The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?

In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues

Examining Journalists' Perception of Fake News and their Attitude Toward Debunking Disinformation

Fake news and other forms of disinformation pose a serious threat to the news ecosystem and the informing of audiences, who are increasingly dependent on online sources of information. After the attention paid to the spreading of fake news, researchers have focused on the study of the negative effects that different typologies of disinformation are prone to having on audiences. Similarly, great attention has also been paid to the motives that users have for the spreading of fake news.These studies, which combine various disciplines, attempt to analyze the psychological factors and motives that lead users to engage with online fake news. On the other hand, several studies have analyzed the role of platforms and their algorithmic logic, as well as the main approaches for addressing this significant problem. Although much effort has been devoted to the phenomenon of disinformation in social media, the role of professional journalists in exposing false information has not been given the necessary attention.Albania is a country with a high rate of fake news and conspiracy theories. This study will investigate the Albanian journalists’ perception of fake news and the risk in them being used as a means of (dis)informing the audience. It will also focus on how this perception affects their behavior and willingness to debunk disinformation on social media. Making use of a national-level questionnaire, to which 270 journalists contributing in the Albanian media responded, the study aims to answer some important questions about the role of journalists in addressing disinformation issues in the social media space. The findings from this study indicate that although journalists in Albania perceive fake news as a danger to democracy, the media and the journalism profession, they do not seem motivated to engage in the debunking actions and exposing of fake news circulating online

Social Media’s impact on Intellectual Property Rights

This is a draft chapter. The final version is available in Handbook of Research on Counterfeiting and Illicit Trade, edited by Peggy E. Chaudhry, published in 2017 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785366451. This material is for private use only, and cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher.Peer reviewe