scholarly journals The Theory of Informative Fictions: A Character-Based Approach to False News and other Misinformation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Drew B Margolin
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
Normative Problem ◽  
False News

Abstract This article derives a theory of informative fictions (TIF). Common forms of misinformation—fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories—while dysfunctional for communicating property information—information about the state and operation of things—can actually be valuable for communicating character information—information about the motivations of social agents. It is argued that narratives containing “false facts” can effectively portray a speaker's theory of another individual's character. Thus, such narratives are useful for gathering information about leaders and other important individuals who are evaluated in the community. After deriving the theory, TIF is used to derive propositions predicting the empirical conditions under which misinformation will be accepted, tolerated or promoted. The implications of the theory for addressing the normative problem of misinformation are also discussed.

scholarly journals False news around COVID-19 circulated less on Sina Weibo than on Twitter. How to overcome false information?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Pulido Rodríguez ◽  
Beatriz Villarejo Carballido ◽  
Gisela Redondo-Sama ◽  
Mengna Guo ◽  
Mimar Ramis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
World Economic Forum ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
False Information ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
World Economic ◽  
False News

Since the Coronavirus health emergency was declared, many are the fake news that have circulated around this topic, including rumours, conspiracy theories and myths. According to the World Economic Forum, fake news is one of the threats in today's societies, since this type of information circulates fast and is often inaccurate and misleading. Moreover, fake-news are far more shared than evidence-based news among social media users and thus, this can potentially lead to decisions that do not consider the individual’s best interest. Drawing from this evidence, the present study aims at comparing the type of Tweets and Sina Weibo posts regarding COVID-19 that contain either false or scientific veracious information. To that end 1923 messages from each social media were retrieved, classified and compared. Results show that there is more false news published and shared on Twitter than in Sina Weibo, at the same time science-based evidence is more shared on Twitter than in Weibo but less than false news. This stresses the need to find effective practices to limit the circulation of false information.

Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Pereira ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel ◽  
Elizabeth Ann Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Social Goals ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
System P ◽  
False News ◽  
Democrats And Republicans ◽  
The Impact

Political misinformation, often called “fake news”, represents a threat to our democracies because it impedes citizens from being appropriately informed. Evidence suggests that fake news spreads more rapidly than real news—especially when it contains political content. The present article tests three competing theoretical accounts that have been proposed to explain the rise and spread of political (fake) news: (1) the ideology hypothesis— people prefer news that bolsters their values and worldviews; (2) the confirmation bias hypothesis—people prefer news that fits their pre-existing stereotypical knowledge; and (3) the political identity hypothesis—people prefer news that allows their political in-group to fulfill certain social goals. We conducted three experiments in which American participants read news that concerned behaviors perpetrated by their political in-group or out-group and measured the extent to which they believed the news (Exp. 1, Exp. 2, Exp. 3), and were willing to share the news on social media (Exp. 2 and 3). Results revealed that Democrats and Republicans were both more likely to believe news about the value-upholding behavior of their in-group or the value-undermining behavior of their out-group, supporting a political identity hypothesis. However, although belief was positively correlated with willingness to share on social media in all conditions, we also found that Republicans were more likely to believe and want to share apolitical fake new. We discuss the implications for theoretical explanations of political beliefs and application of these concepts in in polarized political system.

Political psychology in the digital (mis)information age: A model of news belief and sharing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel ◽  
Elizabeth Ann Harris ◽  
Philip Pärnamets ◽  
Steve Rathje ◽  
Kimberly Doell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Integrative Model ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Social

The spread of misinformation, including “fake news,” propaganda, and conspiracy theories, represents a serious threat to society, as it has the potential to alter beliefs, behavior, and policy. Research is beginning to disentangle how and why misinformation is spread and identify processes that contribute to this social problem. We propose an integrative model to understand the social, political, and cognitive psychology risk factors that underlie the spread of misinformation and highlight strategies that might be effective in mitigating this problem. However, the spread of misinformation is a rapidly growing and evolving problem; thus scholars need to identify and test novel solutions, and work with policy makers to evaluate and deploy these solutions. Hence, we provide a roadmap for future research to identify where scholars should invest their energy in order to have the greatest overall impact.

scholarly journals Linguistic drivers of misinformation diffusion on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giandomenico Di Domenico ◽  
Annamaria Tuan ◽  
Marco Visentin
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Textual Cues ◽  
Twitter Users

AbstractIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retweets. In particular, the presence of misinformation plays an interesting role in spreading the tweet on the network. More importantly, the relative influence of the cues suggests that Twitter users actually read a tweet but not necessarily they understand or critically evaluate it before deciding to share it on the social media platform.

