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Free Paraphrasing Tool

Paraphrase text effortlessly with AI Sparks, a powerful paraphraser by ProWritingAid.

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Why choose our paraphrasing tool?

Choose how to paraphrase.

Expand text, enhance readability, or even add descriptive detail.

Paraphrase in the click of a button. If you’re not satisfied with the result, simply try again.

Strengthen your text

Enhance the structure and vocabulary of your text without removing key information.

Trusted by industry leaders

Power up your writing with ProWritingAid

Our paraphrasing tool reworks vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax to create new, high-quality content that resonates with your readers.

Find the best way to express your ideas with AI Sparks, a powerful paraphraser. Explore options to enhance readability, expand text, change tense, or even add descriptive detail.

Correct grammar and spelling

Whether you’re working on a quick email or a full-length novel, ProWritingAid catches grammar and spelling errors as you write so no pesky mistakes slip through.

Evaluate your writing

Assess your writing with 25+ reports, including established readability tests, sentence structure analysis, overused words, and more.

Ideate with AI

Experiment with AI Sparks Continue to find fresh ideas to continue your writing. Add new lines of dialogue, find an interesting analogy, formulate a counterargument, and more.

ProWritingAid is used by every type of writer

Join over 3 million users improving their writing.

I am continually impressed with the positive input this program offers me every time I sit down to write. My skills have improved immensely since I bought it and heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to have more confidence in their own writing.

Ginger Wakem

I’ve tried every free and paid writing/editing/grammar extension out there and this by far is the best one my team and I have found. It’s fast, accurate and really helps improve your writing beyond simple grammar suggestions.

Joel Widmer

ProWritingAid has been a resource in my writer toolkit for many years. The program helps me to craft and clarify my stories for a better reader experience. Your editor will thank you for making their job easier.

Siera London

Who can benefit from a paraphraser?

Anyone who wants help expressing their writing in a stronger and clearer way.

Our free paraphraser can help you write logical, eloquent, and plagiarism-free assignments. Use ProWritingAid to write a strong thesis statement, make your arguments sound compelling, or craft a poignant conclusion.

Researchers

ProWritingAid makes sure your language is always appropriately formal and helps you easily present complex ideas in a digestible manner—all while avoiding plagiarism.

Creative Writers

Trying to add more vivid descriptions to your prose? Do your characters keep doing the same actions over and over? Use ProWritingAid like a great critique partner or line editor to improve your fiction or nonfiction writing.

Business Writers

Communication is crucial for any successful business. Spend more time thinking about what to say and less time on how to say it. ProWritingAid can help you write emails, presentations, reports, training documents, and so much more.

Works wherever you do

Use our paraphrasing tool to get writing suggestions across all the apps you use.

Paraphrasing Tool FAQs

What is prowritingaid.

ProWritingAid is a grammar checker, paraphraser, and writing coach all in one helpful tool.

By signing up for a ProWritingAid account, you gain access to various features. These include advanced grammar and spelling checks, style suggestions, AI capabilities for rewriting text and generating ideas, as well as over 25 other reports to help you improve and polish your writing.

Is ProWritingAid free?

A free account allows you to edit and run reports on up to 500 words. It also gives you three AI Sparks per day, which is needed to paraphrase text. If you want more, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan .

How do I access the paraphraser in-app?

Follow these steps to paraphrase text:

Highlight the text you want to paraphrase, then click “ Sparks. ”

Next, choose how you want to paraphrase.

For standard paraphrasing, the Fluency mode works best. However, you can also improve readability, expand text, change tense, or even add descriptive detail.

What is a paraphrasing tool?

A paraphrasing tool is a tool that helps you express words in different way to improve the understanding of your message. It keeps the original meaning of your text but makes it clearer, more impactful, or more professional.

Is paraphrasing the same as rewording?

Originally, the terms paraphrasing and rewording had slightly different meanings. Paraphrasing meant rewriting text in a different form, while still retaining the meaning of the original text. Rewording meant simply switching out words with synonyms. Nowadays, the terms are often used interchangeably.

What software integrations does ProWritingAid offer?

ProWritingAid seamlessly integrates with MS Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, Atticus, Vellum, and more. We also offer browser extensions (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge), so you can work almost anywhere online.

Does ProWritingAid have a plagiarism checker?

Yes, it does. ProWritingAid’s plagiarism checker will check your work against over a billion web pages, published works, and academic papers, so you can be sure of its originality. Find out more about pricing for plagiarism checks here .

Try our paraphraser today

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Paraphrasing Tool

Enhance text clarity and understanding using an AI-driven paraphrasing tool. Perfect for students and professionals, this tool rewrites, edits, and adjusts tone for improved comprehension.

Rephrase sentences, paragraphs, essays, and articles effortlessly with our powerful paraphraser. Prevent plagiarism in blogs, research papers, and more using cutting-edge technology

It works effectively to rewrite the content in a way that removes plagiarism , maintains readability, and makes the content considerably more appealing.

Leverage any of its four paraphrasing modes to rewrite the content as required. It enables you to rewrite the content using the standard, fluency, creative, or smarter paraphrasing modes, each of which resonates with a distinct writing style.

Using groundbreaking AI technology , our paraphrasing tool lets you rewrite the content with the utmost accuracy. It neither changes the context nor compromises the content quality. No matter which type of content you are working on, you can run it through our paraphrasing tool and perfect it by all means.

The users including writers, bloggers, researchers, students, and any layperson can get the best out of our online plagiarism remover for free. It facilitates quick paraphrasing of 1000 words in one attempt.

MAKE YOUR CONTENT UNIQUE, ENGAGING, AND EASY TO READ

Use Paraphrasing.io to rewrite your content in original and improved wording that stands out from the rest. Change the choice of words and the way words are combined to construct sentences, achieving uniqueness and creativity in writing. Rewrite your content to ensure that it is free from potential writing errors and perfectly crafted to meet the target audience's needs.

Remove the Plagiarism

Eliminate duplicate phrases, clauses, and sentences to make the content unique

Improve Content Quality

Correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, and diction errors to enhance the readability score

Modify Writing Style

Modify the choice of words to change the tone and rewrite the content in different writing styles

Paraphrasing.io, the best sentence rephraser, thoroughly analyzes the given content to understand the context and then rewrite it with an intention to:

User-friendly Interface

Anyone can easily find, access, and use this tool to paraphrase the content from a beginner to an expert.

Improved Functionality

This tool uses advanced AI algorithms to ensure that the content is paraphrased without errors and delays.

Error-Free Results

This paraphrasing tool skillfully rewrites the content as it works effectively in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Multiple Rewriting Modes

Four different rewriting modes are available, which lets you change the tone and style of the writing without changing the context.

Multi Languages Support

There are 15 different languages available, any of which you can choose to rewrite the content as required.

Safety and Privacy

The content is paraphrased with absolute precision and automatically removed from the tool's database upon reloading.

Free Unlimited Access

Users worldwide can access and use this paraphrasing tool without any premium fee and limit.

Optimize the Content

Maintain readability, uniqueness, and creativity in content to make it search-engine-friendly.

How paraphrase online can enhance your writing?

Whoever creates content is well aware of the fact that uniqueness has great importance in writing. This is because duplicate content is not accepted anywhere. Even if a few phrases or sentences are similar to previously published content, it is considered plagiarism. To paraphrase online, you can easily remove plagiarism from the content.

Must be unique words

The content must be created using unique words, whether for the web or any academic assignment. Anyhow, it isn’t easy to write unique content. It is error-prone and time-consuming.

Readability and creativity

Take into account some more essential factors in writing: readability and creativity. The words you choose and how you combine them must be easy-to-read and creative enough to hook and engage the readers. Unfortunately, there can be various writing errors, such as misused and misspelled words in your writing. These writing issues can ruin your content quality, leaving no chance for a high ranking or score.

Unique and appealing

The students, researchers, and content writers can use an online paraphrasing tool to rewrite any content and make it 100% unique and appealing. The online rephrase tool uses advanced “artificial intelligence” algorithms to rewrite a piece of content to make it free from plagiarism and writing errors.

Multiple rewriting modes

For instance, you can use our word paraphraser then. It will take only a second to provide you with a unique and improved version of your content. There are multiple rewriting modes available, any of which you can leverage to change your content's writing style and make it much more captivating for the target audience.

How does our free paraphrasing tool work?

Our free online rephrasing tool is based on artificial intelligence algorithms that help in attaining uniqueness in less time with accuracy. Paraphrasing.io is considered as an AI-based free rewording tool that makes content unique by replacing the words with synonyms while keeping the content quality high. Editpad contributed to the development of this great paraphrasing tool.

Who can provide excellent services ?

There are so many online paraphrase companies that offer help with many writing types of assignments and a host of others that it can be hard to know which to choose. documents, texts, articles - when it comes to paraphrase this, you need a professional such as we have that offers to refresh the given paper using a vast amount of experience in their fields of expertise.

Software and inexperienced writers will paraphrase text and swap individual terms for their synonyms. Not only is that likely to still be seen content piracy as the structure and order of wordings as are still the same but it will often not maintain the original meaning and will often use phrases that are out of context and will make the text meaningless as best.

