Persian Fake News Detection: Neural Representation and Classification at Word and Text Levels

Nowadays, broadcasting news on social media and websites has grown at a swifter pace, which has had negative impacts on both the general public and governments; hence, this has urged us to build a fake news detection system. Contextualized word embeddings have achieved great success in recent years due to their power to embed both syntactic and semantic features of textual contents. In this article, we aim to address the problem of the lack of fake news datasets in Persian by introducing a new dataset crawled from different news agencies, and propose two deep models based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers model (BERT), which is a deep contextualized pre-trained model for extracting valuable features. In our proposed models, we benefit from two different settings of BERT, namely pool-based representation, which provides a representation for the whole document, and sequence representation, which provides a representation for each token of the document. In the former one, we connect a Single Layer Perceptron (SLP) to the BERT to use the embedding directly for detecting fake news. The latter one uses Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) after the BERT’s embedding layer to extract extra features based on the collocation of words in a corpus. Furthermore, we present the TAJ dataset, which is a new Persian fake news dataset crawled from news agencies’ websites. We evaluate our proposed models on the newly provided TAJ dataset as well as the two different Persian rumor datasets as baselines. The results indicate the effectiveness of using deep contextualized embedding approaches for the fake news detection task. We also show that both BERT-SLP and BERT-CNN models achieve superior performance to the previous baselines and traditional machine learning models, with 15.58% and 17.1% improvement compared to the reported results by Zamani et al. [ 30 ], and 11.29% and 11.18% improvement compared to the reported results by Jahanbakhsh-Nagadeh et al. [ 9 ].

The Colombian Media Industry on the Digital Social Consumption Agenda in Times of COVID-19

The pandemic and lockdown forced the media and its agents to transform and think differently. The situation brought with it the reinvention of productive routines and revitalized the information consumption agenda of audiences immersed in screen devices. The operational change of the Colombian media industry, at a time of conjuncture, is approached by this research from a mixed, quantitative and qualitative methodology, with the aim of evaluating the response of the national news company to citizens’ news expectations during lockdown. The case study outlines a digital characterization of the public’s relationship with the media and communication. The corpus of analysis is made up of the actions of the main news agencies in Colombia—press (2), radio (5), television (2)—and their actions on social media—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube—in the period between 1 January and 31 May 2020. The result of this study denotes a mediamorphosis of analogue media that revitalizes and integrates them into a 360° consumption chain, focusing on content that gives way to a creative culture that adapts to the demands of the market and imposes a see now, share now strategy to expand its market penetration.

The Main Tendencies in the Cuban News Web Sites Development

The changes that have taken place in the work of Cuban news agencies during the digitalization of media production are analyzed. Over the past few years, they have been undergoing a process of transformation, changing their approaches to providing information and introducing new products. To study these processes, the authors resort to the digital platforms of two news agencies - Prensa Latina and Agencia Cubana de Noticias , as well as the online news portal Cubadebate . Comparative and analytical methods of research reveal the specific features of functioning of these media resources at the present moment. The authors conclude that despite the international isolation Cuba experienced for more than sixty years and relatively limited financial resources allocated for media development, the country's media market has entered a period of modernization. All the changes taking place will greatly expand the possibilities for integrating Cuban news agencies into global information processes.

The Confines of News Universalism

News outlets remain predominantly segmented by national boundaries, despite the spectacular development of a range of technologies offering the potential to overcome many of the barriers to transnational news circulation. Likewise, national and local outlooks on the news are persistent even for matters of worldwide magnitude and interest. This article argues that the facts related to newsworthy events should be more systematically paired with the scientific knowledge that is required to describe them accurately. Because facts and scientific knowledge should transcend cultural, social and political differences, they could constitute the basis for a limited but fundamental core of news universalism supported by global news agencies and other international news sources.

