Misinformation is not just a collection of lies that pop up on your screen; it is a living, breathing thing that feeds on our emotions, our fears, and our deepest hopes. It knows exactly when we are angry, when we are grieving, or when we are feeling helpless, and it uses those moments to spread faster than truth ever could. Over the past week, a particularly toxic batch of fake stories has been making the rounds across social media, touching on everything from protests in London and Paris to executions in Saudi Arabia and religious tensions in Bangladesh. These are…

To understand how well an automatic system can spot discourse derailment—the moment when a conversation stops being a conversation and slides off the rails—the researchers built two reference points. The first was a deliberately simple baseline based on sentiment analysis, a tool that measures how positive, negative, or emotionally charged a piece of writing is. Sentiment analysis is a natural starting point because it has been used to detect fake news and other forms of problematic online content. The idea was to see whether emotional tone alone could predict whether a reply derails a discussion. It could not, at least…