An Analysis of the Social Media Fake News Network in the 19th Presidential Election

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 1553-1565
Author(s):  
Hajin Cho ◽  
Gyongho Kim
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Fake News ◽  
The Social

Fake It “Till You Make It”: Debunking Fake News in a Post-Truth America

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-133
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
American People ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Sources ◽  
The Media ◽  
The U.S

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, attacks on the media have been relentless. “Fake news” has become a household term, and repeated attempts to break the trust between reporters and the American people have threatened the validity of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In this article, the authors trace the development of fake news and its impact on contemporary political discourse. They also outline cutting-edge pedagogies designed to assist students in critically evaluating the veracity of various news sources and social media sites.

scholarly journals Linguistic drivers of misinformation diffusion on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giandomenico Di Domenico ◽  
Annamaria Tuan ◽  
Marco Visentin
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Textual Cues ◽  
Twitter Users

AbstractIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retweets. In particular, the presence of misinformation plays an interesting role in spreading the tweet on the network. More importantly, the relative influence of the cues suggests that Twitter users actually read a tweet but not necessarily they understand or critically evaluate it before deciding to share it on the social media platform.

scholarly journals Automated Classification of Fake News Spreaders to Break the Misinformation Chain

Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Simone Leonardi ◽  
Giuseppe Rizzo ◽  
Maurizio Morisio
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Network Architecture ◽  
Diffusion Mechanism ◽  
Automated Classification ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Neural Network Architecture ◽  
User Classification ◽  
The Social ◽  
Network Topologies

In social media, users are spreading misinformation easily and without fact checking. In principle, they do not have a malicious intent, but their sharing leads to a socially dangerous diffusion mechanism. The motivations behind this behavior have been linked to a wide variety of social and personal outcomes, but these users are not easily identified. The existing solutions show how the analysis of linguistic signals in social media posts combined with the exploration of network topologies are effective in this field. These applications have some limitations such as focusing solely on the fake news shared and not understanding the typology of the user spreading them. In this paper, we propose a computational approach to extract features from the social media posts of these users to recognize who is a fake news spreader for a given topic. Thanks to the CoAID dataset, we start the analysis with 300 K users engaged on an online micro-blogging platform; then, we enriched the dataset by extending it to a collection of more than 1 M share actions and their associated posts on the platform. The proposed approach processes a batch of Twitter posts authored by users of the CoAID dataset and turns them into a high-dimensional matrix of features, which are then exploited by a deep neural network architecture based on transformers to perform user classification. We prove the effectiveness of our work by comparing the precision, recall, and f1 score of our model with different configurations and with a baseline classifier. We obtained an f1 score of 0.8076, obtaining an improvement from the state-of-the-art by 4%.

scholarly journals Loodus tuleb tagasi: delfiinid ja saurused. Libauudistest, photoshop-muistenditest ja meemidest koroonakarantiini ajal

Mäetagused ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Eda Kalmre ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Coping Strategies ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fake News ◽  
The Social ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Positive Effect

The article follows the narrative trend initiated by the social media posts and fake news during the first months of the corona quarantine, which claims that the decrease of contamination due to the quarantine has a positive effect on the environment and nature recovery. The author describes the context of the topic and follows the changes in the rhetoric through different genres, discussing the ways in which a picture can tell a truthful story. What is the relation between the context, truth, and rhetoric? This material spread globally, yet it was also readily “translated” into the Estonian context, and – what is very characteristic of the entire pandemic material – when approaching this material, truthful and fabricated texts, photos, and videos were combined. From the folkloristic point of view, these rumours in the form of fake news, first presented in the function of a tall tale and further following the sliding truth scale of legends, constitute a part of coping strategies, so-called crisis humour, yet, on the other hand, also a belief story presenting positive imagery, which surrounds the mainly apocalyptically perceived pandemic period and interprets the human existence on a wider scale. Even if these fake news and memes have no truth value, they communicate an idea – nature recovers – and definitely offer hope and a feeling of well-being.

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 Don’t Republicans Tweet Too? Using Twitter to Assess the Consequences of Political Endorsements by Celebrities

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-160
Author(s):  
Jan Zilinsky ◽  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Jonathan Nagler ◽  
Joshua A. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Presidential Candidate ◽  
Hillary Clinton ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Decision To Stay ◽  
Presidential Election Campaign

Michael Jordan supposedly justified his decision to stay out of politics by noting that Republicans buy sneakers too. In the social media era, the name of the game for celebrities is engagement with fans. So why then do celebrities risk talking about politics on social media, which is likely to antagonize a portion of their fan base? With this question in mind, we analyze approximately 220,000 tweets from 83 celebrities who chose to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign to assess whether there is a cost—defined in terms of engagement on Twitter—for celebrities who discuss presidential candidates. We also examine whether celebrities behave similarly to other campaign surrogates in being more likely to take on the “attack dog” role by going negative more often than going positive. More specifically, we document how often celebrities of distinct political preferences tweet about Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and we show that followers of opinionated celebrities do not withhold engagement when entertainers become politically mobilized and do indeed often go negative. Interestingly, in some cases political content from celebrities actually turns out to be more popular than typical lifestyle tweets.

