> Most research to date focuses on aiding criminal investigations in cases of sex trafficking

Can't say this is all too surprising.

> but more work is needed to support other anti-trafficking activities like supporting survivors, adequately address labor trafficking, and support more diverse survivor populations including transgender and nonbinary individuals.

Unsure as to how AI will solve any of these problems.

Then that seems like a poor study design by the authors that they cannot release essentially all of the data that they obtained, but that why it is in this journal compared to others.

Not at all.

I just think the authors should be sharing more data (including sources) than was released in this paper.

That is exactly what I said.

> But all the people who shared X is an identifiable group?

I guess if the goal was to understand why they posted misinformation, and then see what the reaction would be to presenting the user with information that is the case.

> And also, not enough folks share the same story to make a study.

I've certainly seen articles (with misinformation) posted hundreds of times (the 'other discussion' page is quite helpful at finding that). I bet you could find at least 21 individuals for that (since that was the sample size here).

> This study started with false stories and then found those who were sharing those false stories. As

So the study went: Snopes -> Sources on Snopes containing misinformation -> Searching Reddit for those stories. That is exactly what I said before.

Instead, you wrote:

> This study started with false stories and then found those who were sharing those false stories

Which makes it seem that it went:

Find false stories -> Search Reddit for false stories

Which completely misses the snopes part.

> I've found when there's not enough information Snopes is very good at pointing out there's not enough information. It sounds like you disagree with that?

Sure, Snopes can provide decent information on a topic, but making a blanket statement of that always been the case has not been my experience utilizing them. Therefore, as the authors do not provide the actual Snopes sources, no, I cannot make the conclusion that the individual stories on Snopes sufficiently explained the topic.

> Do you not trust the OP who said "the specific stories in the study were not borderline—they were provably wrong"?

I believe the authors should provide the stories that were shared, instead for providing vague snippets for many of them (while some others were certainly false). A potential solution, which I mentioned before, would instead be conducting interviews on individuals who shared the same provably false story (for example, vaccine misinformation).

> This study did not see a story and then go to Snopes to find out if the story was true or not. This study started with false stories and then found those who were sharing those false stories.

That certainly doesn't seem like the best way to describe how the research was conducted, this (directly from the methods) seems much better:

> We used the Reddit API to find accounts who created subreddit posts that contained these links from Snopes fact-check articles

> As one of the authors have already said in these comments, "the specific stories in the study were not borderline—they were provably wrong."

Considering the lack of information provided by the authors of the study regarding what the stories are...it seems quite odd. While some are certainly bs just based of the few words mentioned in the paper, for quite a few of them, that is certainly not the case.

> You're saying you think Snopes is wrong to label at least some of those stories as fact-checked to be found false?

Some of them, not at all- they are clearly false. Not enough information is provided from quite a few of them to actually determine what the story even is.

> There are a few generalized descriptions of the stories in the paper.

Ah, I found it buried within some of the sections - though, not really enough information is provided for many of the descriptions to actually determine the validity of the story. May be better to focus on individuals who all posted the same, factually incorrect, story?

On another note, which I think is important to mention, I'd be quite hesitant to trust the validity of the demographic information in the study - as we all know, many misrepresent who they are on this platform.

Would be nice to know what the stories they posted were.

The "zero-COVID" policy really seems to be hurting China's growth.

Wondering if they will revert to something else in the near future.

I guess I'll answer it, and not surprisingly, the answer is the spike protein. I wonder why.

> BQ.1* is a sublineage of BA.5, which carries spike mutations in some key antigenic sites, including K444T and N460K. In addition to these mutations, the sublineage BQ.1.1 carries an additional spike mutation in a key antigenic site (i.e. R346T).

https://www.who.int/news/item/27-10-2022-tag-ve-statement-on-omicron-sublineages-bq.1-and-xbb

Even comparing Omicron (BA.5) to the current variants (BQ.1 and BQ.1.1), where are the mutations occurring?

Take a look at the original SARS-CoV-2 and the Omicron variant, where are most of the mutations?

No shocker since most vaccines target the spike protein, there are more mutations in the spike protein to get around the protection offered from the vaccines.

Makes sense.

The other options were from South Korea and potentially France.

Let's hope other European countries do the same in the future.