Chapter Media and fake news: An analysis of citizens’ attitudes toward misinformation in European countries

The rapid changes determined by the rise of Internet and the recent development of social media in daily life have led to profound consequences on the quantity and quality of data made available and on the mechanisms of their dissemination. The rapid spread of on-line disinformation is one of the most discussed topic, and has been identified as one of the top-trends in modern societies by the World Economic Forum, also because of the link between these processes and political communication. Thanks to the availability of micro-data from the Flash Eurobarometer survey on “Fake news and disinformation online”, the present work aims at analyzing the attitude of European citizens toward fake news and disinformation. In a first step, cluster of citizens are identified according to their level of trust in media news, in relation to different types of media. Given the categorical nature of the variables considered, k-mode clustering is implemented. Secondly, the main determinants of news trust levels are analyzed, through regression models for categorical response variables. Preliminary results show that socio-demographic characteristics as well as technological use have an influence on trust in the media, which in turn determines different approaches on the role of institutions in tackling disinformation. The relevance of fake news in contemporary period and its potential consequences on the political side require a reflection on the role of statistical literacy and of official statistical institutes in dealing with disinformation in the post-truth era

The Misinformation Paradox: Older Adults are Cynical about News Media, but Engage with It Anyway

Misinformation can be easily spread with the click of a button, but can cause irreversible harm and negatively impact news consumers’ ability to discern false information. Some prior work suggests that older adults may engage with (read, share, or believe) misinformation at higher rates than others. However, engagement explanations vary. In an effort to understand older adults' engagement with misinformation better, we investigate the misinformation experiences of older adults through their perception of prior media experiences. Analyzing 69 semi-structured interviews with adults ages 59+ from the US, the Netherlands, Bosnia, and Turkey, we find that people who have decades of potential exposure or experience with both online and traditional news media have reached a state of media cynicism in which they distrust most, or even all, of the news they receive. Yet, despite this media cynicism, the older adults we study rarely fact-check the media they see and continue to read and share news they distrust. These findings suggest that this paradoxical reaction to media cynicism, in addition to prior explanations such as cognitive issues and digital literacy, may in part explain older adults' engagement with misinformation. Thus, we introduce the misinformation paradox, an additional area of research worth explorin

Sentiment analysis on film review in Gujarati language using machine learning

Opinion analysis is by a long shot most basic zone of characteristic language handling. It manages the portrayal of information to choose the motivation behind the wellspring of the content. The reason might be of a type of gratefulness (positive) or study (negative). This paper offers a correlation between the outcomes accomplished by applying the calculation arrangement using various classifiers for instance K-nearest neighbor and multinomial naive Bayes. These techniques are utilized to assess a significant assessment with either a positive remark or negative remark. The gathered information considered on the grounds of the extremity film datasets and an association with the results accessible proof has been created for a careful assessment. This paper investigates the word level count vectorizer and term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) influence on film sentiment analysis. We concluded that multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) classier generate more accurate result using TF-IDF vectorizer compared to CountVectorizer, K-nearest-neighbors (KNN) classifier has the same accuracy result in case of TF-IDF and CountVectorizer

The role of the Big Geographic Sort in Online News Circulation among U.S. Reddit Users

Past research has attributed the circulation of online news to two main factors—individual characteristics (e.g., a person’s information literacy) and social media efects (e.g., algorithmmediated information difusion)—and has overlooked a third one: the critical mass created by the ofine self-segregation of Americans into like-minded geographical regions such as states (a phenomenon called ‘The Big Sort’). We hypothesized that this latter factor matters for the online spreading of news not least because online interactions, despite having the potential of being global, end up being localized: interaction probability is known to rapidly decay with distance. Upon analysis of more than 8M Reddit comments containing news links spanning four years, from January 2016 to December 2019, we found that Reddit did not work as an ‘hype machine’ for news (as opposed to what previous work reported for other platforms, circulation was not mainly caused by platform-facilitated network efects). Rather, news circulation in Reddit worked as a supply-and-demand system: news items scaled linearly with the number of users in each state (with a scaling exponent β ≈ 1, and a goodness of ft R2 ≈ 0.95). Furthermore, deviations from such a universal pattern were best explained by state-level personality and cultural factors (R2 ≈ {0.12, 0.39}), rather than socioeconomic conditions (R2 ≈ {0.15, 0.29}) or political characteristics (R2 ≈ {0.06, 0.21}). Higher-than-expected circulation of any type of news was found in states characterised by residents who tend to be less diligent in terms of their personality (low in conscientiousness) and by loose cultures understating the importance of adherence to norms (low in cultural tightness). Interestingly, the combination of those factors with low levels of education was then associated with the circulation of a particular type of news, that is, misinformation. These results suggest that online interactions are geographically bounded and, as such, news circulation cannot be studied purely as an Internet phenomenon but should be grounded into a user’s ofine cultural environment, which has become increasingly segregated over the decades, and is admittedly hard to change

Information disorder, the Triumvirate, and COVID-19: How media outlets, foreign state intrusion, and the far-right diaspora drive the COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement

Information disorder has become an increasing concern in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election. With the state of the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly evolving in all facets, the vaccination debate has become increasingly polarized and subjected to a form of politics based around identity markers such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, and ideology. At the forefront of this is the COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement that has gained mainstream attention, leading to conflict with pro-vaccinationists. This has paved the way for exploitation by subversive elements such as, foreign state-backed disinformation campaigns, alternative news outlets, and right-wing influencers who spread false and misleading information, or disinformation, on COVID-19 in order to promote polarization of the vaccine debate through identity politics. Disinformation spread sows confusion and disorder, leading to the erosion of social cohesion as well as the potential for real-world conflict and violence. As a result, the article below will generate further understanding of the modern-day spread of disinformation, the strategies and tactics utilized by state and non-state actors, the effects of its exposure, and the social-psychological processes involved in its spread and resonance. Furthermore, in countering this phenomenon, this article recommends a collaborative framework involving emphasis on critical media literacy skills, citizen participation, and development of counter-offensive capabilities towards state-backed information operations

Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies