Online social networks (OSNs) are rapidly growing and have become a huge source of all kinds of global and local news for millions of users. However, OSNs are a double-edged sword. Although the great advantages they offer such as unlimited easy communication and instant news and information, they can also have many disadvantages and issues. One of their major challenging issues is the spread of fake news. Fake news identification is still a complex unresolved issue. Furthermore, fake news detection on OSNs presents unique characteristics and challenges that make finding a solution anything but trivial. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are still incapable of overcoming this challenging problem. To make matters worse, AI techniques such as machine learning and deep learning are leveraged to deceive people by creating and disseminating fake content. Consequently, automatic fake news detection remains a huge challenge, primarily because the content is designed in a way to closely resemble the truth, and it is often hard to determine its veracity by AI alone without additional information from third parties. This work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of fake news research as well as a fundamental review of existing approaches used to detect and prevent fake news from spreading via OSNs. We present the research problem and the existing challenges, discuss the state of the art in existing approaches for fake news detection, and point out the future research directions in tackling the challenges. 

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s13278-023-01028-5.pdf

Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review

Desde hace algo más de un lustro, las fake news se han convertido en un fenómeno global que incide de modo determinante en los flujos comunicativos mundiales. Dado que el canal prioritario a través del cual se difunden son las redes sociales, cabe pensar que los jóvenes, principales usuarios de estas aplicaciones, constituyen el colectivo más expuesto a ellas. En este trabajo se analiza, partiendo de un muestreo representativo de los individuos residentes en España de entre 15 y 24 años (n=1.068), la percepción que los jóvenes tienen de las fake news, atendiendo a la frecuencia con que las reciben, sus temáticas y fuentes más habituales y el modo en que se enfrentan a ellas, teniendo en cuenta cómo influyen en su recepción factores sociodemográficos como el sexo, la edad, el hábitat, la ideología o el nivel formativo. Entre otras constataciones, los resultados evidencian que cuanto mayor es la edad y el nivel formativo, mayores son las tasas de reconocimiento y verificación de noticias falsas; que es más habitual contrastar las informaciones entre los individuos que viven en grandes municipios; y que quienes se sitúan a la derecha del espectro ideológico verifican con menor frecuencia que el resto de jóvenes.
 

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Las fake news y su percepción por parte de los jóvenes españoles: el influjo de los factores sociodemográficos

Political fake news continues to be a threat to contemporary societies, negatively affecting public and democratic institutions. The literature has identified political bias as one of the main predictors of belief and spread of fake news. However, the academic debate has not been consensual regarding the effect of political identity on the discernment of fake news. This systematic literature review (2017–2021) seeks to understand whether there is consistent evidence that one political identity may be more vulnerable to fake news than others. Focusing the analysis on European and North American (United States) studies, we used Scopus and Web of Science databases to examine the literature. Our findings revealed that most studies are consistent in identifying the conservative or right-wing audience as more vulnerable to fake news. Although there seems to be a motivated political reasoning for both sides, left-wing people or liberals were not, in any analyzed study, associated with a greater propensity to believe in political fake news. Motivated reasoning seems stronger and more active among conservatives, both in the United States and Europe. Our study reinforces the need to intensify the fight against the proliferation of fake news among the most conservative, populist, and radical right audience.

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Who Believes in Fake News? Identification of Political (A)Symmetries

In this article, I will work on the idea of Pre-Truth (as opposed to post-truth) and Semiological Guerrilla (as opposed to fake news), claiming that these two concepts are better equipped to explain what is happening in our contemporary societies, especially if we take into account the world of media and communication. In the first part of the article, I will frame the problems of fake news and post-truth within the dynamics characterizing the relationships between knowledge and power. Taking into account Foucault and Latour’s perspectives, I argue that the problem of fake news can be understood as a new kind of relationship between these two instances, previously stably coupled and in the hands of institutional power. Later, I will deal with three different meanings of “fake news,” that are usually blended and confused: (a) serendipity, (b) false belief, and (c) mendacity. Consequently, I will deal with the problem of “Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” arguing that the new shape of the “knowledge-power relationship” rendered alternative and non-institutionally certified interpretations the norm. Eventually, I will identify the deep cause of this effect in the machinic production of documents provided by new technologies, causing a return of the medieval sense of “truth” as “trust,” independent from knowledge and strictly related to anecdotes and personal experiences. Finally, I will work on the concept of “truth” connected to technology, trying to reveal its genealogy with the aim of explaining some misleading contemporary beliefs on “post-truth.”

Pre-Truth: Fake News, Semiological Guerrilla Warfare, and Some Other Media and Communication “Revolutions”

The Covid-19 pandemic heightened already intense and increased scrutiny of public education in recent years. The administrative impulse to stage community engagement efforts to deliberate upon these questions, however well-intentioned, rarely realises full community engagement and reflection. Based on an examination of public engagement events held at Florida schools related to the Covid-19 health crisis, the proposed essay identifies a more concerning transformation of "public comment" into a weaponisable prop for lawmakers seeking the public legitimacy necessary for their agenda, marrying the worlds of critical studies with those of public administration and its orientations. More than merely failing to genuinely engage the public, we argue that such events forestall a more productive arrangement of the democratic form that does not rely on publicness and the leader that secures that space. Ultimately, we suggest a path that affords the possibility of public engagement, but that does not seal off the possibility of that more radical democratic future to come.

The Weaponisation of Public Comment Rules in Policy Deliberations

Current literature on fake news is rather abundant and mainly focused on history, variety, and types, rather than processes. This review draws on current literature to build a working definition of fake news focused on its present relevance to journalism and political communication contemporary debate, distinguishing it from non-pertinent conceptual varieties and contributing to a much-needed clarification on the subject. We performed a qualitative analysis of the literature published between 2016 and 2020. Data were extracted from Web of Science and Scopus. We define fake news as a type of online disinformation with misleading and/or false statements that may or may not be associated with real events, intentionally designed to mislead and/or manipulate a specific or imagined public through the appearance of a news format with an opportunistic structure (title, image, content) to attract the reader’s attention in order to obtain more clicks and shares and, therefore, greater advertising revenue and/or ideological gain. 

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Patricia Wannamaker

Papers

A Working Definition of Fake News