scholarly journals The Effects of Warning Labels and Social Endorsement Cues on Credibility Perceptions of and Engagement Intentions with Fake News

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Koch ◽  
Lena Frischlich ◽  
Eva Lermer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Educational Level ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Warning Labels ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Effective Interventions ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Social Endorsement ◽  
Dispositional Factors

Fake news spreading virally on social media platforms is a topic of high societal and political relevance. Therefore, platforms have been experimenting with different measures of intervention. However, research on their effectiveness is still limited and dispositional factors are often neglected. We tested two promising interventions – adding warning labels and removing social endorsement cues (i.e., likes) – while including socio-demographic and psychological dispositions based on prior research as controls. Data from an online experiment (N = 591) shows that warning labels significantly reduced credibility perceptions of a fake news post on climate change and respective amplification intentions (i.e., liking and sharing), whereas removing social endorsement cues below a post did not have an impact. Further, credibility perceptions were associated with users’ political orientation. Amplification intentions differed depending on participants’ educational level, political leaning, and analytic thinking style, whereas the willingness to elaborate more carefully about the post varied with their age, the involvement with the topic of the fake news, and their political leaning. Our findings contribute to the research required to craft effective interventions against the spread of misinformation and identify vulnerable users.

Political Preferences, Personality Traits, and Environmentalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Soutter ◽  
René Mõttus
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Personality Traits ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Environmental Attitudes ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Party Voting

Although the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change continues to grow, public discourse still reflects a high level of scepticism and political polarisation towards anthropogenic climate change. In this study (N = 499) we attempted to replicate and expand upon an earlier finding that environmental terminology (“climate change” versus “global warming”) could partly explain political polarisation in environmental scepticism (Schuldt, Konrath, & Schwarz, 2011). Participants completed a series of online questionnaires assessing personality traits, political preferences, belief in environmental phenomenon, and various pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. Those with a Conservative political orientation and/or party voting believed less in both climate change and global warming compared to those with a Liberal orientation and/or party voting. Furthermore, there was an interaction between continuously measured political orientation, but not party voting, and question wording on beliefs in environmental phenomena. Personality traits did not confound these effects. Furthermore, continuously measured political orientation was associated with pro-environmental attitudes, after controlling for personality traits, age, gender, area lived in, income, and education. The personality domains of Openness, and Conscientiousness, were consistently associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, whereas Agreeableness was associated with pro-environmental attitudes but not with behaviours. This study highlights the importance of examining personality traits and political preferences together and suggests ways in which policy interventions can best be optimised to account for these individual differences.

The Fall of Tripoli in 1289 in the Perception of Christian Communities of the Middle East

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
К.А. Панченко
Keyword(s):  
Educational Level ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Religious Polemics

Abstract The article examines the conquest of the County of Tripoli by the Mamelukes in 1289, and the reaction of various Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups to this event. Along with the Monophysite perspective (the Syriac chronicle of Bar Hebraeus’ Continuator and the work of the Coptic historian Mufaddal ibn Abi-l-Fadail), and the propagandist texts of Muslim Arabic panegyric poets, we will pay special attention to the historical memory of the Orthodox (Melkite) and Maronite communities of northern Lebanon. The contemporary of these events — the Orthodox author Suleiman al-Ashluhi, a native of one of the villages of the Akkar Plateau — laments the fall of Tripoli in his rhymed eulogy. It is noteworthy that this author belongs to the rural Melkite subculture, which — in spite of its conservative character — was capable of producing original literature. Suleiman al-Ashluhi’s work was forsaken by the following generations of Melkites; his poem was only preserved in Maronite manuscripts. Maronite historical memory is just as fragmented. The father of the Modern Era Maronite historiography — Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî († 1516) only had fragmentary information on the history of his people in the 13th century: local chronicles and the heroic epos that glorified the Maronite struggle against the Muslim lords that tried to conquer Mount Lebanon. Gabriel’s depiction of the past is not only biased and subject to aims of religious polemics, but also factually inaccurate. Nevertheless, the texts of Suleiman al-Ashluhi and Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî give us the opportunity to draw conclusions on the worldview, educational level, political orientation and peculiar traits of the historical memory of various Christian communities of Mount Lebanon.

scholarly journals Intelligent Detection of False Information in Arabic Tweets Utilizing Hybrid Harris Hawks Based Feature Selection and Machine Learning Models

