scholarly journals Fake News in Social Kurdish Media in Kurdistan Region

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Nawzad Sadiq Muhammad ◽  
Kamil Omer Sleman

Fake news becomes a phenomenon in the Kurdish social media. The easiness of use and the political and social environmental crisis of northern Kurdistan besides non-professional dealing by a number of journalists worsen the situation. Despite the fact that fake news does not stemmed from the modern technology of information and the advent of using media for psychology and propaganda war but, the easiness of accessing social media makes the online platforms to be the main mediums of disseminating fake news. The openness of northern Kurdistan towards new communication technology and the semi-freedom of journalistic working and partisan activities help this part of the world to be a spot area for spreading fake news phenomenon; which became an interesting topic for many scholars around the world mainly after the presidential elections of United States of America in 2016. In this exploratory study, focus group interview used for collecting data and thematic analysis approach adopted for analysing it. Results show that spreading fake news through the Kurdish social media becomes a prevailing phenomenon. Various political and economy purposes can be identified behind disseminating fake news. Adding to increasing activity of variety of pages and accounts created with this respect through different names. Although of prevailing of the phenomena, a number of procedures can be taken in order to put a line for common of the phenomena including covering fake news through creating parasite account and pages and detecting the source of such piece of information.

Author(s):  
Leticia Bode ◽  
Emily K. Vraga ◽  
Kjerstin Thorson

Chapter 7 tackles the challenges posed by misinformation campaigns and fake news, an issue of growing concern in America and around the world. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, academics and pundits alike struggled to make sense of what happened, and many pointed to the role of fake news and misinformation more broadly in leading voters astray in their assessments of the two major candidates for president. This chapter draws on survey data to investigate how media use in general, and use of social media and partisan media more specifically, affected belief in six fake news stories directly following the 2016 election. The analysis assesses whether use of different types of media affected belief in misinformation—including messages congruent and incongruent with their own candidate preferences—providing insight into what was to blame for belief in fake news in the 2016 elections.


Author(s):  
Kristy A. Hesketh

This chapter explores the Spiritualist movement and its rapid growth due to the formation of mass media and compares these events with the current rise of fake news in the mass media. The technology of cheaper publications created a media platform that featured stories about Spiritualist mediums and communications with the spirit world. These articles were published in newspapers next to regular news creating a blurred line between real and hoax news stories. Laws were later created to address instances of fraud that occurred in the medium industry. Today, social media platforms provide a similar vessel for the spread of fake news. Online fake news is published alongside legitimate news reports leaving readers unable to differentiate between real and fake articles. Around the world countries are actioning initiatives to address the proliferation of false news to prevent the spread of misinformation. This chapter compares the parallels between these events, how hoaxes and fake news begin and spread, and examines the measures governments are taking to curb the growth of misinformation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (6) ◽  
pp. 746-752
Author(s):  
Antonio López Peláez ◽  
Chaime Marcuello-Servós ◽  
Joaquín Castillo de Mesa ◽  
Patricia Almaguer Kalixto

In this article, we present the results of a strategy to disseminate best social work practices during periods of social lockdown in Spain, in a climate characterised by post-truth, misinformation and fake news. Social work is challenged with the task of delivering reliable and quality information aimed at building a better society. At the time of writing, Spain was one of the countries most affected by COVID-19, with one of the highest numbers of deaths per million inhabitants in the world. With the population in lockdown, our strategy was to design a series of innovative web seminars on both the subject and the procedures involved in social work, with the aim of sharing information and best practices to counter disinformation campaigns on social media. The results show the growing demand – both by citizens in general and students and professionals in particular – for reliable information in the field of professional practice. One of the priorities of digital social work must be to disseminate its results in the digital environment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petros Iosifidis ◽  
Nicholas Nicoli

