# Datavoidant: An AI System for Addressing Political Data Voids on Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13594/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 152 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Detection and Resolution of Rumours in Social Media: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00656/) (2017)
- [Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11427/) (2021)
- [TwiBot-20: A Comprehensive Twitter Bot Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13088/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Disinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12541/) (2021)
- [BotRGCN: Twitter Bot Detection with Relational Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13092/) (2021)
- [Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00086/) (2017)
- [SATAR: A Self-supervised Approach to Twitter Account Representation Learning and its Application in Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13089/) (2021)
- [A Topic-Agnostic Approach for Identifying Fake News Pages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00957/) (2019)
- [Perils and Challenges of Social Media and Election Manipulation Analysis: The 2018 US Midterms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00043/) (2019)
- [Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07993/) (2021)
- [Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.07109/) (2015)
- [Supporting the use of user generated content in journalistic practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.06491/) (2017)
- [Insight into Insiders and IT: A Survey of Insider Threat Taxonomies, Analysis, Modeling, and Countermeasures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01612/) (2018)
- [Mobilizing the Trump Train: Understanding Collective Action in a Political Trolling Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00429/) (2018)
- [Fighting Disaster Misinformation in Latin America: The #19S Mexican Earthquake Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05848/) (2020)
- [The Challenges of Crowd Workers in Rural and Urban America](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15211/) (2020)
- [Anti-Latinx Computational Propaganda in the United States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10736/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08283/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness -- Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12558/) (2023)
- [The Impact of Generative AI Coding Assistants on Developers Who Are Visually Impaired](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16491/) (2025)
- [Inclusive Portraits: Race-Aware Human-in-the-Loop Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03567/) (2023)
- [Design and analysis of tweet-based election models for the 2021 Mexican legislative election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00626/) (2023)
- [Collective Narrative Grounding: Community-Coordinated Data Contributions to Improve Local AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04201/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The limited information (data voids) on political topics relevant to underrepresented communities has facilitated the spread of disinformation. Independent journalists who combat disinformation in underrepresented communities have reported feeling overwhelmed because they lack the tools necessary to make sense of the information they monitor and address the data voids. In this paper, we present a system to identify and address political data voids within underrepresented communities. Armed with an interview study, indicating that the independent news media has the potential to address them, we designed an intelligent collaborative system, called Datavoidant. Datavoidant uses state-of-the-art machine learning models and introduces a novel design space to provide independent journalists with a collective understanding of data voids to facilitate generating content to cover the voids. We performed a user interface evaluation with independent news media journalists (N=22). These journalists reported that Datavoidant's features allowed them to more rapidly while easily having a sense of what was taking place in the information ecosystem to address the data voids. They also reported feeling more confident about the content they created and the unique perspectives they had proposed to cover the voids. We conclude by discussing how Datavoidant enables a new design space wherein individuals can collaborate to make sense of their information ecosystem and actively devise strategies to prevent disinformation.