Why should you consider paraphrasing.io ?

This paraphrasing tool provides various reasons and features by which we can easily differentiate this tool from any other online rephrase tool.

The reasons why you need to choose this sentence rephraser are listed below.

How to use Paraphrase Tool?

To use best paraphrasing tool follow the 4 simple steps given below:

• You can choose from 15 different languages: en id da de es fr it pl pt ro sv vi cs ru th ja ko
• Paste/write it into the text box or upload file in txt, doc, and docx format
• Modes `Regular`, `Formal`, `Creative`, and `Academic` to modify concerning.
• Click "Start Paraphrasing" button to rephrase and get an error-free, unique version of the content

Online Paraphrasing Tool

Use our free grammar & spell checker + text rewriter to improve your content for higher efficiency., linguix paraphraser is a tool that helps you rewrite and enhance any sentence., regardless of who you are or what you do, linguix has writing and research tools to support you. our paraphraser has been used by authors, students, researchers, journalists, attorneys, and everyone in between. linguix is ready to help you boost your skills, because writing with confidence will change the way you interact with the world. linguix is a top-rated paraphraser, give it a try today.

Rewrite and enhance any sentence Use Linguix to express yourself better.

Enhance your vocabulary Sign up to get access to advanced synonym suggestions.

Use Linguix Everywhere: Get Browser Extension

Install our browser extension to improve your emails, work documents, and research papers. use linguix within gmail, google docs, salesforce, hubspot, and millions of other websites. click below to get an ai-based grammar checking, rewriting, and shortcuts everywhere you may need it..

Perfect your writing with Rewrite

Instantly paraphrase emails, articles, messages and more to deliver high-quality written work with confidence.

Get a feel for what Rewrite can do

Work you can be proud of

Enhance your writing without spending time on improvements and iterations..

Choose from one of 10 languages to translate into English.

Create content that’s understandable and evokes action..

A must-have | Life-changing | Just incredible

“a must-have” "life-changing" “just incredible”.

Wordtune is the best in my opinion, when it comes to rewriting content.

It's like having 10 friends all willing to suggest alternatives to a sentence I'm writing, and I can pick the best one without hurting anyone's feelings.  :-)

Though my writing's pretty cogent, I'm always running it through Wordtune to find inspiration and better ways to express myself.

Can't live without wordtune, as someone who writes a-lot of sales related copy wordtune helps me personalize and gives me ideas on how to rewrite words or sentences.

Authentically express yourself with personalized Generative AI

The 8 Best Online Paraphrasing Tools You Need to Know About

Whether you're looking to shorten work to meet a word count or you can't quite get the wording right, these eight online paraphrasing tools will help.

A paraphrasing tool can be useful to different kinds of people, from students to professional writers to those simply creating content. If you’re used to writing content, you’ll know that meeting a word count or getting your phrasing spot on isn't always easy.

Paraphrasing tools are useful because they can give your work a new voice, so you can solve that missing piece. Here, we'll look at the eight best online paraphrasing tools that you can use for your writing.

1. QuillBot

If you're looking for one of the best paraphrasing tools, look no further. As one of the popularly used paraphrasing tools, there’s no denying that QuillBot is an effective tool. QuillBot is a quality tool that makes use of advanced AI to rewrite content.

Whether you aim to polish your grammar, enhance the creativity in your writing, or adjust the tone of your writing, QuillBot will amend your work while sticking to your preferred writing style. With this tool, there’s no need to switch between multiple tabs to paraphrase your work.

QuillBot also works as a Chrome extension that you can use on Google Docs. QuillBot’s free account includes a 125-word limit in the paraphraser, and a 1,200-word limit in its summarizer, while the premium account lets you paraphrase an unlimited number of words, up to 6,000 words in the summarizer, and tons of other benefits.

2. Plagiarism Detector

This is a good tool to use to help you create 100 percent authentic content. While this is essentially a plagiarism detection tool, it also has a grammar checking tool and a paraphrasing tool, making it easier to work on your projects using one platform.

Plagiarism Detector's paraphrasing tool is free to use, as long as you have a minimum of 50 words and a maximum of 2,000 words.

You can also choose from premium plans that cost between $20 to $90 per month, depending on how many words and pages you want to paraphrase. Depending on the premium plan you choose, you can also share your membership with other users.

3. Paraphrase Online

Paraphrase Online is a simple tool to use to rephrase your content. The simple interface of this tool makes it easy for you to work faster and more effectively.

You simply need to type in or paste the sentences you want to change, click on paraphrase, and the tool does the work for you.

Paraphrase Online is free to use and requires no sign-up. While this tool is effective at paraphrasing sentences, it’s best to go over the work to ensure it has readability for your audience.

4. Duplichecker

If you’re looking for another multipurpose tool that checks plagiarism and paraphrases your work, Duplichecker does just that. Duplichecker is a free-to-use paragraphing tool, and you don't even need to register. All you have to do is go on the website, type in or paste your text and allow Duplichecker to transform your work.

With this tool, you can upload files and paraphrase up to 1,000 words. If you need to work with a bigger limit, you can get a customized pricing plan suitable for your writing goals, no matter how big or small they are. The tool also includes other relevant features such as spell check and grammar check.

Duplichecker highlights the differences made in your work, making it easier for you to see where changes were made. Additionally, this tool provides additional suggestions to choose from as you review your work.

5. CleverSpinner

If you’re looking for a tool to help you create unique content that is enjoyable and readable to your audience, look no further. CleverSpinner can paraphrase your content on a word and sentence level.

Some paraphrasing websites don’t have the best tools to avoid using the wrong synonyms. Because CleverSpinner uses artificial intelligence, it understands the meaning of words and can choose appropriate synonyms. This way, you don’t have to spend too much time correcting your work.

CleverSpinner is not only readable, but it also rewrites content in a way that avoids plagiarism. You can access a free trial for three days. Then, If you’re satisfied with the free trial, you can pay $9.90 per month to gain full access.

6. Spin Rewriter

This is yet another advanced tool to paraphrase your content. You can completely change the structure of your text by using Spin Rewriter.

If you're into using AI writing tools , you'll love this one. Spin Rewriter uses AI to help you rewrite words, sentences, and paragraphs. Using AI, Spin Rewriter will analyze your content, so it can fully grasp the meaning of your text. With this tool, all the heavy lifting is handled for you, which reduces your workload.

Despite using high-tech features, this tool is surprisingly easy to use. Spin Rewriter goes for $77 per year, or for a once-off, lifetime payment of $497, but you can first try it out by accessing a free trial for five days.

7. Wordtune

Wordtune is a paraphrasing tool that understands human language. Wordtune doesn’t merely paraphrase your sentences, it gives you a few options to choose from. That way, you’re bound to find an option that suits your writing style. Wordtune works hand in hand with Chrome as an extension, allowing you to rephrase your sentences as you type.

Wordtune offers a free plan, which is limited to 10 rewrites per day, three AI rewrites, and three summaries. You can opt for a premium plan for $9.99 per month, which gives you unlimited rewrites. The premium plan includes unique features such as, choosing between casual and formal tones for your text, shortening and expanding the length of your text, paragraph rewrites, and receiving premium support from the Wordtune team.

8. Paraphrasing.io

Paraphrasing.io is a simple paraphrasing tool that lets you easily generate quality, unique content. This tool is most suitable when you're looking to change words and rephrase sentences. Whether you want to summarize your text or rewrite it completely, Paraphrasing.io can help you.

Paraphrasing.io is free to use if you're paraphrasing up to 500 words. If you want to increase your word limit, you can subscribe to the premium package for $20 a month, and if you're a student, you'll only pay $7.

Make Sure You’re Not Plagiarizing

There has been much debate around whether paraphrasing tools should be allowed or not. The fact is, paraphrasing sites and tools are used by many people simply because they are effective and help with your writing.

While these tools are all useful, you need to be 100 percent sure that you’re not plagiarizing any content. Luckily, there are free tools available that are dedicated to making sure your work is original.

• 🔓 Unlock this mode to make your paraphrasing Fluency - Go Pro
• 🔓 Unlock this mode to make your paraphrasing Creative - Go Pro
• 🔓 Unlock this mode to make your paraphrasing Smarter - Go Pro
• 🔓 Unlock this mode to make your paraphrasing Improver - Go Pro
• 🔓 Unlock this mode to make your paraphrasing Academic - Go Pro
• 🔓 Unlock this mode to make your paraphrasing Shorten - Go Pro
• 🔓 Unlock this mode for random paraphrase words- Go Pro

Paraphrasing tool

The paraphrasing tool (paraphraser) is a sentence changer generator that can rephrase sentences, paragraphs, articles, and essays.

This sentence rephraser helps students and writers to avoid plagiarism while writing blogs and research papers with state-of-the-art technology.

What is Paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing is expressing ideas and information in your own words and mentioning their source. ( By University of New South Wales )

Why our paraphrasing tool?

Our paraphrasing tool helps to rewrite plagiarism-free content 😊. It can change sentence structure without changing the context of the topic.

