scholarly journals A practical guide to doing behavioural research on fake news and misinformation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
Jabin Binnendyk ◽  
Christie Newton ◽  
David Gertler Rand
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
News Content ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
Behavioural Research ◽  
False News ◽  
News Headlines ◽  
Selection Of

Coincident with the global rise in concern about the spread of misinformation on social media, there has been influx of behavioural research on so-called “fake news” (fabricated or false news headlines that are presented as if legitimate) and other forms of misinformation. These studies often present participants with news content that varies on relevant dimensions (e.g., true v. false, politically consistent v. inconsistent, etc.) and ask participants to make judgments (e.g., accuracy) or choices (e.g., whether they would share it on social media). This guide is intended to help researchers navigate the unique challenges that come with this type of research. Principle among these issues is that the nature of news content that is being spread on social media (whether it is false, misleading, or true) is a moving target that reflects current affairs in the context of interest. Steps are required if one wishes to present stimuli that allow generalization from the study to the real-world phenomenon. Furthermore, the selection of content to include can be highly consequential for the study’s outcome, and researcher biases can easily result in biases in a stimulus set. As such, we advocate for pretesting materials and, to this end, report our own pretest of 225 recent true and false news headlines, both relating to U.S. political issues and the COVID-19 pandemic. These headlines may be of use in the short term, but, more importantly, the pretest is intended to serve as an example of best practices in a quickly evolving area of research.

scholarly journals A Practical Guide to Doing Behavioral Research on Fake News and Misinformation

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
Jabin Binnendyk ◽  
Christie Newton ◽  
David G. Rand
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Behavioral Research ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
News Content ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
False News ◽  
News Headlines ◽  
Selection Of

Coincident with the global rise in concern about the spread of misinformation on social media, there has been influx of behavioral research on so-called “fake news” (fabricated or false news headlines that are presented as if legitimate) and other forms of misinformation. These studies often present participants with news content that varies on relevant dimensions (e.g., true v. false, politically consistent v. inconsistent, etc.) and ask participants to make judgments (e.g., accuracy) or choices (e.g., whether they would share it on social media). This guide is intended to help researchers navigate the unique challenges that come with this type of research. Principle among these issues is that the nature of news content that is being spread on social media (whether it is false, misleading, or true) is a moving target that reflects current affairs in the context of interest. Steps are required if one wishes to present stimuli that allow generalization from the study to the real-world phenomenon of online misinformation. Furthermore, the selection of content to include can be highly consequential for the study’s outcome, and researcher biases can easily result in biases in a stimulus set. As such, we advocate for pretesting materials and, to this end, report our own pretest of 224 recent true and false news headlines, both relating to U.S. political issues and the COVID-19 pandemic. These headlines may be of use in the short term, but, more importantly, the pretest is intended to serve as an example of best practices in a quickly evolving area of research.

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 KEBIJAKAN PEMERINTAH SURABAYA DALAM MENANGANI BERITA HOAX (Studi kasus di kota Surabaya)

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Pitri Megasari
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
City Government ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
False News

Abstract: This paper discusses how government policies in counteracting hoax news in the community through social media. Sometime lately more rampant news about the spread of fake news or hoaxes through online social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The formulation of the problem here is how the Surabaya government policy to overcome or handle the existence of false news or hoaxes in the Surabaya community. The research method for this type of research is qualitative. The data used are qualitative data, expressed in words or sentences. This false information or hoax was made deliberately because it was to influence the public because of the increasingly widespread stimulant factors such as social and political issues. Social media is now widely used to negative things like one of the accounts that spread hoax information just to increase the popularity of the account or want to be viral by spreading hoax news. Social media makes it easier for us to interact with many people and easier to convey information. But this social media makes a lot of people addicted and many social groups appear that deviate from the norms that exist in the Surabaya city government trying continuously to deal with fake news or hoaxes that are widely spread among the citizens of Surabaya.Keywords: Government Policy, Hoax News, Society

scholarly journals Fake News Detection in Machine Learning Hybrid Model

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2668-2671
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Voting Decisions ◽  
False News ◽  
Gated Recurrent Unit

Now a day's prediction of fake news is somewhat an important aspect. The spreading of fake news mainly misleads the people and some false news that led to the absence of truth and stirs up the public opinion. It might influence some people in the society which leads to a loss in all directions like financial, psychological and also political issues, affecting voting decisions during elections etc. Our research work is to find reliable and accurate model that categorize a given news in dataset as fake or real. The existing techniques involved in are from a deep learning perspective by Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) technique models Vanilla, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) by applying on LAIR dataset. So we come up with a different plan to increase the accuracy by hybridizing Decision Tree and Random Forest.

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.

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.

Spiritualism and the Resurgence of Fake News

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-237
Author(s):  
Kristy A. Hesketh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The World ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
False News

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.

Credibility Perceptions and Detection Accuracy of Fake News Headlines on Social Media: Effects of Truth-Bias and Endorsement Cues

2020 ◽  
pp. 009365022092132
Author(s):  
Mufan Luo ◽  
Jeffrey T. Hancock ◽  
David M. Markowitz
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Deception Detection ◽  
Detection Accuracy ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Default Theory ◽  
Impact Detection ◽  
Truth Bias ◽  
News Credibility ◽  
Biased Processing ◽  
News Headlines

This article focuses on message credibility and detection accuracy of fake and real news as represented on social media. We developed a deception detection paradigm for news headlines and conducted two online experiments to examine the extent to which people (1) perceive news headlines as credible, and (2) accurately distinguish fake and real news across three general topics (i.e., politics, science, and health). Both studies revealed that people often judged news headlines as fake, suggesting a deception-bias for news in social media. Across studies, we observed an average detection accuracy of approximately 51%, a level consistent with most research using this deception detection paradigm with equal lie-truth base-rates. Study 2 evaluated the effects of endorsement cues in social media (e.g., Facebook likes) on message credibility and detection accuracy. Results showed that headlines associated with a high number of Facebook likes increased credibility, thereby enhancing detection accuracy for real news but undermining accuracy for fake news. These studies introduce truth-default theory to the context of news credibility and advance our understanding of how biased processing of news information can impact detection accuracy with social media endorsement cues.

This I Know to be True

Ethnologies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-110
Author(s):  
Kari Sawden
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Alternative Facts ◽  
Ongoing Relationship ◽  
External Sources ◽  
News Headlines

Working within alternative belief communities, I frequently encounter a tension between what is felt to be authentic and the facts provided by external sources. Even a cursory glance at the news headlines and social media postings that saturate daily life with terms such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” reveals that this is not an isolated struggle. Focusing on the ways in which contemporary Canadian divination practitioners establish their own truth, this paper examines how these processes reflect and support folklore’s engagement with and ongoing relationship to the emergence of multiple authenticities defined by the experiential.

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