scholarly journals Measuring the news and its impact on democracy

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (15) ◽  
pp. e1912443118
Author(s):  
Duncan J. Watts ◽  
David M. Rothschild ◽  
Markus Mobius
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Incorrect Information

Since the 2016 US presidential election, the deliberate spread of misinformation online, and on social media in particular, has generated extraordinary concern, in large part because of its potential effects on public opinion, political polarization, and ultimately democratic decision making. Recently, however, a handful of papers have argued that both the prevalence and consumption of “fake news” per se is extremely low compared with other types of news and news-relevant content. Although neither prevalence nor consumption is a direct measure of influence, this work suggests that proper understanding of misinformation and its effects requires a much broader view of the problem, encompassing biased and misleading—but not necessarily factually incorrect—information that is routinely produced or amplified by mainstream news organizations. In this paper, we propose an ambitious collective research agenda to measure the origins, nature, and prevalence of misinformation, broadly construed, as well as its impact on democracy. We also sketch out some illustrative examples of completed, ongoing, or planned research projects that contribute to this agenda.

scholarly journals An Analysis of Fake Narratives on Social Media during 2019 Indonesian Presidential Election

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-368
Author(s):  
Vience Mutiara Rumata ◽  
◽  
Fajar Kuala Nugraha ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Radical Group ◽  
Time Frames ◽  
Election Studies

Social media become a public sphere for political discussion in the world, with no exception in Indonesia. Social media have broadened public engagement but at the same time, it creates an inevitable effect of polarization particularly during the heightened political situation such as a presidential election. Studies found that there is a correlation between fake news and political polarization. In this paper, we identify and the pattern of fake narratives in Indonesia in three different time frames: (1) the Presidential campaign (23 September 2018 -13 April 2019); (2) the vote (14-17 April 2019); (3) the announcement (21-22 May 2019). We extracted and analyzed a data-set consisting of 806,742 Twitter messages, 143 Facebook posts, and 16,082 Instagram posts. We classified 43 fake narratives where Twitter was the most used platform to distribute fake narratives massively. The accusation of Muslim radical group behind Prabowo and Communist accusation towards the incumbent President Joko Widodo were the two top fake narratives during the campaign on Twitter and Facebook. The distribution of fake narratives to Prabowo was larger than that to Joko Widodo on those three platforms in this period. On the contrary, the distribution of fake narratives to Joko Widodo was significantly larger than that to Prabowo during the election and the announcement periods. The death threat of Joko Widodo was top fake narratives on these three platforms. Keywords: Fake narratives, Indonesian presidential election, social media, political polarization, post.

scholarly journals Fighting fake news: Inspiring critical thinking with memorable learning experiences

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 239
Author(s):  
Stephanie A. Diaz ◽  
Russell A. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Learning Experiences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Normal Human ◽  
Lasting Impression ◽  
Perfect Storm

Despite fake news having a long and notorious history in the United States, it seemed like a brand-new phenomenon to many people during the 2016 presidential campaign. Four years later, we continue to grapple with the understanding that the fake news issue is a symptom of a perfect storm of political polarization, shifting U.S. demographics, labor market upheaval, the proliferation of social media use, foreign interference, and normal human psychology. With no clear solutions in sight, the battle against fake news continues. Fake news has many troubling implications for life outside of the academy, but it also has serious consequences for student learning. From the perspective of undergraduate students, it may seem that in this post-truth era, anyone with a cellphone can create news, journalists have ulterior motives, news organizations cannot be trusted, debate centers on reaffirming one’s worldview, and nothing is knowable because there is always evidence on both sides of an argument. Despite this, we believe learning experiences designed to be memorable can change students’ perspectives and make a lasting impression.

scholarly journals Fake News on Twitter in 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: A Quantitative Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Karmvir Padda
Keyword(s):  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Quantitative Approach ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Word Count ◽  
Analytical Thinking ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
The World ◽  
Linguistic Inquiry ◽  
Election Results

The flow of misinformation and disinformation around the 2016 U.S. presidential election put the problem of “fake news” on the agenda all over the world. As a result, news organizations and companies have taken measures to reduce or eliminate the production and dissemination of fake news. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software was employed in the current study to examine 1,500 randomly selected tweets that were used to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Results showed fake news are less likely to have analytical thinking. Moreover, both alt-Right troll accounts and alt-Left troll accounts posted fake news on Twitter. Lastly, Cluster analysis revealed that the fake news tweets are more likely to be retweeted and use fewer analytical thinking. APA Citation Padda, K. (2020). Fake news on Twitter in 2016 U.S. presidential election: a quantitative approach. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare, 3(2), 18-45. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/jicw/article/view/2374/1810.

scholarly journals Analyzing Political Polarization on Social Media by Deleting Bot Spamming

2022 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Riccardo Cantini ◽  
Fabrizio Marozzo ◽  
Domenico Talia ◽  
Paolo Trunfio
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Factions ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Rich Data