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 556
Author(s):  
Thaer Thaher ◽  
Mahmoud Saheb ◽  
Hamza Turabieh ◽  
Hamouda Chantar
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Feature Selection ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
User Profile ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Fake News ◽  
False Information ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Fake or false information on social media platforms is a significant challenge that leads to deliberately misleading users due to the inclusion of rumors, propaganda, or deceptive information about a person, organization, or service. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms, especially in the Arab region, where the number of users is steadily increasing, accompanied by an increase in the rate of fake news. This drew the attention of researchers to provide a safe online environment free of misleading information. This paper aims to propose a smart classification model for the early detection of fake news in Arabic tweets utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, Machine Learning (ML) models, and Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) as a wrapper-based feature selection approach. Arabic Twitter corpus composed of 1862 previously annotated tweets was utilized by this research to assess the efficiency of the proposed model. The Bag of Words (BoW) model is utilized using different term-weighting schemes for feature extraction. Eight well-known learning algorithms are investigated with varying combinations of features, including user-profile, content-based, and words-features. Reported results showed that the Logistic Regression (LR) with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) model scores the best rank. Moreover, feature selection based on the binary HHO algorithm plays a vital role in reducing dimensionality, thereby enhancing the learning model’s performance for fake news detection. Interestingly, the proposed BHHO-LR model can yield a better enhancement of 5% compared with previous works on the same dataset.

Governing Fake News: The Regulation of Social Media and the Right to Freedom of Expression in the Era of Emergency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Donato VESE
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Media Censorship

Governments around the world are strictly regulating information on social media in the interests of addressing fake news. There is, however, a risk that the uncontrolled spread of information could increase the adverse effects of the COVID-19 health emergency through the influence of false and misleading news. Yet governments may well use health emergency regulation as a pretext for implementing draconian restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, as well as increasing social media censorship (ie chilling effects). This article seeks to challenge the stringent legislative and administrative measures governments have recently put in place in order to analyse their negative implications for the right to freedom of expression and to suggest different regulatory approaches in the context of public law. These controversial government policies are discussed in order to clarify why freedom of expression cannot be allowed to be jeopardised in the process of trying to manage fake news. Firstly, an analysis of the legal definition of fake news in academia is presented in order to establish the essential characteristics of the phenomenon (Section II). Secondly, the legislative and administrative measures implemented by governments at both international (Section III) and European Union (EU) levels (Section IV) are assessed, showing how they may undermine a core human right by curtailing freedom of expression. Then, starting from the premise of social media as a “watchdog” of democracy and moving on to the contention that fake news is a phenomenon of “mature” democracy, the article argues that public law already protects freedom of expression and ensures its effectiveness at the international and EU levels through some fundamental rules (Section V). There follows a discussion of the key regulatory approaches, and, as alternatives to government intervention, self-regulation and especially empowering users are proposed as strategies to effectively manage fake news by mitigating the risks of undue interference by regulators in the right to freedom of expression (Section VI). The article concludes by offering some remarks on the proposed solution and in particular by recommending the implementation of reliability ratings on social media platforms (Section VII).

scholarly journals Perceptions and Adaptations to Climate Change in Southern Mali

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiémoko Soumaoro
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Educational Level ◽  
Multinomial Logistic Regression ◽  
Probit Model ◽  
Adaptation To Climate Change ◽  
Impact Of Climate Change ◽  
Main Determinants ◽  
The Impact

This study aims to determine the impact of climate change on market garden production in the extreme south of Mali through the perception and adaptation of market gardeners to climatic phenomena. The study used two models, namely the probit selection and Heckman results models and multinomial logistic regression, based on data collected from producers. A total of 194 producers were surveyed. The results of Heckman's probit model indicate that experience in agriculture and the educational level of the producers are the two main determinants of producers' perception and simultaneous adaptation to climate change. Among these variables agricultural experience is both positively and negatively correlated with perception.

scholarly journals Determinants of improved cookstove adoption and its benefits in Ethiopia.