Our rewording tool is 100% free and easy to use. Editpad AI reworder helps you reword assignments, sentences, paragraphs, and essays with one click.

How does Paraphrase Tool work?

The paraphraser provides a simple interface.

To use paraphrase tool, follow the below steps:

Features of Paraphrasing Tool Free

Some of the features of this rephrase tool are:

Files Uploading

You can upload a file directly from your computer in the following formats:

You can also upload a file directly from Google Drive with just a single click.

Plagiarism-Free Content

The final output from our rephrasing tool would be completely plagiarism-free.

If not sure about plagiarism in text, you can check it on the  plagiarism checker .

Download Report

Our free rephrasing tool provides an option to download the final report in Docx and Txt format.

Free and Secure

The paraphrase generator is completely free and 100% safe to use for all kinds of rewriting purposes.

Accurate and reliable rephrasing of text

Our tool rephrase text accurately and keep the same meaning and context as the original text. 

10 Different paraphrasing modes:

To provide the best results, we have developed four different modes 😏 Smooth : It paraphrases text that flows well, is grammatically correct, and is easy to read. This type of paraphrasing is often used in academic or professional writing.  Best for students to make assignments and presentations.

😉 Reworder : This mode works as a rewording tool that can help you reword your text or words with their best synonyms that are new, trendy, and engaging.

🤠  Formal : Formal paraphrasing is complex and time-consuming because it requires a deep understanding of the original text, so we have developed a separate mode for it.

😃 Fluency : It can be used to build a strong connection between sentences to improve the readability and clarity of the text.

🤩 Creative : Creative is another unique mode used to diversify the content structure to make it appear more creative.

😎 Smart : This mode is highly accurate and reliable. It allows users to fine-tune the output. It rewrites text using advanced algorithms and natural language processing techniques.

🧐 Improver : This mode will paraphrase and improve your content. Removes grammar mistakes, changes sentence structure and good word choice for better readability. Best for teachers to create study notes.

👨‍🎓 Academic : This mode is specially built for students to rephrase their assignments in an academic tone.

📝 Shorten : It is designed to provide a brief statement of the main points of your text concisely to convey the message in a short and summarized way.

🙃 Randomizer : In this mode, you can rephrase your text with different passages with the same meaning multiple times.

Easy-to-use interface

With our super easy-to-use interface, you can reword content within seconds. 

Uses of Online Paraphrasing Tool

Paraphrasing content manually is not an easy task. It takes both time and effort to do this. Therefore, using the paraphrase online tool can save a lot of time and effort.

Other uses are:

• It helps students to submit plagiarism-free assignments and academic work
• Quickly paraphrase the content
• It helps to learn new sentence structures
• It reduces the chances of plagiarism in the paraphrased content
• 100% free paraphrasing tool

Who uses Paraphrasing Tool?

This sentence rephraser is not the requirement of every writer but it is widely used by:

It is hard to come up with engaging content. This rewording tool helps to write articles on the same topic in unique ways. 

Editpad Online Paraphrase tool helps bloggers to rephrase text in a way that is more easily readable by a general audience.

Freelance Writers

Freelance writers have to write high-quality and original content now and then. It helps them complete content tasks.  Use sentence rephraser to save time in the writing process and spend more time on other important tasks such as research, editing and proofreading.

It allows students to paraphrase essays, assignments, and lengthy writing homework. Our tool helps students to avoid plagiarism and to improve their writing skills.

Using editpad paraphrasing tool students can express their ideas in a better writing style.

Pro tip: Do not forget to check assignments and papers for plagiarism . 

Researchers

Researchers need paraphrasers to prevent plagiarism in their research work and to improve readability. They can also use our tool to quickly summarize large content to identify key points. just want to summarize your text? Try our text summarizer . 

CopyWriters

Copywriters can use our rephrase tool to refresh old content and give it a new angle. Rephraser is super helpful when you have to write bulk content under tight deadlines. Present the same information in a new and unique way.

As a webmaster, you have to always keep content quality, SEO quality, and usability at best. And we are here for you to help.

• Quality content : With a paraphrasing tool, webmasters can ensure that the content on their website is unique and free of plagiarism.
• SEO : To optimize the website for different keywords, you can paraphrase online same text multiple times. 
• User-friendly content : Make your content more readable and easily understandable for website users by rephrasing it. Our tool not only improves the content quality but also removes basic grammar errors. You can use Editpad's grammar checker tool to correct all grammatical mistakes.  

Digital Marketers  

Create your next best-quality Social Media Posts using our paraphraser. Digital marketers can generate different ideas for Email Campaigns and advertisements. 

Which is the most effective paraphrasing tool?

Rephrasing tool by Editpad is the most effective paraphrasing tool. It provides four different modes as per your need. Advanced algorithms, lightning-fast speed, and state-of-art technology make our tool the best of all. 

Is using a paraphrasing tool illegal?

Using a paraphrasing tool is not illegal. The outputs are unique and they are not an exact replication of the original content.

Can I use paraphrasing tool for legal writing?

Yes, you can use a paraphrasing tool for legal writing. However, if you want to quote someone or use someone else’s words, you have to give the proper citation.   

Does paraphrasing tool count as plagiarism?

No, using a paraphrasing tool does not count as committing plagiarism. Plagiarism means copying content directly whereas using a paraphrasing tool involves changing the wording.  

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– 7 min read

How to paraphrase (including examples)

Jessica Malnik

Paraphrasing has gotten a bad reputation due to its association with plagiarism . However, when used correctly, paraphrasing has the potential to elevate your writing and give you a better understanding of the research.

In this post, we’ll discuss what paraphrasing is, why we do it, and 6 steps to walk you through the process. We’ll also share what not to do with paraphrasing, along with some examples.

Paraphrasing definition and rules

Paraphrasing is simply a way of summarizing someone else’s content in your own words. When you paraphrase, you keep the meaning or intent of the original work without copying it word for word. However, paraphrasing can quickly become a form of plagiarism if done incorrectly. This is why it’s crucial to follow the rules of paraphrasing.

When borrowing the ideas from someone else’s content, there’s one important rule to follow: you must correctly cite your source. This can be done in a number of ways depending on the style guide you use. 

Source citing is different for MLA and APA formatting and style guides. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with the citation formats for whichever one you follow. However, in some cases, simply hyperlinking the source will be sufficient.

Why do we paraphrase?

There are a number of reasons that professional writers and students alike choose to paraphrase content. Here are just a few of the common reasons that a writer would choose to paraphrase instead of including a quote or summarization.

Process information better 

One benefit of paraphrasing is that it helps you process the author’s ideas. When you have to rewrite the material in your own words, it makes you really think about the context and how it fits into your piece. If you want to really understand the material you’re citing, try rewriting it. If you were to quote the same information, you would miss out on the benefit of analyzing the source material.

For example, if you are writing a research paper all about Shakespeare’s influence on modern-day literature, you don’t want to just use a ton of direct quotes, instead by paraphrasing original passages, it can help you comprehend and analyze the material better.  

Improve your credibility with readers

You can also improve your credibility by association with the sources you decide to paraphrase. 

When you rewrite the material, you create a connection between your content and the knowledge from the source. 

Your audience will have a better understanding of the direction of your piece if you’re paraphrasing a reputable source with established authority on the subject.

Present data in an interesting way

If you’re referencing a data-heavy webpage or study, then paraphrasing is an engaging way to present the information in your own writing style. 

This allows you to tell a story with the source material instead of simply citing numbers or graphs.

Show that you understand the source

Another reason for paraphrasing that’s particularly important in academic writing is to demonstrate that you’ve read and comprehended the source material. 

For example, if all of you are doing is copying and pasting the original words of a textbook, you aren’t really learning anything new. When you summarize the material in your own words, it helps you to understand the material faster.  

How to paraphrase in 6 steps

Paraphrasing is simple when you break it down into a series of steps. 

Here are the 6 steps you can use to paraphrase your sources:

1. Choose a reputable source

First, you need to pick a credible source to paraphrase. A credible source will likely have ideas and concepts that are worth repeating. Be sure to research the author’s name and publisher’s credentials and endorsements (if applicable).

You’ll also want to check the date of the publication as well to make sure it’s current enough to include in your writing.

2. Read and re-read the source material

You want to be sure that you understand the context and information in the original source before you can begin to rework it into your own words. Read through it as many times as you need so you’re sure that you grasp the meaning.

3. Take some notes 

Once you have an understanding of the passage, you’ll want to jot down your initial thoughts. 

What are the key concepts in the source material? 

What are the most interesting parts? 

For this part, it helps to break up the content into different sections. This step will give you a sort of mini-outline before you proceed with rephrasing the material.

4. Write a rough draft

Write your version of the content without looking at the original source material. This part is important. 

With the source hidden, you’ll be less likely to pull phrasing and structure from the original. You are welcome to reference your notes, though. This will help you write the content in your own words without leaning on the source but still hit the key points you want to cover.

5. Compare and revise

Once you have your initial draft written, you should look at it side by side with the original source. Adjust as needed to ensure your version is written in a way that’s unique to your voice. 

This is a good time to break out a thesaurus if you notice you have used too many of the same words as the original source.

