Evaluating Information in the Era of "Fake News"

NPR has done a number of shows and written a number of articles on "Fake News". This page highlights these different stories.

This intriguing article from the Washington Post discusses how Fake News creators make money spreading Fake News.

When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Where does Fake News come from? If you were a detective, you might be told to 'follow the money'. The journalists in this article do so, and it takes them to an unexpected source.

Another example of following the Fake News money trail, this article discusses a Fake News creator and the financial and revenue reasons that drive him to spread fake stories.

This study discusses a research article (link available in this news story) that found that 6 out of 10 articles are actually shared without the sharers actually reading the article itself. This brings into question what does it really mean to consume news and questions the reasons why people might share articles and pieces. By the way, we did read this article before sharing it... (:

While Fake News stories propagated wildly in both liberal and conservative sites in the last elections, a large number of Fake News outlets seemed to target Trump supporters. This article examines 'why?'.

This article discusses a trend to gain a more liberal audience by Fake News propagators attempting to take advantage of angst at Trump's election by left-leaning people.

This interesting article from the Columbia Journalism Review asks about the real impact of Fake News on the nation.

One aspect of the story of Fake News is technological. Algorithms have become central to the spread of information. One form of these are social bots explored in this essay.

Pew is a great resource for information and statistics regarding the media habits of Americans. In this piece the examine American views of Fake News and discover that 23% of those in their study have knowingly or unintentionally shared Fake News stories.

Here is a Pew study that examines the news habits and attitudes of news consumers.

One of the issues with today's information environment, is that people often only engage with articles or news pieces that tend to fit their own opinions. This can be reinforced by technological algorithms which seek to give you more of what you want. This article explores this issue...

Here is another article from the American Press Institute discussing ways in which Americans get their news.

According to this Politico report, "One in four political links shared on social media in France ahead of the first round of the country’s presidential election Sunday contained misinformation, according to a study by Oxford University researchers." This illustrates that Fake News is not just a US, but global problem as well.

Here is a post by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg on the topic of steps Facebook intends on taking to counter misinformation.

"The latest effort in the battle against fake news comes from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who announced plans this week for an online news publication he says will be written by professional journalists, edited by volunteer fact-checkers and supported by readers who care enough to donate money."

Online publishing, social networks, and web search have dramatically lowered the costs of producing, distributing, and discovering news articles. Some scholars argue that such technological changes increase exposure to diverse perspectives, while others worry that they increase ideological segregation. We address the issue by examining webbrowsing histories for 50,000 US-located users who regularly read online news. We find that social networks and search engines are associated with an increase in the mean ideological distance between individuals. However, somewhat counterintuitively, these same channels also are associated with an increase in an individual's exposure to material from his or her less preferred side of the political spectrum. Finally, the vast majority of online news consumption is accounted for by individuals simply visiting the home pages of their favorite, typically mainstream, news outlets, tempering the consequences--both positive and negative--of recent technological changes. We thus uncover evidence for both sides of the debate, while also finding that the magnitude of the effects is relatively modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

he abundance of political media outlets raises concerns that citizens isolate themselves to likeminded news, leaving the public with infrequent shared media experiences and little exposure to disagreeable information. Network analysis of 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey data (N = 57,967) indicates these worries are exaggerated, as general interest news outlets like local newspapers and non-partisan television news are central to the public’s media environment. Although there is some variation between the media diets of Republicans and Democrats (FOX News and conservative talk radio are central to Republicans’ information network), neither group appears to engage in active avoidance of disagreeable information. Individuals across the political spectrum are not creating partisan “echo chambers” but instead have political media repertoires that are remarkably similar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A review of research suggests that the desire for opinion reinforcement may play a more important role in shaping individuals’ exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. The article tests this idea using data collected via a web-administered behavior-tracking study with subjects recruited from the readership of 2 partisan online news sites (N = 727). The results demonstrate that opinion-reinforcing information promotes news story exposure while opinion-challenging information makes exposure only marginally less likely. The influence of both factors is modest, but opinion-reinforcing information is a more important predictor. Having decided to view a news story, evidence of an aversion to opinion challenges disappears: There is no evidence that individuals abandon news stories that contain information with which they disagree. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates political homophily on Twitter. Using a combination of machine learning and social network analysis we classify users as Democrats or as Republicans based on the political content shared. We then investigate political homophily both in the network of reciprocated and nonreciprocated ties. We find that structures of political homophily differ strongly between Democrats and Republicans. In general, Democrats exhibit higher levels of political homophily. But Republicans who follow official Republican accounts exhibit higher levels of homophily than Democrats. In addition, levels of homophily are higher in the network of reciprocated followers than in the nonreciprocated network. We suggest that research on political homophily on the Internet should take the political culture and practices of users seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the above section, it was mentioned that 59% of articles were shared without being read. This is the research article that discusses these findings.

In online social networks, users tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups of like minded people. Polarization as well as its effects on online social interactions have been extensively investigated. Still, the relation between group formation and personality traits remains unclear. A better understanding of the cognitive and psychological determinants of online social dynamics might help to design more efficient communication strategies and to challenge the digital misinformation threat. In this work, we focus on users commenting posts published by US Facebook pages supporting scientific and conspiracy-like narratives, and we classify the personality traits of those users according to their online behavior. We show that different and conflicting communities are populated by users showing similar psychological profiles, and that the dominant personality model is the same in both scientific and conspiracy echo chambers. Moreover, we observe that the permanence within echo chambers slightly shapes users' psychological profiles. Our results suggest that the presence of specific personality traits in individuals lead to their considerable involvement in supporting narratives inside virtual echo chambers.

Made by developers at Google before Fake News became a house-hold word, this article examines one algorithmic way to determine the honesty of sites across the web.