The recent spread of online disinformation has been profound and has played a central role in the growth of populist sentiments around the world. Facilitating its progression has been politically and economically motivated culprits who have ostensibly taken advantage of the digital freedoms available to them. At the heart of these freedoms lie social media organisations that only a few years earlier techno-optimists were identifying as catalysts of an enhanced digital democracy. In order to curtail the erosion of information, policy reform will no doubt be essential. The UK's Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Disinformation and ‘fake news’ Report and Cairncross Review, and the European Commission's Report on Disinformation are three recent examples seeking to investigate how precisely such reform policy might be implemented. Just as important is how social media organisations take on more responsibility and apply self-regulating mechanisms that stifle disinformation across their platforms (something the aforementioned reports identify). Doing so will go a long way in restoring legitimacy in these significant institutions. Facebook (which includes Instagram and Whatsapp), is the largest social media organisation in the world and must primarily bear the burden of this responsibility. The purpose of this article is to offer a descriptive account of Facebook's public announcements regarding how it tackles disinformation and fake news. Based on a qualitative content analysis covering the period November 16th 2016–March 4th 2019, this article will set out some groundwork on how to hold social media platforms more accountable for how they handle disinformation.


Author(s):  
Sharifa Umma Shirina ◽  
Md. Tabiur Rahman Prodhan

Fake news is ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting.’ The upsurge of technological advancement, especially social media, has paved the way for spreading fake news. The virtual realm spurs fake news as per the speed of air. Nowadays, fake news has been one of the social problems in the world along with Bangladesh. Self-seeker groups use fake news as an ‘atomic arsenal’ to disseminate their popular rhetoric with supersonic speed for fulfilling male purposes. Fake news is usually rampant during any crisis, elections, and even in campaigns. The hoaxers and fakers exploit the opportunity of the wavering psychology of the social media users, and fake news becomes ‘viral’ on social media, Facebook. Recently Bangladesh has faced an acute crisis of spreading fake news during the ‘Movement of Nirapod Sarak Chai, ‘National election in December 2018’ and very recent ‘need child’s head for Padma Bridge.’ This study titled “Spreading Fake News in the Virtual Realm in Bangladesh: Assessment of Impact” seeks the reasons for spreading fake news and its’ social impact in Bangladesh.


2020 ◽  
pp. 177-196
Author(s):  
Turgay Yerlikaya ◽  
Seca Toker

This article focuses on how virtual social networks affect socio-political life. The main theme of the article is how social networks such as Facebook and Twitter can direct voters’ electoral preferences, especially during election time, through the dissemination of manipulative content and fake news. The use of social media, which was initially thought to have a positive effect on democratization, has been extensively discussed in recent years as threat to democracy. Examples from the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, France, Brexit, Germany, the UK and Turkey will be used to illustrate the risks that social networks pose to democracy, especially during election periods.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Glueckstern ◽  
Alexi Benyacar ◽  
Sacha Grigri

According to Gill (2017), the present era of electronic revolution is one in which social media has become a means to an end in political sphere communication. Today, political marketing and advertising for persons seeking elective posts analyze, develop, execute and manage campaigns as a way of driving public opinion (Laing & Khattab, 2016). Social media provides a platform on which one can engage with the so-called connected generation. If the November 2016 elections are anything to go by, Twitter proved to be the medium of choice for citizens to engage and consume political content (Le et al., 2017). Ideally, tweets formed the basis of facilitating user engagement through the provision of content and newsbreaks. By extension, the mentioned discussions would influence the political discourse while establishing the capacity to determine the events of mainstream media. This study seeks to establish social media usage by President Donald Trump before and after his election. An understanding of such trend is essential in inferring as to whether Social media, in this case Twitter, plays a role in the current political spheres by promoting influence of a given aspirant. This stems from various studies that have stated that there is an association between social media use and an aspirant’s influence of the connected generation who are especially the youths. For instance, a thesis by Hwang (2016) observed that President Trump’s Twitter usage contributes to his political poll success which he associates with a reflection of his personality in the media use. This was also observed by Lilleker, Jackson, Thorsen and Veneti (2016) who stated that President Trump’s media use contributed to his election. It would hence be essential to understand President Trump’s nature of usage of Twitter. Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) conducted a study in which they observed use of fake news to influence people into certain political alignments. Twitter was also observed as one of the channels through which fake news was distributed. This study might help to create a foundation under which more studies can be done to determine the association of social media with other issues facing the society such as fake news and environment issues and their role on presidential elections. It would also be worth noting that there has been high politicization of President Trump’s use of Twitter especially during his Campaigns. This study would hence help to infer whether there is a change in this factor after his election.


