Today, nearly everyone carries sophisticated devices that provide instant access to news reported from thousands of sources. An endless stream of stories appears on-screen with just the tap of an icon. This technology is often taken for granted, but it is, in fact, a revolution. Readers will trace the development of new kinds of journalism in the digital age, and evaluate the opportunities and dangers they provide.
This book provides a review of current research in fake news and presents six new empirical research studies examining its impact. Fake news has garnered immense public attention following the 2016 Brexit referendum, three US elections, the 2019 Indian lynchings, and so on. Fake news undermines public life across the globe, especially in countries where journalistic practices and institutions are weak. Some fake news is created to spread ideological messages or to create mischief, whereas other fake news is created for profit. Research shows that fake news spreads farther, faster, and more broadly than true news and has had major societal impacts. All signs indicate that it will get worse as political activists, scammers, alternative news media, and hostile governments become more sophisticated in their production and targeting of fake news. This book features leading scholars who provide a review of the current research and presents six new empirical research studies examining its impact. Some of this research shows how inventions designed to reduce fake news can actually have the opposite effect, and instead act to increase the spread of fake news. Other research takes a longer-term perspective, by measuring or inserting emotions into headlines, allowing us to examine some of the roots of fake news behaviors for future study. This shows how challenging the fake news phenomenon is to solve. Fake News on the Internet will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Media Studies, Research Methods, Information Systems, Communication Studies, Management, Cultural Studies and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Management Information Systems.
Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, , language: English, abstract: The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the problem of fake news and to evaluate if regulations of any kind could have a positive impact. The two following questions will be front and center: What are the primary challenges to Internet regulation in general and fake news in particular? What are possible paths to resolutions to those challenges? In order to analyze those questions, this paper will first address the consumption of news online and the role social media in particular. In a second step, the subject of "fake news" will be introduced. It will also take a look at the theoretical background and problems when it comes to regulations of online content. Then, those problems and possible solutions will be discussed in connection to the chosen example of fake news. Lastly, the results will be summarized and a conclusion will be drawn. Overall, it should be noted that the challenges described in this paper relate exclusively to political news and cannot be generalized across all subcategories of news. The discussion will focus primarily on the United States. This can mainly be justified due to their political and economic dominance on the world stage. Furthermore, major Internet companies, for instance Facebook, Twitter and Google, are all based in the United States. Finally, the recent presidential election has provoked an international debate and offers a great basis for further analysis. Events during the past decade have demonstrated that social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are changing the way individuals consume and share news. News stories can be distributed across borders and discussed by people around the world within minutes. One example includes news of the protests in the Middle East that spread through the social media networks Twitter and Facebook. Situations like this demonstrated how posted stories, photos and videos could immediately attract world-wide attention and how social media platforms can support news production and diffusion. Indeed, the spread of news on social media has become a phenomenon of increasing social, economic and political magnitude. Recently though, the proliferation of fake news on social media has been subject of an intensive international discussion.
This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news. Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of “alternative facts”, this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, concerns about fake news have fostered calls for government regulation and industry intervention to mitigate the influence of false content. These proposals are hindered by a lack of consensus concerning the definition of fake news or its origins. Media scholar Nolan Higdon contends that expanded access to critical media literacy education, grounded in a comprehensive history of fake news, is a more promising solution to these issues. The Anatomy of Fake News offers the first historical examination of fake news that takes as its goal the effective teaching of critical news literacy in the United States. Higdon employs a critical-historical media ecosystems approach to identify the producers, themes, purposes, and influences of fake news. The findings are then incorporated into an invaluable fake news detection kit. This much-needed resource provides a rich history and a promising set of pedagogical strategies for mitigating the pernicious influence of fake news.
Introduction -- How has the internet changed journalism? Why anonymity exists and works on newspapers? web sites / Steve Yelvington -- Citizen journalism and its importance / Demir Hodzic -- Journalism after Snowden: how the internet has changed the media / Matthias Spielkamp -- By relying on anonymous sources, the New York times fails to live up to its own standards / Reed Richardson -- Social media and investigative journalism / Syed Nazakat -- Balance and fairness / Alan D. Abbey -- What constitutes "fake news"? The difference between fake news and unverified news / A1skeptic -- "Who is posting comments on news stories, and why do they do it?" / Shan Wang -- How to spot fake news / Eugene Kiely & Lori Robertson -- Stanford study examines fake news and the 2016 presidential election / Krysten Crawford -- How 'fake news' exploded? and how to tell when the label is misused / Phil Torres -- How can we fight fake news? -- How to fight fake news and misinformation? research helps point the way / Elia Powers -- Education and automation: tools for navigating a sea of fake news / Victoria L. Rubin, Yimin Chen and Niall J. Conroy -- Fake news isn't all Facebook's fault: sprawling digital media made it worse / Lauren C. Williams -- Column: why click-bait will be the death of journalism / Jeffrey Dvorkin
In the past decade, social media has become increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area that is attracting tremendous attention. This book, from a data mining perspective, introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates challenging issues of fake news detection on social media. In particular, we discussed the value of news content and social context, and important extensions to handle early detection, weakly-supervised detection, and explainable detection. The concepts, algorithms, and methods described in this lecture can help harness the power of social media to build effective and intelligent fake news detection systems. This book is an accessible introduction to the study of detecting fake news on social media. It is an essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners to understand, manage, and excel in this area. This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, datasets, tools used in this book, and the source code of representative algorithms. The readers are encouraged to visit the book website for the latest information: http://dmml.asu.edu/dfn/
New perspectives on the misinformation ecosystem that is the production and circulation of fake news. What is fake news? Is it an item on Breitbart, an article in The Onion, an outright falsehood disseminated via Russian bot, or a catchphrase used by a politician to discredit a story he doesn't like? This book examines the real fake news: the constant flow of purposefully crafted, sensational, emotionally charged, misleading or totally fabricated information that mimics the form of mainstream news. Rather than viewing fake news through a single lens, the book maps the various kinds of misinformation through several different disciplinary perspectives, taking into account the overlapping contexts of politics, technology, and journalism. The contributors consider topics including fake news as “disorganized” propaganda; folkloric falsehood in the “Pizzagate” conspiracy; native advertising as counterfeit news; the limitations of regulatory reform and technological solutionism; Reddit's enabling of fake news; the psychological mechanisms by which people make sense of information; and the evolution of fake news in America. A section on media hoaxes and satire features an oral history of and an interview with prankster-activists the Yes Men, famous for parodies that reveal hidden truths. Finally, contributors consider possible solutions to the complex problem of fake news—ways to mitigate its spread, to teach students to find factually accurate information, and to go beyond fact-checking. Contributors Mark Andrejevic, Benjamin Burroughs, Nicholas Bowman, Mark Brewin, Elizabeth Cohen, Colin Doty, Dan Faltesek, Johan Farkas, Cherian George, Tarleton Gillespie, Dawn R. Gilpin, Gina Giotta, Theodore Glasser, Amanda Ann Klein, Paul Levinson, Adrienne Massanari, Sophia A. McClennen, Kembrew McLeod, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, Paul Mihailidis, Benjamin Peters, Whitney Phillips, Victor Pickard, Danielle Polage, Stephanie Ricker Schulte, Leslie-Jean Thornton, Anita Varma, Claire Wardle, Melissa Zimdars, Sheng Zou
The rise of the Internet has changed the way news is reported and consumed. One effect of these changes involves fake newsfalse news items that are spread through email and social media to discredit people and policies, most often in the realm of politics. This book examines the growth and influence of fake news in the US and beyond.
