Misinformation with Legal Consequences (MisLC): A New Task Towards Harnessing Societal Harm of Misinformation

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Main Authors: Luo, Chu Fei, Shayanfar, Radin, Bhambhoria, Rohan, Dahan, Samuel, Zhu, Xiaodan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Luo, Chu Fei
Shayanfar, Radin
Bhambhoria, Rohan
Dahan, Samuel
Zhu, Xiaodan
author_facet Luo, Chu Fei
Shayanfar, Radin
Bhambhoria, Rohan
Dahan, Samuel
Zhu, Xiaodan
contents Misinformation, defined as false or inaccurate information, can result in significant societal harm when it is spread with malicious or even innocuous intent. The rapid online information exchange necessitates advanced detection mechanisms to mitigate misinformation-induced harm. Existing research, however, has predominantly focused on assessing veracity, overlooking the legal implications and social consequences of misinformation. In this work, we take a novel angle to consolidate the definition of misinformation detection using legal issues as a measurement of societal ramifications, aiming to bring interdisciplinary efforts to tackle misinformation and its consequence. We introduce a new task: Misinformation with Legal Consequence (MisLC), which leverages definitions from a wide range of legal domains covering 4 broader legal topics and 11 fine-grained legal issues, including hate speech, election laws, and privacy regulations. For this task, we advocate a two-step dataset curation approach that utilizes crowd-sourced checkworthiness and expert evaluations of misinformation. We provide insights about the MisLC task through empirical evidence, from the problem definition to experiments and expert involvement. While the latest large language models and retrieval-augmented generation are effective baselines for the task, we find they are still far from replicating expert performance.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_03829
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle Misinformation with Legal Consequences (MisLC): A New Task Towards Harnessing Societal Harm of Misinformation
Luo, Chu Fei
Shayanfar, Radin
Bhambhoria, Rohan
Dahan, Samuel
Zhu, Xiaodan
Computation and Language
Misinformation, defined as false or inaccurate information, can result in significant societal harm when it is spread with malicious or even innocuous intent. The rapid online information exchange necessitates advanced detection mechanisms to mitigate misinformation-induced harm. Existing research, however, has predominantly focused on assessing veracity, overlooking the legal implications and social consequences of misinformation. In this work, we take a novel angle to consolidate the definition of misinformation detection using legal issues as a measurement of societal ramifications, aiming to bring interdisciplinary efforts to tackle misinformation and its consequence. We introduce a new task: Misinformation with Legal Consequence (MisLC), which leverages definitions from a wide range of legal domains covering 4 broader legal topics and 11 fine-grained legal issues, including hate speech, election laws, and privacy regulations. For this task, we advocate a two-step dataset curation approach that utilizes crowd-sourced checkworthiness and expert evaluations of misinformation. We provide insights about the MisLC task through empirical evidence, from the problem definition to experiments and expert involvement. While the latest large language models and retrieval-augmented generation are effective baselines for the task, we find they are still far from replicating expert performance.
title Misinformation with Legal Consequences (MisLC): A New Task Towards Harnessing Societal Harm of Misinformation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03829