6. Cite your source

Whether you use MLA, APA, Chicago, or another style guide, now is the time to give proper credit to the original author or source. When posting content online, you may only need to hyperlink to the original source.

Keep in mind that the paraphrased text will not change depending on the citation style that you follow. It will just change how it’s cited.

What you shouldn’t do when paraphrasing

Now that you understand the process of paraphrasing and can follow the steps, it’s important that you know what to avoid. When paraphrasing, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Do NOT write while you’re still researching

You might be tempted to start writing during the research phase. However, this sets you up to miss information or restate the copy too closely to the source material. Be sure to do your research first, take notes, and then start writing the piece.

2. Do NOT skip the citations

When you pull a small amount of information from a paraphrased source, you may think you don’t need to cite it. However, any idea or copy that’s taken from another source is considered plagiarism if you don’t give it credit, even if it is only a little bit of information.

Paraphrasing examples

Here are some examples to help you understand what paraphrasing looks like when done correctly and incorrectly

Excerpt from LinkedIn’s Official Blog:

“When reaching out to connect with someone, share a personalized message telling the person why you would like to connect. If it’s someone you haven’t been in touch with in a while, mention a detail to jog that person’s memory for how you met, reinforce a mutual interest and kickstart a conversation.”

Here’s another example. This one is from the U.S. Department of Education:

“ The U.S. Department of Education does not accredit educational institutions and/or programs. However, the Department provides oversight over the postsecondary accreditation system through its review of all federally-recognized accrediting agencies. The Department holds accrediting agencies accountable by ensuring that they enforce their accreditation standards effectively. ”

Here’s one more example to show you how to paraphrase using a quote from Mark Twain as the source material:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.”

Paraphrasing can be a beneficial tool for any writer. It can give you credibility and a deeper understanding of the topic. However, to successfully use paraphrasing, you must be careful to properly cite your sources and effectively put the material into your own words each time.

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Complex Sentence Generator is a free content rewriter that can potentially rephrase, reword, paraphrase and/or rewrite sentences, paragraphs, articles, content, words and/or phrases into a more complex, unorthodox or convoluted alternative while delivering the same meaning. The vocabulary of this sentence paraphraser contains an abundance of rarely used words/phrases and can paraphrase sentences in a variety of ways that are chosen randomly. Aside from this web based software being used as a paraphrasing tool or a text spinner, it can also be used as a vocabulary improvement tool. The artificial intelligence of this paraphrase generator is so sophisticated that it is capable of understanding context. Use the dictionary or thesaurus to learn definitions for words or discover more synonyms.

Aside from this web based software being used as a paraphrasing tool or a text spinner, it can also be used as a vocabulary improvement tool. The artificial intelligence of this paraphrase generator is so sophisticated that it is capable of understanding context. Use the dictionary or thesaurus to learn definitions for words or discover more synonyms.

Complex Sentence Generator is very easy to use. After typing or pasting content in the first text box, press the convert button to automatically paraphrase the content. This generator can also work as a random sentence generator. Click on the random sentence button to generate random complex sentences and have them paraphrased. This software works as a paraphrase converter for transforming simple and common english into more complex english. It can be useful as a free article spinner due to its' ability to rephrase a large body of text and potentially generate multiple unique versions with each conversion of the same content. With complex sentence generator you can reword content online and rewrite up to 10000 characters or less at a time/per conversion. This should be more than enough for spinning articles, essays or paraphrasing website content for blogs which usually consists of a large amount of content.

In order to rephrase a sentence, paragraph, essay or article effectively, content with good grammar and spelling is important when using this automatic paraphraser because it can only recognize, understand and rewrite correct grammar. For an article rewriter that is in the form of a bot, it does a good job of respecting english and using replacements that make sense. Content that is written in all caps or with the first letter of every word capitalized can still be rephrased by this software. Otherwise, as long as the grammar of the content is sensible and recognizable, complex sentence generator can make the task of paraphrasing easy. Rather than having to research synonyms for words or phrases and deduce which ones are the most suitable substitutes for any context a word or phrase may be used in, paraphrasing is done on auto pilot.

Aside from simply being used as a tool to spin text or paraphrase content, complex sentence generator can be instrumental towards accomplishing a number of additional tasks. Improving vocabulary, learning new ways to utilize english words and phrases and adding more uniqueness to the process of generating new content. You can also use paraphrase search to learn new words by searching for examples of words/phrases being used in a sentence and paraphrased in a sentence. Due to how rare and uncommon a lot of the words and phrases are in the database of this paraphrase generator, it can create and exhibit a unique style of writing and vocabulary. It also makes it easier to encounter and discover new words.

Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers

The tech giant is rolling out AI-generated answers that displace links to human-written websites, threatening millions of creators

Kimber Matherne’s thriving food blog draws millions of visitors each month searching for last-minute dinner ideas.

But the mother of three says decisions made at Google, more than 2,000 miles from her home in the Florida panhandle, are threatening her business. About 40 percent of visits to her blog, Easy Family Recipes , come through the search engine, which has for more than two decades served as the clearinghouse of the internet, sending users to hundreds of millions of websites each day.

Podcast episode

As the tech giant gears up for Google I/O, its annual developer conference, this week, creators like Matherne are worried about the expanding reach of its new search tool that incorporates artificial intelligence. The product, dubbed “Search Generative Experience,” or SGE, directly answers queries with complex, multi-paragraph replies that push links to other websites further down the page, where they’re less likely to be seen.

The shift stands to shake the very foundations of the web.

The rollout threatens the survival of the millions of creators and publishers who rely on the service for traffic. Some experts argue the addition of AI will boost the tech giant’s already tight grip on the internet, ultimately ushering in a system where information is provided by just a handful of large companies.

“Their goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the information they want,” Matherne said. “But if you cut out the people who are the lifeblood of creating that information — that have the real human connection to it — then that’s a disservice to the world.”

Google calls its AI answers “overviews” but they often just paraphrase directly from websites. One search for how to fix a leaky toilet provided an AI answer with several tips, including tightening tank bolts. At the bottom of the answer, Google linked to The Spruce, a home improvement and gardening website owned by web publisher Dotdash Meredith, which also owns Investopedia and Travel + Leisure. Google’s AI tips lifted a phrase from The Spruce’s article word-for-word.

A spokesperson for Dotdash Meredith declined to comment.

The links Google provides are often half-covered, requiring a user to click to expand the box to see them all. It’s unclear which of the claims made by the AI come from which link.

Tech research firm Gartner predicts traffic to the web from search engines will fall 25 percent by 2026. Ross Hudgens, CEO of search engine optimization consultancy Siege Media, said he estimates at least a 10 to 20 percent hit, and more for some publishers. “Some people are going to just get bludgeoned,” he said.

Raptive, which provides digital media, audience and advertising services to about 5,000 websites, including Easy Family Recipes, estimates changes to search could result in about $2 billion in losses to creators — with some websites losing up to two-thirds of their traffic. Raptive arrived at these figures by analyzing thousands of keywords that feed into its network, and conducting a side-by-side comparison of traditional Google search and the pilot version of Google SGE.

Michael Sanchez, the co-founder and CEO of Raptive, says that the changes coming to Google could “deliver tremendous damage” to the internet as we know it. “What was already not a level playing field … could tip its way to where the open internet starts to become in danger of surviving for the long term,” he said.

When Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai announced the broader rollout during an earnings call last month, he said the company is making the change in a “measured” way, while “also prioritizing traffic to websites and merchants.” Company executives have long argued that Google needs a healthy web to give people a reason to use its service, and doesn’t want to hurt publishers. A Google spokesperson declined to comment further.

“I think we got to see an incredible blossoming of the internet, we got to see something that was really open and freewheeling and wild and very exciting for the whole world,” said Selena Deckelmann, the chief product and technology officer for Wikimedia, the foundation that oversees Wikipedia.

“Now, we’re just in this moment where I think that the profits are driving people in a direction that I’m not sure makes a ton of sense,” Deckelmann said. “This is a moment to take stock of that and say, ‘What is the internet we actually want?’”

People who rely on the web to make a living are worried.

Jake Boly, a strength coach based in Austin, has spent three years building up his website of workout shoe reviews. But last year, his traffic from Google dropped 96 percent. Google still seems to find value in his work, citing his page on AI-generated answers about shoes. The problem is, people read Google’s summary and don’t visit his site anymore, Boly said.

“My content is good enough to scrape and summarize,” he said. “But it’s not good enough to show in your normal search results, which is how I make money and stay afloat.”

Google first said it would begin experimenting with generative AI in search last year, several months after OpenAI released ChatGPT. At the time, tech pundits speculated that AI chatbots could replace Google search as the place to find information. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Google’s biggest competitor, Microsoft, added an AI chatbot to his company’s search engine and in February 2023 goaded Google to “ come out and show that they can dance .”

The search giant started dancing. Though it had invented much of the AI technology enabling chatbots and had used it to power tools like Google Translate, it started putting generative AI tech into its other products. Google Docs, YouTube’s video-editing tools and the company’s voice assistant all got AI upgrades.