New Evidence of the Effect of Literacies in Reducing Disinformation and Fake News

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 300-333
Author(s):  
José Ricardo Ledur ◽  
Renato P. dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Student Perceptions ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Fake News ◽  
9Th Grade ◽  
Data Collection And Analysis ◽  
Information Literacy Skills ◽  
The Media ◽  
False News ◽  
New Evidence

Context: The production of scientific knowledge is not clearly understood by most individuals. In the information age, society faces challenges generated by discrediting institutions, including science, the proliferation of false news, disinformation and the relativisation of truth. These are significant issues that the school cannot refrain from discussing if it wants to educate for citizenship. Objectives: To investigate how conceptions about science influence and are influenced by fake news conveyed by the media and the contribution of literacy to minimise the effects of misinformation. Design: The methodology used in this research used a mixed-methods approach through content analysis of students’ responses combined with descriptive statistical techniques. Environment and participants: The research was carried out with 32 students, divided into two groups, attending the 9th grade of an elementary public school in Bom Princípio/RS. Data collection and analysis: Two questionnaires were applied: one for the conceptions about science and another to identify fake news. Results: Most students have a limited view of science and find it difficult to identify fake news through verification criteria. A correlation between student perceptions and the identification of false news was observed. Conclusions: Knowledge about science possibly enhances students’ perception of doubtful information. It is crucial to develop mediatic and information literacy skills as they can positively impact the identification of fake news and reduce its shares.

scholarly journals Fake news, fast and slow: Deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news headlines

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bence Bago ◽  
David Gertler Rand ◽  
Gordon Pennycook
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Time Pressure ◽  
Memory Load ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Fake News ◽  
System 2 ◽  
False News ◽  
News Headlines ◽  
Classical Account

What role does deliberation play in susceptibility to political misinformation and “fake news”? The “Motivated System 2 Reasoning” account posits that deliberation causes people to fall for fake news because reasoning facilitates identity-protective cognition and is therefore used to rationalize content that is consistent with one’s political ideology. The classical account of reasoning instead posits that people ineffectively discern between true and false news headlines when they fail to deliberate (and instead rely on intuition). To distinguish between these competing accounts, we investigated the causal effect of reasoning on media truth discernment using a two-response paradigm. Participants (N= 1635 MTurkers) were presented with a series of headlines. For each, they were first asked to give an initial, intuitive response under time pressure and concurrent working memory load. They were then given an opportunity to re-think their response with no constraints, thereby permitting more deliberation. We also compared these responses to a (deliberative) one-response baseline condition where participants made a single choice with no constraints. Consistent with the classical account, we found that deliberation corrected intuitive mistakes: subjects believed false headlines (but not true headlines) more in initial responses than in either final responses or the unconstrained 1-response baseline. In contrast – and inconsistent with the Motivated System 2 Reasoning account – we found that political polarization was equivalent across responses. Our data suggest that, in the context of fake news, deliberation facilitates accurate belief formation and not partisan bias.

scholarly journals Research note: The scale of Facebook’s problem depends upon how ‘fake news’ is classified

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Research Note ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Scale Problem ◽  
Media Organizations ◽  
False News

