When liars are considered honest.

This article introduces a theoretical model of truth and honesty from a psychological perspective. We examine its application in political discourse and discuss empirical findings distinguishing between conceptions of honesty and their influence on public perception, misinformation dissemination, and the integrity of democracy.

IRMA: the 335-million-word Italian coRpus for studying MisinformAtion.

The dissemination of false information on the internet has received considerable attention over the last decade. Misinformation often spreads faster than mainstream news, thus making manual fact checking inefficient or, at best, labor-intensive. Therefore, there is an increasing need to develop methods for automatic detection of misinformation. Although resources for creating such methods are available in English, other languages are often underrepresented in this effort. With this contribution, we present IRMA, a corpus containing over 600,000 Italian news articles (335+ million tokens) collected from 56 websites classified as 'untrustworthy' by professional factcheckers. The corpus is freely available and comprises a rich set of text- and website-level data, representing a turnkey resource to test hypotheses and develop automatic detection algorithms. It contains texts, titles, and dates (from 2004 to 2022), along with three types of semantic measures (i.e., keywords, topics at three different resolutions, and LIWC lexical features). IRMA also includes domainspecific information such as source type (e.g., political, health, conspiracy, etc.), quality, and higher-level metadata, including several metrics of website incoming traffic that allow to investigate user online behavior. IRMA constitutes the largest corpus of misinformation available today in Italian, making it a valid tool for advancing quantitative research on untrustworthy news detection and ultimately helping limit the spread of misinformation.

From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians.

The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who 'speak their mind' are perceived by segments of the public as authentic and honest even if their statements are unsupported by evidence. By analysing communications by members of the US Congress on Twitter between 2011 and 2022, we show that politicians' conception of honesty has undergone a distinct shift, with authentic belief speaking that may be decoupled from evidence becoming more prominent and more differentiated from explicitly evidence-based fact speaking. We show that for Republicans-but not Democrats-an increase in belief speaking of 10% is associated with a decrease of 12.8 points of quality (NewsGuard scoring system) in the sources shared in a tweet. In contrast, an increase in fact-speaking language is associated with an increase in quality of sources for both parties. Our study is observational and cannot support causal inferences. However, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the current dissemination of misinformation in political discourse is linked to an alternative understanding of truth and honesty that emphasizes invocation of subjective belief at the expense of reliance on evidence.

Social media sharing of low-quality news sources by political elites.

Increased sharing of untrustworthy information on social media platforms is one of the main challenges of our modern information society. Because information disseminated by political elites is known to shape citizen and media discourse, it is particularly important to examine the quality of information shared by politicians. Here, we show that from 2016 onward, members of the Republican Party in the US Congress have been increasingly sharing links to untrustworthy sources. The proportion of untrustworthy information posted by Republicans versus Democrats is diverging at an accelerating rate, and this divergence has worsened since President Biden was elected. This divergence between parties seems to be unique to the United States as it cannot be observed in other western democracies such as Germany and the United Kingdom, where left-right disparities are smaller and have remained largely constant.