InterConf ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Aygun Abdulova ◽  
Fatima Khosroshahi ◽  
Nargiz Mehdiyeva ◽  
Fidan Asgarzade

Information and communication technology has changed rapidly over the past 20 years, with a key development being the emergence of social media. Social media alludes to all applications and websites or blogs that empower individuals around the globe to interconnect through the web, chat, and share substance, video call among numerous other functionalities it offers to its clients. For a individual to be a part of any social media, he or she has got to begin with signup and after that sign in to get to substance and be able to share and chat with other clients of that social media stage. Over the past two decades, social media have picked up so much development and popularity around the world to an degree that numerous analysts are presently inquisitive about learning more almost these social stages and their impacts on the community. Despite the reality that nearly everybody within the community is associated to at slightest one social media stage, the youth and young people are the driving and most aficionado of these social stages to the point that they indeed social organize whereas in course or indeed church. It is to this light that analysts have found that these social locales affect the lives of our youth in a society a extraordinary bargain in terms of ethics, behavior and indeed education-wise.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Naim Rahim

The teachers and students' engagement on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and other online and offline platforms for the purpose of teaching and learning are considered as digital citizenship in education. These social media have also exposed the users to admit several rights and mutual values. However, the enhancement of technology has motivated these citizens not only to communicate across the world but also to build platforms to practice and learn new knowledge and skills. This article is proposed to review the impacts of digital citizenship on teachers and students' educational development. Therefore, a critical review of the literature is conducted. The data is collected using Google Scholar with the scope of the topic and the criteria mainly between 2011 to 2021. The data analysis procedure and identifying codes, patterns, and similar themes have motivated the authors to present and discuss the results and findings thematically. The results show that the fundamental elements of digital citizenship are the internet, technological tools, social media, and responsible behaviors of the users on the platforms. The findings also indicate that the development of information communication technology and virtual practices are serving digital citizens to be involved in many related and unrelated activities which need to be controlled by an authentic policy. Since the growing technology of the world is transforming the paradigms including the students' needs, the layout of the classrooms, and the stakeholders' requirement for employability. Investigating these continuing needs contributes to the efforts to lead the information communication technology integration into educational circumstances and address the local and national policies, facilitating the infrastructure, enhancing the educational settings, cybersecurity issues, and privacy accountability among educators and the learners.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 987-1006
Author(s):  
Patricia L. Moravec ◽  
Antino Kim ◽  
Alan R. Dennis

Disinformation on social media—commonly called “fake news”—has become a major concern around the world, and many fact-checking initiatives have been launched in response. However, if the presentation format of fact-checked results is not persuasive, fact-checking may not be effective. For instance, Facebook tested the idea of flagging dubious articles in 2017 but concluded that it was ineffective and removed the feature. We conducted three experiments with social media users to investigate two different approaches to implementing a fake news flag—one designed to be most effective when processed by automatic cognition (System 1) and the other designed to be most effective when processed by deliberate cognition (System 2). Both interventions were effective, and an intervention that combined both approaches was about twice as effective. The awareness training on the meaning of the flags increased the effectiveness of the System 2 intervention but not the System 1 intervention. Believability influenced the extent to which users would engage with the article (e.g., read, like, comment, and share). Our results suggest that both theoretical routes can be used—separately or together—in the presentation of fact-checking results in order to reduce the influence of fake news on social media users.


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