Author: Fake News Fighter

On January 6, as public officials met to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential Election, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the capitol by mob, resulting in a riot that left five people dead.

In the days leading up to the riot, supporters of President Trump used a myriad of mainstream and fringe social media sites to organize and discuss the possibility of violence. Websites like Parler and TheDonald.win were “rife with posts about storming the Capitol,” according to an article in The Hill.

According to reporting by the New York Times, as Donald Trump ended his afternoon rally by calling on protestors to march on Congress, right-wing groups immediately took to these sites to promote the attack. At least 12 people openly posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol building, with others recommending tools that could help pry open doors.

Some were dressed in Viking costumes, some looked like soldiers in camouflage military uniforms, and others carried with them symbols of hate.

But they all united — as they had been for months — around a common falsehood: The election had been unlawfully stolen from Trump, who deserved the victory.

Fake news, from what it is to how it spreads, has been a hot topic throughout the past few years, especially amidst the recent election.

In the weeks following Election Day, President Trump has been making claims of widespread fraud that wrongfully resulted in Joe Biden’s win.

Jeff Hemsley, Professor of Information Studies at the iSchool, says that there
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From loose tigers to voter fraud, news outlets and social media have contributed to the explosive growth of fake news stories and false information in recent years.

But if one thing has become increasingly clear, it’s that fake news can have very real, very dangerous consequences.

We spoke to Jeff Hemsley, Josh Introne, Bei Yu, and Lu Xiao — each of them a professor here at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies — to dig into the nature of fake news and what we can all do to mitigate its impact.

Looking for a program that lets you study information’s effect on society? Check out our undergraduate and graduate programs at the iSchool.

It’s one thing to hear something that isn’t true. It’s another to believe it. It’s these beliefs that lead to action, which can have both positive and negative repercussions.

Josh Introne, Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the iSchool, studies how our belief systems impact the stories and information we choose to accept as true.

His research examines belief systems — pools of interconnected beliefs that are likely to occur together — within certain populations.

He says, for example, that a person who believes that the Affordable Care Act was an important step in improving healthcare is also likely to support gun control as a means of addressing gun violence.

Introne attributes people’s individual susceptibility to false information to their belief systems and tribalism — a state where the identity of the group becomes more important than the identity of the
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At his suburban Melbourne medical practice, GP Dr Billy Stoupas has been fielding an “unprecedented” number of vaccine questions from patients.

The questions started when the US approved the Pfizer vaccine two months ago and have been increasing ahead of the Australian rollout — now only weeks away.

Things like: How did they get the vaccine ready to go so quickly? How do we know it’s safe? Which one would you get?

“We spend time discussing things like that and try to reassure people,” he says.

Australians are overwhelmingly supportive of vaccinations in general, but surveys show a higher than usual rate of hesitancy about the COVID jab.

This is to be expected — COVID vaccines have been developed very fast, so it’s natural to ask how they have been found safe to use.

But lurking in the background, experts say, is a hidden campaign of
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If you want someone to not believe that false or misleading headline they just read, when’s the best time to correct it? We hear a lot about inoculating people against fake news or “prebunking” it, but new research shows that the best time to fact-check a false headline — and have subjects remember the fact-check a week later — is after the subject has already read the headline.

Presenting corrections after and during exposure to false headlines decreased belief one week later. While all three treatments increased belief in true headlines one week later, supplying corrections after exposure was most effective. 4/10 pic.twitter.com/pFqNQvbM9O

— Nadia Brashier (@nadiabrashier) January 26, 2021

Nadia Brashear, Gordon Pennycook, Adam J. Berinsky, and David G. Rand write in PNAS:

[The] key challenge is making corrections memorable. Debunking was more effective than labeling, emphasizing the power of feedback in boosting memory. […]

Ideally, people would not see misinformation in the first place, since even a single exposure to a fake headline makes it seem truer. Moreover, professional fact-checkers only flag a small fraction of false content, but tagging some stories
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Adapting to the misinformation era, journalists emphasize transparency in their daily practices

“Fake news” is an unfortunate phrase. It is so casually invoked and widely deployed as to be almost devoid of meaning. And, most infamously, it has been weaponized by politicians (one former president in particular) as both a ready tool to dismiss inconvenient truths in the moment and also, more perniciously, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of journalism as a whole.

Yet, “fake news” captures for many people a defining set of features about our information environment: from declining trust in news media to concerns about the seemingly supercharged spread of misinformation on social media to the general unease with the level of fakery that seems to fight for our precious attention at every turn online. This creates a conundrum for journalists: Given how directly the “fake news” phenomenon and the discourse surrounding it challenges the authority behind producing “real” news, what are journalists to do? How should they respond and adapt?

A new article in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly offers some initial answers. Researchers Hong Tien Vu and Magdalena Saldaña use a nationally representative survey of U.S. journalists to examine how newsroom practices have changed (or not) amid the rise of misinformation and the rhetoric of “fake news.” Specifically, the authors focused on whether journalists reported having either adopted new approaches or intensified existing ones as a way of “preventing” misinformation and thereby avoiding complaints of spreading fake news.

First, Vu and Saldaña found that “journalists were most likely to
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The videos will notify the user when content is misleading or has not been verified before sharing.

Bad actors are hijacking journalist names, photos and bylines to help give credibility to fake storylines or hoaxes on the internet.

Why it matters: Even when platforms try to police this type of content, memes and fake stories often still circulate indefinitely, making it hard for victims to fully recover from the hoax.

Driving the news: Joe Gould, a Congress and Industry reporter for Defense News, tells Axios about how his identity was hacked to fuel a right-wing meme conspiracy that the incoming Defense Secretary planned to outsource U.S. defense systems to China.

• Gould received more than five dozen emails last weekend asking him if a meme that featured an article with his byline on Telegram was really written by him. It wasn’t.

“My credibility as a journalist was hijacked.”

— Gould

Gould later found that the meme was rapidly spreading on bigger platforms like Facebook. Frantically, he started to search for the meme using key words noted in the fake article and to contact people who posted it to try to get them to take it down.

• Many were distraught that they had been duped and grateful to Joe for reaching out. “People were thanking me for good journalism,” Gould said. “People out there just want the truth.”
• Eventually, Defense News’ lawyers contacted Facebook. The tech giant did try to take the memes down, but many are still floating around the platform. Some
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Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Frankfurt and the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, have developed a new approach that can help detect fake news leveraging machine learning methods.

As part of the study published in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, scientists have leveraged machine learning methods to create classification models that can help detect false information.

The model can help identify suspicious messages based on their content and certain linguistic characteristics.

“Here we look at other aspects of the text that makes up the message, such as the comprehensibility of the language and the mood that the text conveys,” said Professor Jan Muntermann from the University of Göttingen as quoted in an official release published in Eureaklert!.

The approach is known in principle. For instance, the spam filters that are used by internet companies to identify spam messages.

The key problem with current methods, according to the researchers was that fraudsters are continuously adapting the content and avoiding certain words that are used to identify fake information to avoid being detected.

In the new approach, researchers combined models with high detection rates and robustness. This is so that fake news can still be detected even if certain suspicious words disappear from the text.

“This puts scammers into a dilemma. They can only avoid detection if they change the mood of the text so that it is negative, for instance,” explained Dr Michael Siering. “But then they would miss their target of inducing investors to buy certain
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