scholarly journals Fake News and Understanding of Pakistani Millennial

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
Wajid Zulqarnain ◽  

The mushroomed growth and usage of social media have benefitted the world in many ways on the other hand it has also given rise to many issues. Fake news and its extensive spread is one of the problem, world is tackling at this time. Fake news is a kind of deception that purposely integrates to affect masses and create panic, which is fabricated too have aim to instill a false sense of truth in the users mind. This paper provides a conceptual overview of fake news on social media, expanding and illustrating the unique characteristics of fake news in Pakistan. A survey is conducted from university Millennial from the capital city of Islamabad. Results showed that use of social media is increasing day by day amongst young generation of Pakistan and becoming main source of information for them. In this scenario the rate at which such false news are penetrating social media and the internet is distressing, as most of the students claim to often witness fake news on social media. Social media personalities, celebrities and political representatives should make efforts in creating awareness regard fake news, so that our nation stay safe from the hazardous effects and panic created from social media. Keywords: Social Media, Fake News, Pakistan, Millennial.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Pereira ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel ◽  
Elizabeth Ann Harris

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.


Author(s):  
V.T Priyanga ◽  
J.P Sanjanasri ◽  
Vijay Krishna Menon ◽  
E.A Gopalakrishnan ◽  
K.P Soman

The widespread use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc. has changed the way News is created and published; accessing news has become easy and inexpensive. However, the scale of usage and inability to moderate the content has made social media, a breeding ground for the circulation of fake news. Fake news is deliberately created either to increase the readership or disrupt the order in the society for political and commercial benefits. It is of paramount importance to identify and filter out fake news especially in democratic societies. Most existing methods for detecting fake news involve traditional supervised machine learning which has been quite ineffective. In this paper, we are analyzing word embedding features that can tell apart fake news from true news. We use the LIAR and ISOT data set. We churn out highly correlated news data from the entire data set by using cosine similarity and other such metrices, in order to distinguish their domains based on central topics. We then employ auto-encoders to detect and differentiate between true and fake news while also exploring their separability through network analysis.


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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 4255-4274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Chadwick ◽  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Ben O’Loughlin

The use of social media for sharing political information and the status of news as an essential raw material for good citizenship are both generating increasing public concern. We add to the debates about misinformation, disinformation, and “fake news” using a new theoretical framework and a unique research design integrating survey data and analysis of observed news sharing behaviors on social media. Using a media-as-resources perspective, we theorize that there are elective affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviors on social media. Integrating four data sets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing ( N = 1,525,748 tweets), website data ( N = 17,989 web domains), news article data ( N = 641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users ( N = 1313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explain the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on fake news.


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.


Author(s):  
Tatjana Vulić

The goal of this research paper is to examine the frequency of use of social media by high school students in Serbia, as well as whether they use the social media to keep themselves informed and adopt informal knowledge, that is, to educate themselves. With regards to this topic, several research goals were set. The respondents were 155 students from “Prva kragujevačka gimnazija” (transl.: The First High School of Kragujevac) and “Prva tehnička škola” (transl.: The First Technical School) in Kragujevac, from 1st to 4th grade. The sample included 86 boys (55.5%) and 69 girls (44.5%). The questionnaire with 13 items was created specifically for this survey and it included the answer choices for the specific phenomena we investigated. Descriptive statistics was used during this research. Research findings suggest that high school students in Serbia spend more and more time on social media, primarily on Facebook (133 out of 155 respondents) which they also see as a source of information. Moreover, 49% of the respondents claimed that they trust this type of information and find it significant in peer-to-peer communication. Although more than a half of the respondents do not adopt role models and idols through social media, 45% of them still said that they have this tendency. Furthermore, this research has also shown that the largest number of respondents express their personal views on social media, two to three times a week. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 4833-4837

Technology is growing day by day and the influence of them on our day-to-day life is reaching new heights in the digitized world. Most of the people are prone to the use of social media and even minute details are getting posted every second. Some even go to the extent of posting even suicide related issues. This paper addresses the issue of suicide and is predicting the suicide issues on social media and their semantic analysis. With the help of Machine Learning techniques and semantic analysis of sentiments the prediction and classification of suicide is done. The model of approach is a four-tier approach, which is very beneficial as it uses the twitter4J data by using weka tool and implementing it on WordNet. The precision and accuracy aspects are verified as the parameters for the performance efficiency of the procedure. We also give a solution for the lack of resources regarding the terminological resources by providing a phase for the generation of records of vocabulary also.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1489
Author(s):  
Chiara Scuotto ◽  
Ciro Rosario Ilardi ◽  
Francesco Avallone ◽  
Gianpaolo Maggi ◽  
Alfonso Ilardi ◽  
...  

The exposure to relevant social and/or historical events can increase the generation of false memories (FMs). The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a calamity challenging health, political, and journalistic bodies, with media generating confusion that has facilitated the spread of fake news. In this respect, our study aims at investigating the relationships between memories (true memories, TMs vs. FMs) for COVID-19-related news and different individual variables (i.e., use of traditional and social media, COVID-19 perceived and objective knowledge, fear of the disease, depression and anxiety symptoms, reasoning skills, and coping mechanisms). One hundred and seventy-one university students (131 females) were surveyed. Overall, our results suggested that depression and anxiety symptoms, reasoning skills, and coping mechanisms did not affect the formation of FMs. Conversely, the fear of loved ones contracting the infection was found to be negatively associated with FMs. This finding might be due to an empathy/prosociality-based positive bias boosting memory abilities, also explained by the young age of participants. Furthermore, objective knowledge (i) predicted an increase in TMs and decrease in FMs and (ii) significantly mediated the relationships between the use of social media and development of both TMs and FMs. In particular, higher levels of objective knowledge strengthened the formation of TMs and decreased the development of FMs following use of social media. These results may lead to reconsidering the idea of social media as the main source of fake news. This claim is further supported by either the lack of substantial differences between the use of traditional and social media among participants reporting FMs or the positive association between use of social media and levels of objective knowledge. The knowledge about the topic rather than the type of source would make a difference in the process of memory formation.


Author(s):  
Cristina Pulido Rodríguez ◽  
Beatriz Villarejo Carballido ◽  
Gisela Redondo-Sama ◽  
Mengna Guo ◽  
Mimar Ramis ◽  
...  

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.


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