As AI-generated political disinformation proliferates, warning labels have emerged as a defining regulatory intervention. Drawing on Third-Person Effect (TPE) theory, this study investigates how exposure to warning labels on AI-generated disinformation shapes perceptual effects and behavioral consequences during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. A national online survey in the U.S. (N = 2,373) examined the impact of warning labels attached to AI-generated political disinformation targeting both Democratic and Republican candidates. Results show that exposure to the warning labels significantly increased perceived effects on both oneself and the general public. These findings support the generalizability of TPE in politically charged environments and highlight its relevance in the domain of AI-generated disinformation. Regarding behavioral outcomes, perceived effects of warning labels on others predict support for restrictive policies and engagement in preventive actions. In contrast, perceived effects on oneself drive individual-level preventive behaviors, such as AI literacy enhancement, but do not lead to greater support for regulatory action. In addition, the perceived social desirability of warning labels was found to moderate these outcomes, particularly for anti-Republican disinformation, amplifying perceived influence among those endorsing the intervention. These findings advance TPE scholarship by highlighting the complex interplay between perception, partisanship, and regulatory attitudes, offering insights for the governance of AI-mediated information environments and the design of communication interventions for safeguarding information integrity.

This study examines the predictors and behavioral outcomes of hostile media perception of campus protest. Data from a national online survey of 1010 respondents during the 2024 American campus protests show that hostile media perception fueled strategic social media activity - strengthening in-group bonds and disengaging from opponents. Additionally, conspiracy beliefs moderated these effects, intensifying or reducing the impact of hostile media perception on polarized social media behavior, depending on belief strength.

News organizations face mounting challenges in the social media era. This study, informed by the Normalization Process Theory, examines how social media metrics are embedded into the news production routines across Greater China, mapping journalists' coherence (making sense of), cognitive participation (engaging with), collective action (adapting workflows for), and reflexive monitoring (evaluating) of traffic-driven practices. Semi-structured interviews with 19 news professionals reveal that while reporters uphold traditional standards like fairness and balance, they actively normalize social media affordances by innovating formats and content structures to align platform demands with institutional constraints. Key strategies include focusing on apolitical stories in order to align with official propaganda or avoid potential backlash, repackaging news with clickbait elements, and adopting shorter, interactive layouts specifically tailored for digital platforms. These practices enable pragmatic survival but also risk account shutdowns, revealing ongoing normalization struggles as technology and journalism negotiate their divergent logics.

This study examines how government responses to citizen inquiries on governmental social media enhance policy communication campaigns for observers. Drawing upon theories of masspersonal communication and artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated communication, it investigates the effects of replying agents, inquiry tones, and institutional trust on observers' perceptions of the campaigner, campaign message, and communicated policy. A pre-registered four (replying agents: AI-powered bot editor, human editor, AI-human tandem editor, and control) x two (inquiry tones: friendly vs. frustrated) between-subjects online survey experiment was conducted in Hong Kong (N = 1458), focusing on a recent waterpipe smoking control policy. Results revealed that audiences viewed the institution more favorably when friendly inquiries were addressed. AI-human collaborative responses enhanced policy communication effectiveness. Institutional trust moderated the impact of both inquiry tones and replying agents. These findings emphasize that beyond technological factors, nurturing citizens' confidence in government institutions is crucial for effective AI-mediated government-citizen communication and its role in policy communication. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(AI)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic),(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic),(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(N = 1,458)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic) ((sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic),(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic),(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic),(sic)(sic)(sic))(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)((sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)-(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic). Este estudio examina c & oacute;mo las respuestas del gobierno a las consultas ciudadanas en las redes sociales gubernamentales mejoran las campa & ntilde;as de comunicaci & oacute;n de pol & iacute;ticas para los observadores. Bas & aacute;ndose en las teor & iacute;as de la comunicaci & oacute;n personal masiva y la comunicaci & oacute;n mediada por la Inteligencia Artificial (IA), investiga los efectos de los agentes que responden, los tonos de las consultas y la confianza institucional en las percepciones de los observadores sobre el activista, el mensaje de la campa & ntilde;a y la pol & iacute;tica comunicada. Se llev & oacute; a cabo un experimento de encuesta en l & iacute;nea entre sujetos preinscritos de cuatro (agentes que responden: editor bot impulsado por IA, editor humano, editor t & aacute;ndem IA-humano y control) x dos (tonos de consulta: amistosos vs. frustrados) en Hong Kong (N = 1.458), centr & aacute;ndose en una pol & iacute;tica reciente de control del tabaquismo en pipa de agua. Los resultados revelaron que las audiencias ve & iacute;an a la instituci & oacute;n de manera m & aacute;s favorable cuando se abordaban consultas amistosas. Las respuestas colaborativas de IA-humanos mejoraron la eficacia de la comunicaci & oacute;n de pol & iacute;ticas. La confianza institucional moder & oacute; el impacto tanto de los tonos de consulta como de los agentes que respondieron. Estos hallazgos enfatizan que, m & aacute;s all & aacute; de los factores tecnol & oacute;gicos, fomentar la confianza de los ciudadanos en las instituciones gubernamentales es crucial para una comunicaci & oacute;n efectiva entre el gobierno y los ciudadanos mediada por IA y su papel en la comunicaci & oacute;n de pol & iacute;ticas.

