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The study aims to investigate the predictors of engaging in combat against the spread of misinformation and disinformation online, and of actively sharing disinformation by users. The study advances an understanding of user active engagement with disinformation as political participation, especially linked to violent activism, in alignment with the view of disinformation as political weapon.

A survey of 502 Israeli internet users inquired into respondents' political participation, trust and orientation, definitions and perceptions of “Fake News,” and previous engagement in sharing misinformation disinformation items, combating or intention to combat against the spread of disinformation.

In addition to identifying predictors for each practice, the findings indicate that sharing and combating against disinformation are closely linked. They are also all directly linked to political participation of various kinds. Most interestingly, working for a political party significantly correlates with knowingly sharing disinformation items, and participating in illegal or violent political activities significantly correlates with knowingly sharing and actively participating in combat against disinformation.

The spread of disinformation online and its implications has received much scholarly as well as public attention in recent years. However, the characteristics of individual users who share or combat against the spread of disinformation online, as forms of political participation, have not been examined. This study fills this gap by inquiring into such practices and the behaviors, perceptions and demographics that predict them.

This study presents an innovative approach to analyzing user behavior when performing digital tasks by integrating eye-tracking technology. Through the measurement of user scan patterns, gaze and attention during task completion, the authors gain valuable insights into users' approaches and execution of these tasks.

In this research, the authors conducted an observational study that centered on assessing the digital skills of individuals with limited proficiency who enrolled in a computer introductory course. A group of 19 participants were tasked with completing various online assignments both before and after completing the course.

The study findings indicate a significant improvement in participants' skills, particularly in basic and straightforward applications. However, advancements in more sophisticated utilization, such as mastering efficient search techniques or harnessing the Internet for enhanced situational awareness, demonstrate only marginal enhancement.

In recent decades, extensive research has been conducted on the issue of digital inequality, given its significant societal implications. This paper introduces a novel tool designed to analyze digital inequalities and subsequently employs it to evaluate the effectiveness of “LEHAVA,” the largest government-sponsored program aimed at mitigating these disparities in Israel.

Social media have become the main channel of direct communication between members of parliament and constituents. The study analyzes the content in all Israeli MPs' Facebook channels throughout an entire term of parliament and asks if the results are consistent with the equalization or the normalization hypotheses.

The study uses automatic analysis to produce a birds-eye-view of the content uploaded to the Facebook pages of all Israeli MPs during a full term of parliament. All 106 MP pages were automatically scraped. Some complementary information was added to each post in the dataset, such as post length (number of words) and whether the page belongs to a member of the opposition or coalition. The total of 441,974 posts was analyzed to compare engagement and publication rates between pages, coalition vs opposition MPs, MPs vs users etc.

The findings demonstrate that the MP-Facebook sphere is non-egalitarian, in that it follows skewed distributions by MPs in terms of post publication and engagement rates; non-inclusive, in that pages of coalition members receive significantly much more engagement vis-a-vis pages of members of the oppositions; and “top-down”, in that MP-authored posts receive dramatically more engagement then user-authored posts, suggesting MPs have a near-monopoly on setting the agendas manifest in their pages, while users have extremely limited agenda-setting capabilities in these pages.

Previous studies have looked at the character of the interactions between MPs and constituents on the Internet and particularly on online social media. Yet, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study provides a birds-eye-view of the content in all MPs' Facebook channels throughout a full term of parliament. Such an analysis provides a more comprehensive understanding of the character and dynamics of conversations that take place in such arenas.

This study aims to examine the long-term effects of an Israeli digital literacy government program for disadvantaged populations, as they are perceived by participants of the program one year after completing the course.

Participants in the program were interviewed about the effects of participating in the program, their experiences and satisfaction, in retrospect, a year after they completed the program.

The main reasons for joining the program included cognitive motivations, mainly interest to become familiar with internet applications, followed by employment aspiration. Positive benefits from participation included accumulated knowledge, confidence in using technology, empowerment and enhanced sense of self-efficacy. Interviewees also reported that as they could not practice or communicate with instructors once they completed the program, a significant portion of the accumulated gains faded.

Social and practical implications: Digital technologies constitute key infrastructure to facilitate public participation, as well as for gaining social, political and economic capital. Therefore, there is a significant social value in reducing digital inequality by increasing digital literacy of disadvantaged populations, i.e. citizens with low socioeconomic status and low digital literacy. This study sheds light on the benefits gained from such programs, as perceived by past participants.

While previous studies evaluating digital literacy programs focus on specific technical improvements and short-term gains, this study investigates the long-term effects and shortcomings of the program as perceived by participants.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how users in an anonymous virtual environment react to an offer to trade in access to their social network profile.

The experiment was conducted in Second Life (SL). Participants were offered varied sums of money in exchange for access to their Facebook profile, effectively undermining their anonymity.

Even in an anonymous environment, money plays a role in users’ decisions to disclose their offline identity, but a closer look at the findings reveals that users also use deception to enjoy the benefits of the offer without paying the costs. The results illustrate three types of users according to the strategies they employ: abstainers, traders, and deceivers.

The implications to the field of online information disclosure lie at the ability to illustrate and distinguish between the different strategies users choose with regard to online information disclosure, as the study design simulates a common information disclosure trade offer in online environments.

Unlike previous studies that focussed on trades with specific pieces of information, this study examines willingness to sell access to a user’s entire profile, by thus better simulating online services conduct. This is also the first privacy experiment conducted in the anonymous environment of SL, and the first to study deception as a privacy protection strategy.