Social media platforms are part of everyday life, allowing the interconnection of people around the world in large discussion groups relating to every topic, including important social or political issues. Therefore, social media have become a valuable source of information-rich data, commonly referred to as Social Big Data, effectively exploitable to study the behavior of people, their opinions, moods, interests and activities. However, these powerful communication platforms can be also used to manipulate conversation, polluting online content and altering the popularity of users, through spamming activities and misinformation spreading. Recent studies have shown the use on social media of automatic entities, defined as social bots, that appear as legitimate users by imitating human behavior aimed at influencing discussions of any kind, including political issues. In this paper we present a new methodology, namely TIMBRE (Time-aware opInion Mining via Bot REmoval), aimed at discovering the polarity of social media users during election campaigns characterized by the rivalry of political factions. This methodology is temporally aware and relies on a keyword-based classification of posts and users. Moreover, it recognizes and filters out data produced by social media bots, which aim to alter public opinion about political candidates, thus avoiding heavily biased information. The proposed methodology has been applied to a case study that analyzes the polarization of a large number of Twitter users during the 2016 US presidential election. The achieved results show the benefits brought by both removing bots and taking into account temporal aspects in the forecasting process, revealing the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Finally, we investigated how the presence of social bots may affect political discussion by studying the 2016 US presidential election. Specifically, we analyzed the main differences between human and artificial political support, estimating also the influence of social bots on legitimate users.

scholarly journals The anatomy of ‘fake news’: Studying false messages as digital objects

2021 ◽  
pp. 026839622110376
Author(s):  
Ali Khan ◽  
Kathryn Brohman ◽  
Shamel Addas
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Public Concern ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Digital Objects ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Current Terminology ◽  
Do So

Public concern about ‘fake news’ skyrocketed following the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum, and has only intensified since then. A burgeoning body of research on the topic is emerging, and conceptual clarity is vital for this research to converge into a cumulative body of knowledge; the purpose of this article is to underline and address some of the conceptual clutter and ambiguities around the concept of fake news and situate it within its social context. To do so, we first discuss the problems with current terminology and conceptualisation, and then draw on recent developments on the ontology of digital objects and their attributes to shift the focus from fake news to false messages, a type of syntactic digital objects comprised of content and structure and characterised by attributes of editability, openness, interactivity, and distributedness. Then we expand this concept further by placing it within a network of actors and digital objects. Our analysis uncovers several areas of research that have been overlooked in the study of fake news.

Proposing a model of social media user interaction with fake news

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhijeet R. Shirsat ◽  
Angel F. González ◽  
Judith J. May
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Media Environments

Purpose This study aims to understand the allure and danger of fake news in social media environments and propose a theoretical model of the phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative research study used the uses and gratifications theory (UGT) approach to analyze how and why people used social media during the 2016 US presidential election. Findings The thematic analysis revealed people were gratified after using social media to connect with friends and family and to gather and share information and after using it as a vehicle of expression. Participants found a significant number of fake news stories on social media during the 2016 US presidential election. Participants tried to differentiate between fake news and real news using fact-checking websites and news sources and interacted with the social media users who posted fake news and became part of the echo chamber. Behaviors like these emerged in the analysis that could not be completely explained by UGT and required further exploration which resulted in a model that became the core of this study. Research limitations/implications This is a small-scale exploratory study with eight diverse participants, findings should not be generalized to larger populations. Time-specific self-reporting of information from social media and fake news during the 2016 US presidential election. Upgrading public policies related to social media is recommended in the study, contributing to burgeoning policy discussions and provides recommendations for both purveyors of social media and public policymakers. Practical implications Upgrade in public policies related to social media is recommended in the study and contributes to burgeoning policy discussions and provides recommendations for both purveyors of social media and public policymakers. Social implications Social media users are spending increased time on their preferred platforms. This study increases the understanding of the nature, function and transformation of virtual social media environments and their effects on real individuals, cultures and societies.What is original/of value about the paper?This exploratory study establishes the foundation on which to expand research in the area of social media use and fake news. Originality/value This exploratory study establishes the foundation to expand research in the area of social media use and fake news.

The narrative that wasn’t: what passes for discourse in the age of Trump

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Emily R Anderson
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Discursive Power

This article considers political discourse and the role it played in the 2016 US presidential election while paying particular attention to its construction of narrative. Foucault’s understanding of discourse and power frames the argument that Donald Trump successfully abandoned political narratives. Instead, he often used idiosyncratic language, instances in which the surface of a statement outshines its content. These normally appear in Trump’s tweets and culminate in his invective against the ‘fake news’ media. In order to respond to Trump, his interlocutors must posit a premise and then refute it; in even granting that there is a premise, one must take Trump on his own terms. Trump thus disrupts the direction of traditional discursive power.

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