Emotionality is a well-established strategy for boosting audience engagement on social media. While fact-checking is positioned to provide objective information, fact-checking posts on social media often involve heightened emotionality. How much emotionality is present and how emotionality influences audience engagement and public sentiment toward fact-checked targets remain largely understudied. Informed by social psychological frameworks explicating message-level factors influencing public engagement and sentiment, the present study examines emotionality in 49,270 fact-checking posts created by 10 United States fact-checking organizations on Facebook from 2017 to 2022. Results showed that emotionality in fact-checking posts significantly increased by 13.5% over the years. Editorial fact-checkers (e.g., Washington Post) used higher levels of emotionality than independent fact-checkers (e.g., snopes.com). Emotionality positively indicated public engagement as predicted. However, in both fact-checked true and false information, emotionality was negatively associated with the public’s sentiment toward fact-checked targets, suggesting a potential spillover effect on stories verified to be true. This study reveals that emotionality in fact-checking posts boosts social media engagement yet with the potential of compromising fact-checking effectiveness.

This study investigates the effectiveness of public health institutions’ misinformation debunking on social media by examining the impact of message features—social media intermediaries, message framing, and social cues—alongside the moderating roles of political cynicism and conspiracy beliefs. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and the United States (total N = 2,769). Results show that sponsored messages outperformed AI recommendations. Causal framing would backfire for the cynics (in both Hong Kong and the Netherlands). In the United States, peer-shared messages enhanced source and message evaluations among those with higher conspiracy beliefs.

Social media offers individuals sophisticated communicative tactics to manage politically motivated interpersonal disagreement. This study investigates an underexplored behavior in this context: retroactive self-censorship, which includes actions such as deleting previously published posts or untagging oneself from others' timelines or photos for political reasons. These behaviors are conceptualized as a form of selective self-presentation within the framework of the spiral of silence, triggered by interpersonal political disagreement. The study also examines the role of discussion network heterogeneity in shaping this process, hypothesizing that higher levels of heterogeneity make disagreement-induced self-censorship more likely. A two-wave online panel survey was implemented in Hong Kong, one of the most politically polarized societies globally. Findings reveal a sequence in which political expression on social media leads to disagreement, which then prompts ad hoc self-censorship. The mediation effect of opinion expression on self-censorship via disagreement becomes stronger as network heterogeneity increases from low to moderate levels, but this pattern does not extend to highly heterogeneous networks. The results suggest that ad hoc content manipulation on social media would aggravate political polarization by making people's networks more homogeneous. The democratic implications of managing political impressions in a politically polarized digital public sphere are discussed.

Although journalists’ social media sourcing can empower non-elite sources and diversify public discussions, counterarguments maintain that social media sourcing relies on a small group of elites and reinforces social division. To contribute to that debate, we examined how health journalists from the mainstream news organizations in the U.S. used Twitter’s @mention for sourcing during the first three months of the COVID-19 outbreak. Using a sample of public Twitter posts published by the journalists, we formed co-@mentioned networks (i.e., two sources were connected if @mentioned in the same post) to examine the structure of the networks and identify important sourcing informants. Among the results, elite sources (e.g., health journalists and health experts in the public sector) and influential users (i.e., verified users with a large number of followers and who post frequently) dominated the sourcing repertoire. Moreover, the networks were fragmented because the sources were clustered into several close-knit subgroups. Analyzing exponential random graph models to examine the formation mechanism of the networks revealed that, as the pandemic’s severity increased, influential users played a more salient role in the sourcing repertoire, and a homogeneous cluster consisting of journalists and news organizations emerged.

