De Lijn (Belgium)

A wide part of research on misinformation has relied lies on fake-news detection, a task framed as the prediction of veracity labels attached to articles or claims. Yet social-science research has repeatedly emphasized that information manipulation goes beyond fabricated content and often relies on amplification dynamics. This theoretical turn has consequences for operationalization in applied social science research. What changes empirically when prediction targets move from veracity to diffusion? And which performance level can be attained in limited resources setups ? In this paper we compare fake-news detection and virality prediction across two datasets, EVONS and FakeNewsNet. We adopt an evaluation-first perspective and examine how benchmark behavior changes when the prediction target shifts from veracity to diffusion. Our experiments show that fake-news detection is comparatively stable once strong textual embeddings are available, whereas virality prediction is much more sensitive to operational choices such as threshold definition and early observation windows. The paper proposes practical ways to operationalize lightweight, transparent pipelines for misinformation-related prediction tasks that can rival with state-of-the-art.

In Belgium, there is a growing awareness about the importance of informal carers to cover persons' care and support needs. In the last decades several efforts were made in order to support informal carers, reduce levels of burden and enhance quality of life. In 2016, Flanders launched the Flemish informal care policy plan 2016-2020, which was created to valorise and support informal carers in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium and in Brussels. This policy plan came to an end and an evaluation of its implementation was necessary to outline future policy priorities and actions. The evaluation methodology used insights from the analytic hierarchy process and was characterised by a participatory approach. Stakeholders from different stakeholder groups (i.e., informal carers, informal care organisations, organisations for persons with care and support needs and their relatives, professional care organisations, policy makers and researchers) were involved in all steps of the research process. In collaboration with the researchers, stakeholders generated knowledge, which formed the basis for the next steps of the research process. Focus groups were held with each stakeholder group, which aimed to explore the goals of a successful Flemish informal care policy. Six goals were identified by the participants, each containing around eight preconditions to achieve the identified goal. The generated input was used in an online questionnaire to evaluate the Flemish informal care policy plan 2016-2020 and define priorities for a new informal care policy plan. The online questionnaire gathered data of 1,045 respondents from different stakeholder groups. Although the results show that the identified needs and priorities in the Flemish informal care policy plan 2016-2020 are still prominent, there is a discrepancy between the perspective of informal carers and the perspective of health and social care professionals. Most informal carers indicate that the various priorities of a successful informal care policy were not present in the implementation of the Flemish informal care plan 2016-2020, which was not the case for health and social care professionals. Regarding the new Flemish informal care policy plan, two objectives were prioritised by most participants in the different participant profiles: ‘recognising and acknowledging informal carers’ and 'supporting informal carers'. The selected goals for a new informal care policy plan as well as the selected preconditions within these goals show that the provision of care and support should be perceived as a process rather than a product. Furthermore, informal care should be approached as a matter that goes beyond care and wellbeing. Following the evaluation study, a participatory trajectory was initiated to outline future policy priorities and actions for a new informal care policy plan. Therefore, interviews with experts and policymakers were conducted, cocreation workshops with informal care organisations were held and a validation session with broader stakeholders was conducted. The evaluation study and participatory trajectory offered interesting insights for the creation of a sense of ownership in policy making and facilitated content development and implementation of a new informal care policy plan, taking various stakeholder perspectives into account.

To answer the long‐standing question if we can predict plant invader success based on characteristics of the environment (invasibility) or the invasive species (invasiveness), or the combination of both, there is a need for detailed observational studies in which habitat properties, non‐native plant traits, and the resulting invader success are locally measured. In this study, we assess the interaction of gradients in the environmental and trait space on non‐native species fitness, expressed as seed production, for a set of 10 invasive and noninvasive non‐native species along a wide range of invaded sites in Flanders. In our multidimensional approach, most of the single environmental gradients (temperature, light availability, native plant species diversity, and soil fertility) and sets of non‐native plant traits (plant size, photosynthesis, and foliar chemical attributes) related positively with invader seed production. Yet correlation with seed production was much stronger when several environmental gradients were assessed in interaction, and even more so when we combined plant traits and habitat properties. The latter increased explanatory power of the models on average by 25% for invasive and by 7% for noninvasive species. Additionally, we report a 70‐fold higher seed production in invasive than in noninvasive species and fundamentally different correlations of seed production with plant traits and habitat properties in noninvasive versus invasive species. We conclude that locally measured traits and properties deserve much more attention than they currently get in invasion literature and thus encourage further studies combining this level of detail with the generality of a multiregion and multispecies approach across different stages of invasion.