Accountability disclosure of SOEs: comparing hybrid and private European news agencies

Purpose This paper aims to explore the financial and non-financial accountability disclosure patterns of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as hybrid organizations. Design/methodology/approach Adopting the hybridity concept and resorting to stakeholder theory, this paper works on a comparison between the accountability disclosure patterns of hybrid and private organizations operating in the same industry. European national news agencies are selected as units of analysis and an extensive web content analysis is performed on three categories of information. Findings SOEs are found to disclose a broader spectrum of information than private organizations, and differences between them have been found. Nevertheless, both financial and non-financial disclosures are underdeveloped in the two organizational types. Research limitations/implications This paper illustrates how hybridity explains SOEs’ accountability disclosure patterns. Results could not be complemented through information on disclosure through alternative channels. Future studies are encouraged to perform simultaneous comparisons among hybrid, public and private organizations, as well as considering industry specifics. Practical implications As web accountability disclosure helps to address the demands of distant stakeholders, efforts are needed to enhance SOEs’ web accountability disclosures and not to undermine democratic accountability relationships. Originality/value This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the accountability mechanisms and style of SOEs. Using a framework for hybrid organizations provides an understanding of how SOEs, as hybrid organizations, disclose information for accountability. In turn, this allows, and then promotes, the investigation of social phenomena by conceiving hybridity as a standalone institutional space.

The Terminology Work of Arabicization and Dissemination of Arabicized Terms in the Arab Press from the Perspective of Arab Journalistic Translators

The paper investigates Arab journalists and journalistic translators’ perceptions towards the terminology work of Arabicization, which is laboriously shouldered by Arabic Language Academies (ALAs) in the Arab region. The paper discusses the Arabic academy’s Arabicized terms’ popularity and dissemination in Arab press agencies and outlets, in addition to the linguistic and extralinguistic factors, which play a key role in disseminating these Arabicized terms among Arab journalists, journalistic translators, and news editors. So far, the ALAs have made hugely concerted efforts to Arabicize foreign terms, particularly scientific and technical terminology, particularly from English (ST) into Arabic (TT). However, there is a lack of circulation of the academy’s Arabicized terminologies among Arab journalists and translators in the Arab press. Therefore, Arab journalistic translators in several Arab news agencies and networks were approached as respondents of five semi-structured, detailed interviews to provide an insightful understanding of the case at hand. Accordingly, data were collected via in-depth interviews, and based on the interpretive content analysis of the interviews, the data were analyzed, described, and interpreted. The findings revealed that the ALA’s Arabicized terms are not well-received by Arab journalists and translators and, therefore, these terminologies are not frequently used in the translation of news in the Arab press. The respondents pointed out that the ALA’s Arabicized terms are sometimes difficult to understand because they are unfamiliar forms of Arabic.

Are doctors protected enough during COVID-19 in South Asia?

Background The highly contagious nature of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) places physicians in South Asia at high risk of contracting the infection. Accordingly, we conducted this study to provide an updated account of physician deaths in South Asia during the COVID-19 pandemic and to analyze and compare the different characteristics associated with physician mortality amongst the countries of the region. Methods We performed a cross-sectional study by using published news reports on the websites of news agencies from 9 selected countries in South Asia. Our study included only those physicians and doctors who died after contracting COVID-19 from their respective workplaces. All available data about the country of origin, type of, sex, age, medical or surgical specialty, and date of death were included. Results The total number of physician deaths reported due to COVID-19 in our study was 170, with half (87/170, 51%) of the deaths reported from Iran. Male physician deaths were reported to be 145 (145/170 = 85%). Internal Medicine (58.43%) was the most severely affected sub-specialty. The highest physician mortality rate in the general population recorded in Afghanistan (27/1000 deaths). General physicians from India [OR = 11.00(95% CI = 1.06–114.08), p = 0.045] and public sector medical practitioners from Pakistan [aOR = 4.52 (95% CI = 1.18–17.33), p = 0.028] were showing significant mortality when compared with other regions in multivariate logistic regression. Conclusion An increased number of physician deaths, owing to COVID-19, has been shown in South Asia. This could be due to decreased personal protective equipment and the poor health care management systems of the countries in the region to combat the pandemic. Future studies should provide detailed information of characteristics associated with physician mortalities along with the main complications arising due to the virus.