As an emerging audience engagement channel for news organizations, news chatbots can interact with and attract audiences in a conversational manner. The present study applies the comparative digital journalism frameworks and examines how society-level factors—such as media systems and information communication technology’s development—explain chatbot implementation on social media platforms. We surveyed 365 news organizations across 38 countries or regions and inspected their Facebook Messenger accounts with a mixed-methods approach. We found that less than half of the surveyed news organizations implemented Messenger, and only 67 Messengers were responsive—i.e. able to produce at least one response. We used the walkthrough method to interact with the Messengers with 22 pre-defined search queries on information seeking and navigation related to COVID-19. Then we used qualitative content analysis to examine the contents generated by the Messengers. Some Messengers are out of service or could only provide limited services (e.g. generating templated responses or closed-ended options). The Messengers in different news organizations demonstrated great variations in their capacity to understand the queries and interact with the audiences and reparative strategies to handle search failure. We proposed a three-category typology of news chatbots and offered practical and constructive suggestions for news organizations.

The meta-mirror we designed integrates four functions: linear-to-linear polarization conversion, linear-to-circular polarization conversion, linear dichroism and circular dichroism, and can be adjusted by temperature and voltage.

Scams are fraudulent activities aiming to deceive individuals into relinquishing money, property, or rights, and they have proliferated in the context of widespread misinformation and disinformation. In this paper, we propose strategies and a research plan to address key questions about the exploitation of newcommunication technologies by scammers, the prevalence and nature of different scam types, and the language characteristics and appeals used in scamming content. We aim to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of scams and identify factors that contribute to their persuasiveness. Additionally, we propose the use of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, physiological measures, and brain mapping, to detect, investigate, and combat scams. The findings will inform the creation of educational resources and interventions, including databases, short videos, an online repository for crowdsourcing scam cases, community training programs, and online courses aimed at improving scam detection and prevention. By leveraging interdisciplinary expertise, this study seeks to develop a multifaceted approach to mitigate the impact of scams and foster a more informed and resilient public.

Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), as flexible and stretchable materials, have attracted considerable attention in the field of novel flexible electronics due to their excellent mechanical, optical, and electronic properties. Among the various TMD materials, atomically thin MoS2has become the most widely used material due to its advantageous properties, such as its adjustable bandgap, excellent performance, and ease of preparation. In this work, we demonstrated the practicality of a stacked wafer-scale two-layer MoS2film obtained by transferring multiple single-layer films grown using chemical vapor deposition. The MoS2field-effect transistor cell had a top-gated device structure with a (PI) film as the substrate, which exhibited a high on/off ratio (108), large average mobility (∼8.56 cm2V-1s-1), and exceptional uniformity. Furthermore, a range of flexible integrated logic devices, including inverters, NOR gates, and NAND gates, were successfully implemented via traditional lithography. These results highlight the immense potential of TMD materials, particularly MoS2, in enabling advanced flexible electronic and optoelectronic devices, which pave the way for transformative applications in future-generation electronics.

For a public health campaign to succeed, the public sector is expected to debunk the misinformation transparently and vividly and guide the citizens. The present study focuses on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in Hong Kong, a non-Western society with a developed economy and sufficient vaccine supply but high vaccine hesitancy. Inspired by the Health Belief Model (HBM) and research on source transparency and the use of visuals in the debunking, the present study examines the COVID-19 vaccine misinformation debunking messages published by the official social media and online channels of the public sector of Hong Kong (n = 126) over 18 months (1 November 2020 to 20 April 2022) during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. Results showed that the most frequently occurring misinformation themes were misleading claims about the risks and side effects of vaccination, followed by (non-)effectiveness of the vaccines and the (un)-necessity of vaccination. Among the HBM constructs, barriers and benefits of vaccination were mentioned the most, while self-efficacy was the least addressed. Compared with the early stage of the vaccination campaign, an increasing number of posts contained susceptibility, severity or cues to action. Most debunking statements did not disclose any external sources. The public sector actively used illustrations, with affective illustrations outnumbering cognitive ones. Suggestions for improving the quality of misinformation debunking during public health campaigns are discussed.