But search is Google’s most important product, accounting for about 57 percent of its $80 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year. Over the years, search ads have been the cash cow Google needed to build its other businesses, like YouTube and cloud storage, and to stay competitive by buying up other companies .

Google has largely avoided AI answers for the moneymaking searches that host ads, said Andy Taylor, vice president of research at internet marketing firm Tinuiti.

When it does show an AI answer on “commercial” searches, it shows up below the row of advertisements. That could force websites to buy ads just to maintain their position at the top of search results.

Google has been testing the AI answers publicly for the past year, showing them to a small percentage of its billions of users as it tries to improve the technology.

Still, it routinely makes mistakes. A review by The Washington Post published in April found that Google’s AI answers were long-winded, sometimes misunderstood the question and made up fake answers.

The bar for success is high. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a novel product, consumers have spent years with Google and expect search results to be fast and accurate. The rush into generative AI might also run up against legal problems. The underlying tech behind OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft’s AI was trained on millions of news articles, blog posts, e-books, recipes, social media comments and Wikipedia pages that were scraped from the internet without paying or asking permission of their original authors.

OpenAI and Microsoft have faced a string of lawsuits over alleged theft of copyrighted works .

“If journalists did that to each other, we’d call that plagiarism,” said Frank Pine, the executive editor of MediaNews Group, which publishes dozens of newspapers around the United States, including the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News and the Boston Herald. Several of the company’s papers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in April, alleging the companies used its news articles to train their AI.

If news organizations let tech companies, including Google, use their content to make AI summaries without payment or permission, it would be “calamitous” for the journalism industry, Pine said. The change could have an even bigger effect on newspapers than the loss of their classifieds businesses in the mid-2000s or Meta’s more recent pivot away from promoting news to its users, he said.

The move to AI answers, and the centralization of the web into a few portals isn’t slowing down. OpenAI has signed deals with web publishers — including Dotdash Meredith — to show their content prominently in its chatbot.

Matherne, of Easy Family Recipes, says she’s bracing for the changes by investing in social media channels and email newsletters.

“The internet’s kind of a scary place right now,” Matherne said. “You don’t know what to expect.”

A previous version of this story said MediaNews Group sued OpenAI and Microsoft. In fact, it was several of the company's newspapers that sued the tech companies. This story has been corrected.

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: spotting ai's touch: identifying llm-paraphrased spans in text.

Abstract: AI-generated text detection has attracted increasing attention as powerful language models approach human-level generation. Limited work is devoted to detecting (partially) AI-paraphrased texts. However, AI paraphrasing is commonly employed in various application scenarios for text refinement and diversity. To this end, we propose a novel detection framework, paraphrased text span detection (PTD), aiming to identify paraphrased text spans within a text. Different from text-level detection, PTD takes in the full text and assigns each of the sentences with a score indicating the paraphrasing degree. We construct a dedicated dataset, PASTED, for paraphrased text span detection. Both in-distribution and out-of-distribution results demonstrate the effectiveness of PTD models in identifying AI-paraphrased text spans. Statistical and model analysis explains the crucial role of the surrounding context of the paraphrased text spans. Extensive experiments show that PTD models can generalize to versatile paraphrasing prompts and multiple paraphrased text spans. We release our resources at this https URL .

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Former IRS revenue officer and his brother among six defendants sentenced to prison in multimillion-dollar COVID-19 fraud scheme

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Defendants admitted their involvement in a scheme to obtain more than $3 million in pandemic relief aid

Date: May 17, 2024

Contact:   [email protected]

Six defendants, including a former IRS revenue officer and his brother, have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 12 to 30 months following their convictions on charges that they fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in COVID-19 pandemic relief funds through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), announced United States Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey; IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Mosley of the Oakland Field Office; Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) Special Agent in Charge Weston King of the Western Region; and Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Special Agent in Charge Jon Ellwanger of the Western Region. The sentences were handed down by the Hon. Araceli Martínez-Olguín, United States District Judge.

Five defendants—Frank Mosley, of Oakland; his brother Reginald Mosley, of Sacramento; Marcus Wilborn, of Elk Grove, California; Aaron Boren, of Roseville, California; and Scott Conway, of Rocklin, California—pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1349. The Mosley brothers, both of whom were sentenced to 30 months in prison, also pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and advising in the filing of false tax returns, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7201(2). Wilborn was sentenced to 18 months in prison and Boren and Conway were each sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison for their roles in the scheme. The sixth defendant—Kenya Ellis, of Los Angeles—pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1344, and was sentenced to 12 months in prison. All six defendants were originally charged in May 2023.

According to the defendants' plea agreements and the parties' sentencing memoranda, Frank Mosley was a tax enforcement officer for the City of Oakland and a former IRS revenue officer who conspired with others between July 2020 and September 2021 to submit fraudulent PPP loan applications and to spend his portion of the more than $3 million in loan funds he and his co-conspirators fraudulently obtained on personal investments and expenses.

"At the height of a global pandemic wreaking havoc on American businesses and families, these defendants fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in aid money intended to help those who desperately needed it and used that money to enrich themselves," said United States Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey. "That one of these defendants was a former IRS revenue officer makes their crime that much more concerning. These sentences should help rebuild some of the public trust eroded by the defendants' greed."

"Frank and Reginald Mosley, along with their co-conspirators, ran an abhorrent scheme that fraudulently obtained over $3 million of funds designed to help struggling businesses in the wake of a global pandemic. Even worse, Frank Mosley, a former IRS revenue agent, exploited his expertise to help cover up the scheme," said IRS-CI Acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Mosley. "No one is above the law. Fostering confidence in our financial system and public institutions is at the core of IRS Criminal Investigation's mission."

"The Mosley brothers orchestrated a scheme that defrauded the federal government of over $3 million in pandemic relief funds intended to help distressed businesses for their own personal gain," said Jon Ellwanger, Special Agent in Charge, Western Region, Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. "They and their co-conspirators have now been brought to justice for their actions. We are proud to have worked with our federal law enforcement partners and the U.S. Attorney's Office to achieve this result."

"This sentencing sends a clear message that those who defraud SBA's programs will be held accountable," said SBA OIG's Western Region Special Agent in Charge Weston King. "Our office will remain steadfast in pursuing those who exploit such vital resources for personal gain, ensuring accountability, and justice for the American taxpayer. I want to thank the U.S. Attorney's Office and our law enforcement partners for their unwavering commitment to pursuing justice in this case."

According to their plea agreements, the Mosley brothers, Wilborn, Boren, and Conway each admitted their involvement in a scheme to obtain millions of dollars in PPP loans by submitting fraudulent documents on behalf of companies the defendants falsely certified had dozens of employees and hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly payroll expenses. In fact, these were shell companies with no legitimate employees and no payroll expenses. The defendants also admitted they did not use the PPP loan funds they fraudulently obtained on legitimate business expenses; rather, they admitted using those funds for personal expenses and investments, to pay their personal credit card bills, and to transfer money to family members.

According to their plea agreements, Frank and Reginald Mosley submitted a fraudulent loan application on behalf of Forward Thinking Investors, Inc., an entity they controlled, in August 2020. They received more than $1 million in PPP funds, and Reginald Mosley thereafter recruited acquaintances (including Wilborn, Boren, and Conway) who owned companies that existed before February 2020 to submit additional fraudulent loan applications. Frank and Reginald Mosley helped prepare fraudulent loan applications for Wilborn, Boren, and Conway, who kicked back some of the PPP funds they received to the Mosley brothers. In fact, Frank and Reginald Mosley admitted they drafted a contract under which they would receive at least 15 percent of any fraudulently obtained PPP funds in exchange for their assistance in preparing and submitting fraudulent applications for Wilborn, Boren, and Conway. Finally, Frank and Reginald Mosley admitted filing fraudulent payroll tax returns with the IRS to cover up their scheme.

In her plea agreement, Ellis admitted she aided and advised the Mosley brothers and others in connection with their fraudulent PPP loan applications. She also admitted that, in 2020 and 2021, she fraudulently obtained almost $300,000 in PPP loans and other pandemic-relief aid in connection with an entity she falsely claimed to own and about which she made other material false statements, including regarding its number of employees and monthly payroll expenses. In fact, Ellis was unaffiliated with the entity, whose true owner had no awareness of, or involvement in, the preparation and submission of Ellis' loan applications.

The PPP was administered by the SBA as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a federal law enacted in March 2020 to provide billions of dollars in emergency financial assistance to millions of Americans suffering from the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The PPP provided forgivable loans to small businesses for job retention and certain other qualified business expenses.

In addition to sentencing all six defendants to prison, Judge Martínez-Olguín ordered each of them to serve three years of supervised release to begin after their prison terms are completed. Judge Martínez-Olguín also ordered each defendant to pay restitution in an amount to be set at a later date.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Abraham Fine is prosecuting these cases with assistance from Kay Konopaske. The prosecutions are the result of an investigation by IRS-CI, SBA OIG, and the Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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This Microsoft-approved website tracks how Windows games play on Arm

Microsoft pointed it out at build today..

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

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With Microsoft’s new Surfaces leading a wave of Copilot Plus PCs powered by Arm chips that could reshape our expectations of Windows laptops , you might be wondering: do they game?

• Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops
• Qualcomm quietly demos Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control on Snapdragon X Elite laptops

We’d already seen a few examples, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control — but at Build, Microsoft and Qualcomm just revealed a new website with far more examples. WorksOnWoA.com has apparently already tested 1,481 games on the Surface Laptop and other devices with Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chips, and it lets you search to see whether your game of choice falls into one of four categories: “Perfect,” “Playable,” “Runs,” or “Unplayable.”

Here’s what each of those terms mean, according to Linaro , the Arm engineering group that built the website and counts Microsoft and Qualcomm among its supporters:

Perfect: Runs at 60+ FPS at 1080p resolution with no glitches / issues that affect gaming experience Playable: Runs at 30+ FPS at 1080p resolution with minimal glitches/ issues that affect gaming experience Runs: Runs with bugs that may affect gaming experience Unplayable: Does not run due to anti-cheat or other failures

Unfortunately, the site doesn’t specify graphics settings — it’s quite possible they’re running at the lowest levels of detail. Some of them are also using Microsoft’s AI upscaling to reach that frame rate and resolution target, though the website keeps track of that, too.

In a Build session, Microsoft and Qualcomm showed us how Borderlands 3 runs about 60 percent faster with Auto Super Resolution versus native 1440p by tapping into the Qualcomm chip’s NPU, for example:

Though Auto Super Res could maintain the same frame rate at a higher effective resolution instead:

Anyhow, 747 games are currently listed as running at a “perfect” 1080p and 60fps, including Control Ultimate Edition , and it should be easy to check against Linaro’s findings when final devices come out.

Here’s the whole list of 19 “unplayable” games so far, like Fortnite, Roblox, and PUBG , many of which famously don’t run on the Steam Deck due to their anti-cheat measures:

Microsoft says that the BattlEye anti-cheat system does support Arm, though support wasn’t necessarily enough to get big games that use it onto the Steam Deck.

As far as the accuracy of these tests, Linaro says:

The information is intended to serve as a guide, but does not absolutely guarantee that a game will run. The results have been tested, but may not work on your specific machine and configuration. If your results differ, please contribute to the site with your own findings.

If you want to submit your own results, Linaro is taking your contributions — in the form of commits and pull requests .

The Sonos Ace headphones are here, and they’re damn impressive

She sold her bathwater — paypal took her profits, microsoft build 2024: everything announced, humane is looking for a buyer after the ai pin’s underwhelming debut, inside microsoft’s mission to take down the macbook air.

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US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election

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Taiwan has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes while it also encounters the largest amount of foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Because of the large influx of misinformation, Taiwan has taken a public crowdsourcing approach to combatting misinformation, using both fact-checking ChatBots and public dataset called CoFacts. Combining CoFacts with large-language models (LLM), we investigated misinformation across three platforms (Line, PTT, and Facebook) during the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. We found that most misinformation appears within China-friendly political groups and attacks US-Taiwan relations through visual media like images and videos. A considerable proportion of misinformation does not question U.S. foreign policy directly. Rather, it exaggerates domestic issues in the United States to create a sense of declining U.S. state capacity. Curiously, we found misinformation rhetoric that references conspiracy groups in the West.

Program in Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College, USA

Department of Political Science, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA

Department of Computer Science, Barnard College, USA

Research Questions

• What are the misinformation narratives surrounding the election in Taiwan and how do they target international relations with the United States?
• What geographical or temporal patterns emerge from misinformation data?
• Who are the targets of these misinformation narratives and through what modalities?

Essay Summary

• We leveraged a dataset of 41,291 labeled articles from Line, 911,510 posts from Facebook, and 2,005,972 posts and comments from PTT to understand misinformation dynamics through topic modeling and network analysis.
• The primary form of misinformation is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.
• Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.
• Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share many themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.
• Our study shows the prevalence of misinformation strategies using visual media and fake news websites. It also highlights how crowdsourcing and advances in large-language models can be used to identify misinformation in cross-platform workflows.

Implications

According to Freedom House, Taiwan has one of the highest indices for free speech in Asia (Freedom House, 2022). Additionally, due to its contentious history with China, it receives significant foreign interference and misinformation, especially during its presidential elections. Due to the large influx of dis- and misinformation, Taiwan has developed many strategies to counter misleading narratives, including fact-checking ChatBots on its most popular chatroom app (Chang et al., 2020). Under this information environment, the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election emerged as one of the most divisive elections in Taiwan’s history, featuring at one point a doubling of presidential candidates in a typically two-party race, from two to four. As such, Taiwan is regarded as a “canary for disinformation” against elections in 2024, as a first indicator to how foreign interference may take place in other democracies (Welch, 2024).

In this paper, we study the misinformation ecosystem in Taiwan starting a year prior to the election. First, our findings highlight the interaction between misinformation and international relations. As was reported in The Economist and The New York Times , a considerable portion of the misinformation spread in Taiwan before the 2024 election is about US-skepticism, which aims at undermining the reputation of the United States among Taiwanese people (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023; Hsu, Chien, and Myers, 2023). This phenomenon is significant because it does not target specific candidates or parties in the election but may indirectly influence the vote choice between pro- and anti-U.S. parties. Given the US-China global competition and the Russia-Ukraine ongoing conflict, the reputation of the United States is crucial for the strength and reliability of democratic allies (Cohen, 2003). Hence, it is not surprising that misinformation about the United States may propagate globally and influence elections across democracies. However, our findings surprisingly show that US-skepticism also includes a considerable number of attacks on U.S. domestic politics. Such content does not question the U.S. foreign policy but undermines the perceived reliability and state capacity of the United States. Here, s tate capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal, which is conceptually different from motivation and trust.

US-skepticism is commonly characterized as mistrusting the motivations of the United States, as illustrated in the Latin American context due to long histories of political influence (see dependency theory; Galeano, 1997), but our findings suggest that perceived U.S. state capacity is also an important narrative. As most foreign disinformation arises from China, this indicates a greater trend where authoritarian countries turn to sharp power tactics to distort information and defame global competitors rather than winning hearts and minds through soft power. Sharp power refers to the ways in which authoritarian regimes project their influence abroad to pierce, penetrate, or perforate the informational environments in targeted countries (Walker, 2018). In Taiwan’s case, China may not be able to tell China’s story well, but can still influence Taiwanese voters by making them believe that the United States is declining. Our findings suggest that future work analyzing the topics and keywords of misinformation in elections outside the United States should also consider the US-skepticism as one latent category, not just the politicians and countries as is common with electoral misinformation (Tenove et al., 2018). These findings are corroborated by narratives identified by a recent report including drug issues, race relations, and urban decay (Microsoft Threat Intelligence, 2024).

Additionally, our research investigates both misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are closely related. Whereas misinformation is broadly described as “false or inaccurate information” (Jerit & Zhao, 2020), a conspiracy theory is the belief that harmful events are caused by a powerful, often secretive, group. In particular, conspiracy communities often coalesce around activities of “truth-seeking,” embodying a contrarian view toward commonly held beliefs (Enders et al., 2022; Harambam, 2020; Konkes & Lester, 2017). Our findings also provide evidence of transnational similarities between conspiracy groups in Taiwan and the United States. Whereas the domestic context has been explored (Chen et al., 2023; Jerit & Zhao, 2020), the intersection of partisanship and conspiracy groups as conduits for cross-national misinformation flow deserves further investigation.

Second, our findings reemphasize that an IP address is not a reliable criterion for attributing foreign intervention.  Previous studies on Chinese cyber armies show that they use a VPN for their activities on Twitter (now X) (Wang et al., 2020) and Facebook (Frenkel, 2023). Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is a public forum in Taiwan that by default contains the IP address of the poster. Our analysis of PTT located a group of accounts with US IP addresses that have the same activity pattern as other Taiwan-based accounts. Therefore, it is likely that these accounts use VPN to hide their geolocation. Our results provide additional evidence that this VPN strategy also appears on secondary and localized social media platforms. Our results suggest that the analysis of the originating location of misinformation should not be based entirely on IP addresses.

Third, our findings show that text is far from the only format used in the spread of misinformation. A considerable amount of misinformation identified on Facebook is spread through links (47%), videos (21%), and photos (15%). These items may echo each other’s content or even feature cross-platform flow. Proper tools are needed to extract and juxtapose content from different types of media so that researchers can have a holistic analysis of the spread and development of misinformation (Tucker et al., 2018). Such tools are urgent since mainstream social media has adopted and highly encouraged short videos—a crucial area for researchers to assess how misinformation spreads across platforms in the upcoming year of elections. This understanding is also important for fact-check agencies because they must prepare for collecting and reviewing information on various topics found in multiple media types across platforms. Crowdsourcing, data science, expert inputs, and international collaboration are all needed to deal with multi-format misinformation environments.