scholarly journals Spreading Fake News in the Virtual Realm in Bangladesh: Assessment of Impact

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Sharifa Umma Shirina ◽  
Md. Tabiur Rahman Prodhan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
National Election ◽  
Technological Advancement ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Supersonic Speed ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Acute Crisis

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.

scholarly journals Typology of Business-Related Fake News Online: A Literature Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-76
Author(s):  
Marko Selaković ◽  
Anna Tarabasz ◽  
Monica Gallant
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Marketing Research ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Crisis Communications ◽  
Web 3.0 ◽  
The Past ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Smart Technologies

Internet and social media, as highly interactive platforms, enable two way-communication and content generation which was unprecedented in history. In the past, the media were decisive about content that should be presented, and what public impact it might have (Giessen, 2015). User-generated content provided an opportunity for single Internet users to reach large audiences in the same way as content originating from the traditional mass-media. Web 3.0 and Meta Web introduced a new myriad of available solutions and opportunities (Tarabasz, 2013). Smart technologies and integration networks of Web 4.0, with an ability to detect intentions and goals of the users and offer solutions based on users` preferences and habits (Benhaddi, 2017) are opening an entirely new dimension of the social media: digital identity becomes part of the identity of the Internet users. Keywords: Fake News; Crisis Communications; Online Communications; Management Research; Marketing Research

scholarly journals COMBATING INFODEMIC COVID-19: GOVERNMENT RESPONSE AGAINST FAKE NEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 255
Author(s):  
Andi Luhur Prianto ◽  
Abdillah Abdillah ◽  
Syukri Firdaus ◽  
Muhammad Arifeen Yamad
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Media Literacy ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Public Trust ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Communication Performance ◽  
Government Response ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Channels

The global commitment to fighting the pandemic is not only about medical and epidemiological work, but also about how information about the disease is disseminated. The threat of the Covid-19 infodemic is no less dangerous than the pandemic itself. The phenomenon of infodemic has distorted the work of science and reduced public trust in state authorities. This research has identified, mapped, and analyzed official government responses to fake news attacks on social media. This study uses an interpretive-phenomenological approach, related to the spread and belief of fake news about Covid-19 in Indonesia. Data analysis uses the Nvivo-12 Pro application, as an artificial intelligence tool to support data exploration from various sources. The results show that the quality of media literacy, public communication performance, and the effectiveness of government regulations have become part of the challenges in mitigating infodemic. The level of public trust in information from social media contributes to the decline in trust in fake news about Covid-19. Stimulation from the social media news that does not control the belief in myths and false information about Covid-19. Content creators who have produced, posted, and shared on social media channels that are less critical, have an impact on the infodemic situation. The solution is to increase media literacy education and the effectiveness of law enforcement in mitigating the infodemic in Indonesia.

scholarly journals Conspiracy beliefs and vaccination intent for COVID-19 in an infodemic

PLoS ONE ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e0261559
Author(s):  
Ali Ghaddar ◽  
Sanaa Khandaqji ◽  
Zeinab Awad ◽  
Rawad Kansoun
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Viral Spread ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Guidelines And Recommendations

Background The massive, free and unrestricted exchange of information on the social media during the Covid-19 pandemic has set fertile grounds for fear, uncertainty and the rise of fake news related to the virus. This “viral” spread of fake news created an “infodemic” that threatened the compliance with public health guidelines and recommendations. Objective This study aims to describe the trust in social media platforms and the exposure to fake news about COVID-19 in Lebanon and to explore their association with vaccination intent. Methods In this cross-sectional study conducted in Lebanon during July–August, 2020, a random sample of 1052 participants selected from a mobile-phone database responded to an anonymous structured questionnaire after obtaining informed consent (response rate = 40%). The questionnaire was conducted by telephone and measured socio-demographics, sources and trust in sources of information and exposure to fake news, social media activity, perceived threat and vaccination intent. Results Results indicated that the majority of participants (82%) believed that COVID-19 is a threat and 52% had intention to vaccinate. Exposure to fake/ unverified news was high (19.7% were often and 63.8% were sometimes exposed, mainly to fake news shared through Watsapp and Facebook). Trust in certain information sources (WHO, MoPH and TV) increased while trust in others (Watsapp, Facebook) reduced vaccination intent against Covid-19. Believing in the man-made theory and the business control theory significantly reduced the likelihood of vaccination intent (Beta = 0.43; p = 0.01 and Beta = -0.29; p = 0.05) respectively. Conclusion In the context of the infodemic, understanding the role of exposure to fake news and of conspiracy believes in shaping healthy behavior is important for increasing vaccination intent and planning adequate response to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.

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