In 2013, Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava resolved the famous Kadison-Singer conjecture. It states that for $n$ independent random vectors $v_1,\cdots, v_n$ that have expected squared norm bounded by $\epsilon$ and are in the isotropic position in expectation, there is a positive probability that the determinant polynomial $\det(xI - \sum_{i=1}^n v_iv_i^\top)$ has roots bounded by $(1 + \sqrt{\epsilon})^2$. An interpretation of the Kadison-Singer theorem is that we can always find a partition of the vectors $v_1,\cdots,v_n$ into two sets with a low discrepancy in terms of the spectral norm (in other words, rely on the determinant polynomial). In this paper, we provide two results for a broader class of polynomials, the hyperbolic polynomials. Furthermore, our results are in two generalized settings: $\bullet$ The first one shows that the Kadison-Singer result requires a weaker assumption that the vectors have a bounded sum of hyperbolic norms. $\bullet$ The second one relaxes the Kadison-Singer result's distribution assumption to the Strongly Rayleigh distribution. To the best of our knowledge, the previous results only support determinant polynomials [Anari and Oveis Gharan'14, Kyng, Luh and Song'20]. It is unclear whether they can be generalized to a broader class of polynomials. In addition, we also provide a sub-exponential time algorithm for constructing our results.

The simplex method for linear programming is known to be highly efficient in practice, and understanding its performance from a theoretical perspective is an active research topic. The framework of smoothed analysis, first introduced by Spielman and Teng (JACM ’04) for this purpose, defines the smoothed complexity of solving a linear program with d variables and n constraints as the expected running time when Gaussian noise of variance σ 2 is added to the LP data. We prove that the smoothed complexity of the simplex method is O (σ −3/2 d 13/4 log 7/4 n ), improving the dependence on 1/σ compared to the previous bound of O (σ −2 d 2 √log n ). We accomplish this through a new analysis of the shadow bound , key to earlier analyses as well. Illustrating the power of our new method, we use our method to prove a nearly tight upper bound on the smoothed complexity of two-dimensional polygons.

An intriguing visible-light-induced strategy has been established for the P-H insertion reaction between acylsilanes and H-phosphorus oxides that, upon a subsequent acidic process, deliver a wide variety of α-hydroxyphosphorus oxides in good yields (up to 93% yield). The metal-free protocol represents a unique example of P-H insertion for C-P bond formation through in situ generation of siloxycarbenes. This methodology features the advantages of operational simplicity, mild conditions, broad substrate scope, and column free in gram-scale synthesis.

Memristive devices have attracted significant attention due to their downscaling potential, low power operation, and fast switching performance. Their inherent properties make them suitable for emerging applications such as neuromorphic computing, in-memory computing, and reservoir computing. However, the different applications demand either volatile or nonvolatile operation. In this study, we demonstrate how compliance current and specific material choices can be used to control the volatility and nonvolatility of memristive devices. Especially, by mixing different materials in the active electrode, we gain additional design parameters that allow us to tune the devices for different applications. We found that alloying Ag with Sn stabilizes the nonvolatile retention regime in a reproducible manner. Additionally, our alloying approach improves the reliability, endurance, and uniformity of the devices. We attribute these advances to stabilization of the filament inside the switching medium by the inclusion of Sn in the filament structure. These advantageous properties of alloying were found by investigating a choice of six electrode materials (Ag, Cu, AgCu-1, AgCu-2, AgSn-1, AgSn-2) and three switching layers (SiO2, Al2O3, HfO2).

The present research aims to extend the literature on the effects of interpersonal political disagreement on political expression on social media. It investigates how disagreement-motivated information repertoire filtration and discussion network heterogeneity play a role in the disagreement-expression nexus. A two-wave online panel survey (n = 791) implemented in Hong Kong finds that encountering disagreement during political conversations is associated with filtering the information repertoire. While information repertoire filtration itself may not lead to political expression, political disagreement influenced political expression via information repertoire filtration, and this effect was stronger when network heterogeneity was low. The result indicates that politically motivated selectivity makes already-homogeneous online networks even more fragmented. The present study enriches the literature regarding how digitally mediated disconnectivity creates a personalized, homogeneous private sphere during interpersonal political communication, which may fail to nurture an open and inclusive society.

Metasurfaces have shown their versatile capabilities in light-field shaping. To further pursue dense integration and miniaturization in photonics, a combination of multiple diversified functionalities into a metasurface is a promising solution. Recent bifunctional metasurfaces have relied on meta-atom superposition and tunable material introduction. The former supports simultaneous multi-functions, while the latter provides flexible adjustment. To achieve simultaneous and tunable multi-functions using a simple structure, based on a split-ring resonator metasurface with the linear polarization modulation function, here, we additionally introduced resonance to induce anti-symmetric polarization absorption for circular polarization modulation. As a proof-of-concept, we propose a bifunctional THz metasurface that combines linear polarization conversion and circular dichroism for polarization control and detection applications. Moreover, by changing the Fermi levels of graphene, both the frequency ranges of linear polarization conversion and circular dichroism can be adjusted. This work provides a reference to photonics integration related to polarization engineering and other distinct functionalities.