Ushering in the contemporary ‘fake news’ crisis, Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News reported that it outperformed mainstream news on Facebook in the three months prior to the 2016 US presidential elections. Here the report’s methods and findings are revisited for 2020. Examining Facebook user engagement of election-related stories, and applying Silverman’s classification of fake news, it was found that the problem has worsened, implying that the measures undertaken to date have not remedied the issue. If, however, one were to classify ‘fake news’ in a stricter fashion, as Facebook as well as certain media organizations do with the notion of ‘false news’, the scale of the problem shrinks. A smaller scale problem could imply a greater role for fact-checkers (rather than deferring to mass-scale content moderation), while a larger one could lead to the further politicisation of source adjudication, where labelling particular sources broadly as ‘fake’, ‘problematic’ and/or ‘junk’ results in backlash.

scholarly journals Coronavirus in Spain: Fear of ‘Official’ Fake News Boosts WhatsApp and Alternative Sources

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 462-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Elías ◽  
Daniel Catalan-Matamoros
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
The State ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Public Media ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Alternative Sources ◽  
Official Sources

The communication of the Coronavirus crisis in Spain has two unexpected components: the rise of the information on social networks, especially WhatsApp, and the consolidation of TV programs on mystery and esotericism. Both have emerged to “tell the truth” in opposition to official sources and public media. For a country with a long history of treating science and the media as properties of the state, this very radical development has surprised communication scholars.

Clarifying the Relations between Intellectual Humility and Misinformation Susceptibility

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shauna Marie Bowes ◽  
Arber Tasimi
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Psychological Characteristics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Intellectual Humility ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Cognitive Reflection ◽  
Three Samples

Misinformation is widespread and consequential. Thus, identifying psychological characteristics that might mitigate misinformation susceptibility represents a timely and pragmatically important issue. One construct that may be particularly relevant to misinformation susceptibility is intellectual humility (IH). As such, we examined whether IH is related to less misinformation susceptibility, what aspects of IH best predict misinformation susceptibility, and whether these relations are unique to IH. Across three samples, IH tended to manifest small-to-medium negative relations with misinformation susceptibility (pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fake news). IH measures assessing both intrapersonal and interpersonal features tended to be stronger correlates of misinformation susceptibility than measures assessing either intrapersonal or interpersonal features in isolation. These relations tended to remain robust after controlling for covariates (honesty-humility, cognitive reflection, political ideology). Future research should leverage our results to examine whether IH interventions not only reduce misinformation susceptibility but also lessen its appeal for those already committed to misinformation.

THE CONCEPT OF FAKE NEWS AND AND ITS DETECTION BY MEANS OF COMMUNICATIVE THEORY

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-39
Author(s):  
M. І. Hordiichuk
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Word Combination ◽  
Argumentative Strategy ◽  
The Media ◽  
Hybrid War ◽  
Communicative Theory ◽  
False News ◽  
Perlocutionary Effect ◽  
Modern Era

The article studies the concept of “fake news,” focusing on researching its etymology and the scope of its meaning. The meaning of the concept of “fake news” is studied based on the contrast with the word combination“false news”. The coinages “post-truth” and “fake news” have been recognized as the words of the year by different dictionaries in the recent years, which contributes to the image of the present-day media. Various definitions of fake news of different scholars were analyzed. It was found that fake news are relatively easy in making and spreading due to the advancement of modern technologies. However, they disrupt the faith of readers in media, which stands for the need for the detection of fake news in mass media. Consequently, the detection of fake news has been acknowledged as a crucial skill in the modern era. The paper analyzes the ways communicative theory can be used in the detection of fake news in the media. Four main strategies were identified, namely argumentative, appellative, evaluative, and the strategy of optimizing of perlocutionary effect. Each of the strategies is applied in various ways in fake news making with the use of appropriate tactics within their scope. The argumentative strategy operates with the tactics of manipulation and detalization. Tactics of ideologization, appeal to addressees’ needs and retrospection are used within the appellative strategy. Evaluative strategy includes the tactics of positioning, discrediting the opponent and distancing. And within the strategy of optimizing of perlocutionary effect the tactics of emotion evocation, mnemonization and visualization are identified. The paper provides a theoretical background to all of these strategies. Also, their practical application in the media was analyzed based on the examples taken from the independent fact-checking organization “StopFake”. It was found that all of them are frequently used in the hybrid war against Ukraine to disrupt its official government, treaties with European partners, and provoke chaos within the state.

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