Nazar, Nizi; Abdelali, Ahmed; Chowdhury, Shammur Absar; Mubarak, Hamdy; Ali, Ahmed; others,
LLMeBench: A Flexible Framework for Accelerating LLMs Benchmarking Journal Article
In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.04945, 2023.
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Noman, Muaadh; Gurgun, Selin; Phalp, Keith; Nakov, Preslav; Ali, Raian
In: Behaviour & Information Technology, pp. 1–21, 2023.
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Gurgun, Selin; Cemiloglu, Deniz; Arden-Close, Emily; Phalp, Keith; Ali, Raian; Nakov, Preslav
Challenging Misinformation on Social Media: Users’ Perceptions and Misperceptions and Their Impact on the Likelihood to Challenge Journal Article
In: Available at SSRN 4600006, 0000.
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