When GenAI Meets Fake News: Understanding Image Cascade Dynamics on Reddit
This research addresses the challenge of moderating synthetic and misleading visual content online, which is an incremental advance as it extends prior work from textual to visual misinformation.
The study tackled the problem of misinformation and AI-generated images spreading on social media by analyzing their propagation through repost cascades on Reddit, achieving high prediction accuracy for virality with AUC scores of 0.83 for immediate spread and 0.998 for long-term spread.
AI-generated content and misinformation are increasingly prevalent on social networks. While prior research primarily examined textual misinformation, fewer studies have focused on visual content's role in virality. In this work, we present the first large-scale analysis of how misinformation and AI-generated images propagate through repost cascades across five ideologically diverse Reddit communities. By integrating textual sentiment, visual attributes, and diffusion metrics (e.g., time-to-first repost, community reach), our framework accurately predicts both immediate post-level virality (AUC=0.83) and long-term cascade-level spread (AUC=0.998). These findings offer essential insights for moderating synthetic and misleading visual content online.