With prior studies showing that the aggregated fact checks (known as wisdom of the crowds) perform on par with expert ratings (see Arechar et al., 2023; Martel et al., 2023), our case study also evidences how crowdsourcing and LLM approaches can not only quickly fact-check but also summarize larger narrative trends. In Taiwan, this takes form of the CoFacts open dataset, which we use to identify misinformation narratives. CoFacts is a project initiated by g0v (pronounced “gov zero”), a civic hacktivism community in Taiwan that started in 2012. CoFacts started as a fact-checking ChatBot that circumvents the closed nature of chatroom apps, where users can forward suspicious messages or integrate the ChatBot into private rooms. These narratives are then sent to a database. Individual narratives are subsequently reviewed by more than 2,000 volunteers, including teachers, doctors, students, engineers, and retirees (Haime, 2022). As a citizen-initiated project, it is not affiliated with any government entity or party.

Crucially, these reviews provide valuable labels that are used to train AI models and fine-tune LLMs. The dataset is available open source on the popular deep-learning platform HuggingFace. Just as AI and automation can be used to spread misinformation (Chang, 2023; Chang & Ferrara, 2022; Ferrara et al., 2020; Monaco & Woolley, 2022), it can also help combat “fake news” through human-AI collaboration.

Finding 1: The primary form of misinformation  is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.

The status quo between China and Taiwan is marked by Taiwan’s self-identification as a sovereign state, which is in contrast to China’s view of Taiwan as part of its territory under the “One China” policy. As brief context, China has claimed Taiwan as its territory since 1949, but the United States has helped maintain the status quo and peace after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. After democratization in 1987, Taiwan’s politics have been dominated by a clear blue-green division. The blue camp is led by Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT hereafter), the founding party of the Republic of China (ROC, the formal name of Taiwan’s government based on its constitution) who was defeated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The green camp is led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which pursues revising the ROC Constitution and changing the country’s name to Taiwan. The political cleavage between the blue and green camps is dictated by Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC and the United States. The blue camp’s position is that the PRC and ROC are under civil war but belong to the same Chinese nation, and thus the blue camp appreciates military support from the United States while enhancing economic and cultural cooperation with the PRC. The green camp believes that the necessary conditions for Taiwan to be free and independent are to stand firmly with the United States and maintain distance from the PRC. After 2020, the two major camps’ insufficient attention to domestic and social issues caused the rise of nonpartisans and a third party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP or the white camp), which strategically avoids discussing foreign policies. In the 2024 election, the ruling DPP party (green) was reelected with 40% of votes for the third consecutive presidency (from 2016 to 2028), while KMT (blue) and TPP (white) received 33% and 26% of votes, respectively.

The U.S. “One China” policy since 1979 indicates that the United States opposes any change to the status quo unless it is solved peacefully. This has motivated the PRC to persuade Taiwanese citizens to support unification using misinformation targeted at China-friendly political groups, as the cost of unification would be greatly reduced if sufficient Taiwanese citizens opposed U.S. military intervention. This history between the United States and Taiwan serves as the foundation of US-skepticism. In the literature, US-skepticism in Taiwan is composed of two key psychological elements: trust and motivation (Wu & Lin, 2019; Wu, 2023). First, many Taiwanese no longer trust the United States after the United States switched diplomatic ties from Taiwan (ROC) to the PRC in 1979. Many blue-camp supporters doubt the commitment of the United States to send troops should China invade, per the Taiwan Relations Act (Wu & Lin, 2019). Second, Taiwanese citizens question Taiwan’s role as a proxy in a potential war with China instead of sincerely protecting democracy and human rights in Taiwan (Wu, 2023).

The CoFacts dataset contains 140,314 articles submitted by Line users, which are then fact-checked by volunteers as rumor (47%), not a rumor (21%), not an article (19%), and opinion (13%). Here, rumor is synonymous with misinformation. Using the CoFacts dataset, we trained a BERTopic model to identify 34 forms of misinformation and then ranked them by their overlap with the word “elections” in Mandarin Chinese (George & Sumathy, 2023; Nguyen et al., 2020). Table 1 shows the top nine narratives.

Many of these narratives are directly related to political parties or the democratic process. For instance, the highest-ranked topic is attacking the incumbent party (the DPP) at 18.1%, which contains 2,371 total posts. The subsequent misinformation topics focus on policy issues and specific narratives—international relations, issues of marriage and birth rate, vaccines, nuclear energy, biometrics, egg imports, and the war in Ukraine. These are known cleavage issues and overlap with the eight central concerns during the election cycle—economic prosperity, cross-strait affairs, wealth distribution, political corruption, national security, social reform/stability, and environmental protection (Achen & Wang, 2017; Achen & Wang, 2019; Chang & Fang, 2023).

We focus on the third type of misinformation, which is the relationship between Taiwan, the United States, and China. US-skepticism is not only the largest at 10,826 individual posts, but one flagged by journalists, policymakers, and politicians as one of the most crucial themes. This is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of proportion, which aims to sow distrust toward the United States (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023). In contrast, questioning the fairness of process (i.e. ballot numbers) and policy positions (i.e. gay marriage) are common during elections. However, US-skeptical misinformation diverges in that there is no explicit political candidate or party targeted. By sampling the topic articles within this category and validating using an LLM-summarizer through the ChatGPT API, we identified three specific narratives:

(a) The United States and the threat of war: Ukraine intersects frequently in this topic, with videos of direct military actions. Example: “Did you hear former USA military strategist Jack Keane say the Ukrainian war is an investment. The USA spends just $66,000,000,000 and can make Ukraine and Russia fight…  Keane then mentions Taiwan is the same, where Taiwanese citizens are an ‘investment’ for Americans to fight a cheap war. The USA is cold and calculating, without any actual intent to help Taiwan!”

(b) Economic atrophy due to fiscal actions by the United States: These narratives focus on domestic policy issues in Taiwan such as minimum wage and housing costs. Example: “The USA printed 4 trillion dollars and bought stocks everywhere in the world, including Taiwan, and caused inflation and depressed wages. Be prepared!”

(c) Vaccine supply and the United States: While some narratives focus on the efficacy of vaccines, several describe the United States intentionally limiting supply during the pandemic. Example: “Taiwanese Dr. Lin is a leading scientist at Moderna, yet sells domestically at $39 per two doses, $50 to Israel. Taiwan must bid at least $60! The United States clearly does not value Taiwan.”

These narratives reveal a new element to US-skepticism: state capacity. As previously mentioned, state capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal. The Ukraine war and vaccine supply narratives both question the United States’ motivations in foreign policies and perceived trustworthiness. Meanwhile, the economic atrophy narrative is based on the United States’ domestic budgetary deficit and downstream impact on Taiwanese economy. These narratives frame U.S. state capacity as declining and imply that the United States could no longer realize any other commitment due to its lack of resources and capacity. The goal of such a narrative is to lower the Taiwanese audience’s belief that the United States will help. But such a narrative does not include keywords of its target group (e.g., Taiwan) nor the PCR’s goal (e.g., unification) and only works through framing and priming as an example of sharp power. 

The specific focus of misinformation narratives related to the United States is composed of Ukraine (28.8%), the economy and fiscal policies (33.1%), technology (25.2%), and vaccine supply (9.9%). Misinformation related to state capacity takes up approximately 52.4%, more than half of all narratives (see Figure A1, part a in the Appendix). In all narratives, political parties are only referenced 27.8% of the time with the DPP the primary target (26.2%), which is almost half of the proportion for state capacity. China is only mentioned in tandem with the United States in 38.4% of the posts (see Figure A1, part b in the Appendix).

Finding 2: Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.

Once we identified the top misinformation narratives using Line, we investigated information operations or coordination. Line is one of Taiwan’s most popular communication apps featuring chatrooms (similar to WhatsApp), with 83% usage. One limitation of Line is that although we can analyze message content, Line chatrooms can be seen as conversations behind “closed doors”—platforms cannot impose content moderation and researchers have no access to the users themselves nor to the private chatroom in which users engage with misinformation (Chang et al., 2020). PTT, on the other hand, provides a public forum-like environment in which users can interact. Figure 1 shows the co-occurrence network of users who post comments under the same forum. Each circle (node) represents a user who posts on PTT. If two users make mutual comments on more than 200 posts, then they are connected (form a tie). Intuitively, this means if two users are connected or “close” to each other by mutual connections, then they are likely coordinating or have extremely similar behaviors. The placement of the users reflects this and is determined by their connections.

Using the Louvain algorithm (Traag, 2015), a common method to identify communities on social networks, five communities emerged from our dataset. Each community is colored separately, with clear clusters, except for teal which is more integrated. In particular, the yellow cluster is significantly separate from the others. This means they share significant activity amongst their own community, but less so with other communities. This suggests premeditated coordination rather than organic discussion, as the users would have to target the same post with high frequency. Prior studies have shown analyzing temporal patterns can provide insight into information operations. Specifically, overseas content farms often follow a regular cadence, posting content before peak hours in Taiwan on Twitter (Wang et al., 2020) and YouTube (Hsu & Lin, 2023).

To better understand the temporal dynamics on PTT, we plotted the distribution of posts and comments over a 24-hour period. Specifically, we focused on the top two countries by volume—Taiwan and the United States. Figure 2, part a shows the time of posting. Taiwan’s activity increases from 6 in the morning until it peaks at noon (when people are on lunch break), then steadily declines into the night. In contrast, posts from the United States peak at midnight and 8 a.m. Taipei time, which corresponds to around noon and 8 p.m. in New York, respectively. This provides an organic baseline as to when we might expect people to post.