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sintayehu Kare ◽  
Abera Alemu ◽  
Melese Mulugeta ◽  
Zerhun Ganewo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Educational Level ◽  
Climate Changes ◽  
Household Head ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Econometric Models ◽  
Interview Schedule ◽  
Improved Cookstove ◽  
Income Sources

Abstract BackgroundBiomass is the most dominant source of energy for both food cooking and lighting in rural parts of Ethiopia. Energy conversions are carried out in open fires using inefficient traditional stoves, results in poor quality of life due to smoking-related health outcomes, and consume a large quantity of wood. This resulted in increased costs of health and cutting trees which facilities climate change. To change the situation, improved cooking stoves (ICS) have been introduced through youth cooperatives in the study area.Objective The study examined the major sources of energy for the rural households, evaluate the health and related benefits of using improved cook stove and assessing the determinants for its adoption.MethodData were collected from 344 households using a questionnaire in supplement with interview schedule. The collected data were analyzed using both descriptive and econometric models.ResultsThe findings of the study showed that only 22.97% of the respondents adopted the ICS whereas the vast majority (67.03%) still rely on traditional stoves that are highly inefficient. The positive and significant variables in predicting the adoption of ICS were the educational level of household head (OR 1.23; CI at 95% 0.029-0.040), access to ICS (OR 5.88; CI at 95% 1.05-2.48), affordability (OR 2.31; CI at 95% 0.11-1.56) and demonstration about the stove (OR 6.74; CI at 95% 1.13-2.68). Family size (OR 0.74; CI at 95% -0.45-0.12) and Availability of firewood (OR 0.27; CI at 95% -2.00-.56) significantly and negatively affected the adoption of the ICS.ConclusionsLow adoption levels of ICS were found in the study area. This has been triggered by socio-economic, institutional, financial, and resource endowments. Therefore, it is recommended that increasing access to improved stoves, diversifying income sources, creating awareness about ICS health benefits, climate changes, and providing reasonable prices will facilitate its adoption.

scholarly journals Beyond “fake news”: The role of analytic thinking in the detection of inaccuracy and partisan bias in news headlines

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M Ross ◽  
David Gertler Rand ◽  
Gordon Pennycook
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Total N ◽  
Partisan Bias ◽  
News Content ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
News Headlines

Why is misleading partisan content believed and shared? An influential account posits that political partisanship pervasively biases reasoning, such that engaging in analytic thinking exacerbates motivated reasoning and, in turn, the acceptance of hyperpartisan content. Alternatively, it may be that susceptibility to hyperpartisan misinformation is explained by a lack of reasoning. Across two studies using different subject pools (total N = 1977), we had participants assess true, false, and hyperpartisan headlines taken from social media. We found no evidence that analytic thinking was associated with increased polarization for either judgments about the accuracy of the headlines or willingness to share the news content on social media. Instead, analytic thinking was broadly associated with an increased capacity to discern between true headlines and either false or hyperpartisan headlines. These results suggest that reasoning typically helps people differentiate between low and high quality news content, rather than facilitating political bias.

scholarly journals Fake and Real News detection Using Python

2020 ◽  
pp. 423-428
Author(s):  
Fakhra Akhtar ◽  
Faizan Ahmed Khan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Fake News ◽  
False Information ◽  
False Negatives ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Negative Attributes ◽  
Entire Dataset ◽  
F Measure

<p>In the digital age, fake news has become a well-known phenomenon. The spread of false evidence is often used to confuse mainstream media and political opponents, and can lead to social media wars, hatred arguments and debates.Fake news is blurring the distinction between real and false information, and is often spread on social media resulting in negative views and opinions. Earlier Research describe the fact that false propaganda is used to create false stories on mainstream media in order to cause a revolt and tension among the masses The digital rights foundation DRF report, which builds on the experiences of 152 journalists and activists in Pakistan, presents that more than 88 % of the participants find social media platforms as the worst source for information, with Facebook being the absolute worst. The dataset used in this paper relates to Real and fake news detection. The objective of this paper is to determine the Accuracy , precision , of the entire dataset .The results are visualized in the form of graphs and the analysis was done using python. The results showed the fact that the dataset holds 95% of the accuracy. The number of actual predicted cases were 296. Results of this paper reveals that The accuracy of the model dataset is 95.26 % the precision results 95.79 % whereas recall and F-Measure shows 94.56% and 95.17% accuracy respectively.Whereas in predicted models there are 296 positive attributes , 308 negative attributes 17 false positives and 13 false negatives. This research recommends that authenticity of news should be analysed first instead of drafting an opinion, sharing fake news or false information is considered unethical journalists and news consumers both should act responsibly while sharing any news.</p>

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