Toward Mitigating Misinformation and Social Media Manipulation in LLM Era

The pervasive abuse of misinformation to influence public opinion on social media has become increasingly evident in various domains, encompassing politics, as seen in presidential elections, and healthcare, most notably during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. This threat has grown in severity as the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) empowers manipulators to generate highly convincing deceptive content with greater efficiency. Furthermore, the recent strides in chatbots integrated with LLMs, such as ChatGPT, have enabled the creation of human-like interactive social bots, posing a significant challenge to both human users and the social-bot-detection systems of social media platforms.These challenges motivate researchers to develop algorithms to mitigate misinformation and social media manipulations. This tutorial introduces the advanced machine learning researches that are helpful for this goal, including (1) detection of social manipulators, (2) learning causal models of misinformation and social manipulation, and (3) LLM-generated misinformation detection. In addition, we also present possible future directions.