However, in Figure 2, part b, while the distribution for Taiwan (blue) remains unchanged, the peak for the United States (orange) occurs at the same time as Taiwan. One explanation is that users are responding to posts in Taiwan. The second is that users in Asia—potentially China—are using a VPN to appear as if they are in the United States. This coincides with a report by Meta Platforms that found large numbers of CCP-operated Facebook accounts and subsequently removed them (Frenkel, 2023).

The more curious issue is when considering the activity of the yellow group from Figure 1, the temporal pattern (green) shows a sharp increase in activity at 10 a.m., which then coincides with both the peaks for Taiwan (12) and the United States (22). The sudden burst of activity is consistent with prior findings on content farms from China, where posting behavior occurs when content farm workers clock in regularly for work (Wang et al., 2020). While it is difficult to prove the authenticity of these accounts, the structural and temporal aspects suggest coordination. Figure A2 in the appendix shows further evidence of coordination through the frequency distribution of counts for co-occurring posts. For the US-based group, a distribution akin to a power law appears, commonly found within social systems (Adamic & Huberman, 2000; Chang et al., 2023; Clauset et al., 2009). In contrast, the coordinated group features a significantly heavier tail, with a secondary, “unnatural,” peak at around 15 co-occurrences.

To better understand the content of these groups, Table A1 shows the summary of comments of each group and the originating post, using a large-language model for abstractive summarization (see Methods). We report the top points for comments and posts in Table A1. The coordinated community focuses on businessman Terry Gou, who considered running as a blue-leaning independent. The comments attack the incumbent DPP and their stance toward foreign policy. One popular post features President Tsai’s controversial meeting with Kevin McCarthy, then the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. When a journalist asked McCarthy if he would “invite President Tsai to Congress… or… Washington,” McCarthy replied, “I don’t have any invitation out there right now. Today we were able to meet her as she transits through America, I thought that was very productive.” While this was positively framed, the title of the post itself was translated as “McCarthy will not invite Tsai to the United States” (Doomdied, 2023). This takes on a common tactic in misinformation where statements are intentionally distorted to produce negative framings of a particular candidate.

Comments from U.S. IP addresses between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. focus on the potential alliance between the KMT and TPP. These posts are KMT-leaning with criticism toward both Lai and Ko, who are two oppositional candidates to the KMT. Some users argue that while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a negative force, the United States is not automatically a positive force, as the United States does not explicitly support Taiwan’s international recognition or economic integration. In general, both posts and comments express that Taiwan should not rely too heavily on either China or the United States. This echoes the element of trust in the US-skepticism from the historical experience between ROC and the United States.

Both the U.S.-based and coordinated groups appear as blue-leaning audiences. What differentiates the first and second case is clear evidence of misinformation in the former through inaccurate framing. While US-skepticism may be a valid political stance, if the ambient information environment contains inaccurate information, then the democratic deliberative process is at risk. The case of US-skepticism is also one where stance and truth-value are often conflated, which may influence the process of voter deliberation.

Finding 3: Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.

Lastly, we considered the groups in which misinformation is common and the way misinformation is delivered. To do so, we queried CrowdTangle using the titles and links from the CoFacts dataset specific to US-Taiwan relations. This yielded 4,632 posts from public groups. Table 2 shows the groups ranked by the total number of misinformation articles identified.

There are two themes to these groups. First, they are often pan-Blue media outlets ( CTI News ), politician support groups ( Wang Yo-Zeng Support Group ), and ROC national identity groups ( I’m an ROC Fan ). The second type is somewhat unexpected but extremely interesting; it consists of groups that espouse freedom of speech ( Support CTI News and Free Speech ) and truth-seeking ( Truth Engineering Taiwan Graduate School ), topics often regarded as conspiracies. These topics are reminiscent of those in the West, such as the rhetoric around “fake news” and “truthers,” and paint a transnational picture of how misinformation coalesces. The second largest group is Trump for the World , which supports a politician known to court conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon. These groups also serve as the “capacity” element of US-skepticism, implying that the United States is in trouble for its domestic issues and is not a reliable partner to Taiwan. Furthermore, these groups have sizable followings—ranging from 8,279 to 43,481. We show the mean, as the total number of members fluctuated over our one-year period.

Lastly, we found that the majority of misinformation contains some form of multimedia, such as video (36%) or photos (15%), as shown in Figure 3, part a. Only 1% is a direct status. This may be due to CrowdTangle not surfacing results from normal users, but the ratio of multimedia to text is quite high. This aligns with extant studies showing the growth of multimodal misinformation (Micallef et al., 2022) and also user behavior in algorithm optimization (Chang et al., 2022; Dhanesh et al., 2022; Pulley, 2020)—posts with multimedia tend to do better than posts with only text.

Moreover, 47% contain a URL. Figure 3, part b shows one of the top domains containing misinformation (beyondnews852.com) after filtering out common domains such as YouTube. The site is named “Beyond News Net” and is visually formatted like a legitimate news site to increase the perceived credibility of information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007; Wölker & Powell, 2021). The ability to rapidly generate legitimate-looking news sites as a tactic for misinformation may become a challenge for both media literacy and technical approaches to fight misinformation.

We utilized three unique misinformation datasets—Line, Facebook, and PTT—with dates between 01/12/2023 and 11/10/2023. The CoFacts dataset includes 140,193 received messages, 96,432 that have been labeled as misinformation, facts, opinion, or not relevant. Of this, 41,564 entries are misinformation. The CoFacts dataset is not only methodologically useful but exemplifies a crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking misinformation as an actual platform intervention. Moreover, it is public and transparent, allowing for replicability. Using a subset of articles and posts containing misinformation, we trained a topic model using BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022). On a high level, using BERTopic involves five steps: 1) extract embeddings using a sentence transformer, 2) reduce dimensionality, 3) cluster reduced embeddings, 4) tokenize topics, and 5) create topic representation.

We conducted several trials, experimenting with parameters such as different sentence transformer models and minimum cluster sizes for the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm. The model used to extract topics for this paper utilized paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 for our sentence embedding model (Reimers & Gurevych, 2019), had a minimum cluster size of 80 for the clustering algorithm, and used tokenize_zh for our tokenizer. Our model yielded 34 topics. We also trained a model based on latent-Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), but found the BERTopic results to be more interpretable. We then labeled all messages to indicate whether they included reference to the election or not, and ranked the topics by their election-related percentage to measure electoral salience. For our subsequent analysis, we focused on topic 3 (see Table 1), which captures general discourse about the relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan.

The Facebook dataset was extracted using CrowdTangle. We queried posts containing links and headlines from topic 3. We also cross-sectioned these links and headlines with a general election-based dataset with 911,510 posts. This yielded a total of 4,632 of posts shared on public Facebook groups and 227,125 engagements. Due to privacy concerns, it is not possible to obtain private posts from users on their own Facebook timelines, private groups, or messages. However, public groups are a good proxy for general discourse, in addition to providing ethnic or partisan affiliations via their group name (Chang & Fang, 2023). In other words, while CoFacts provides the misinformation narratives, Facebook public groups give insight into the targets of misinformation.

Lastly, we scraped PTT using Selenium. Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is unique in that it contains the IP address of the poster, though this could be shrouded by proxy farms or VPNs. First, we scraped all posts that contained reference to the United States and the election, which yielded 22,576 posts and 1,983,396 comments, all with IP addresses, addresses provided by PTT, and the time of posting. We expanded the scope of this analysis as we were interested in the general discourse directly related to the United States, and the geospatial and temporal patterns that arose. 

Due to the large amount of data, there are three general approaches we could have taken—local extractive summarization with LLMs, local abstractive summarization with LLMs, and server-based abstractive summarization (such as ChatGPT). Local extractive summarization is a method that embeds each of the input sentences and then outputs five of the most representative sentences. However, this approach is often too coarse, as it returns sentences with the highest centrality but does not summarize general themes across all the different comments or posts. On the other hand, abstractive summarization works by considering the entire context by ingesting many documents and then summarizing across them. This provides a more generalized characterization of key themes. However, the input size is the primary bottleneck as large-language models can only ingest so many tokens (or words), which also need to be held in memory—the case for our project, as we are summarizing more than 10,000 posts.

To circumvent these issues, we sampled the maximum number of posts or comments that could fit within 16,000 tokens and then made a query call using the ChatGPT API. This provided a summary based on a probabilistic sample of the posts and comments.

• / Elections

Cite this Essay

Chang, H. C. H., Wang, A. H. E., & Fang Y. S. (2024). US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-144

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No funding has been received to conduct this research.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

No human subjects were included in this study.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All materials needed to replicate this study are available via the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5SPGDY . The Cofacts database is available on HuggingFace and Facebook via CrowdTangle per regulation of Meta Platforms.

Acknowledgements

H. C. would like to thank Brendan Nyhan, Sharanya Majumder, John Carey, and Adrian Rauschfleish for their comments. H. C. would like to thank the Dartmouth Burke Research Initiation Award.

All authors contributed equally.