Preface - Special Issue on Misinformation on the Web

Abstract

Misinformation threatens democracy, economics, and society at a global scale. For the past few years, there has been a rapid rise in the use of different forms of misinformation such as rumours, spam reviews, conspiracy theories, social bots, and manipulative campaigns. While the emergence of misinformation has quickly evolved into a worldwide phenomenon, a vast effort is under way that attempts to understand this phenomenon. However, most of these efforts have focused only on reducing the problem to a detection task. Unfortunately, detection techniques do not necessarily help to understand the characteristics of misinformation in depth. There is a need to investigate misinformation from a variety of different perspectives.