Incentivizing the Dissemination of Truth Versus Fake News in Social Networks

The concept of truth, as a public good is the production of a collective understanding, which emerges from a complex network of social interactions. The recent impact of social networks on shaping the perception of truth in political arena shows how such perception is corroborated and established by the online users, collectively. However, investigative journalism for discovering truth is a costly option, given the vast spectrum of online information. In some cases, both journalist and online users choose not to investigate the authenticity of the news they receive, because they assume other actors of the network had carried the cost of validation. Therefore, the new phenomenon of "fake news" has emerged within the context of social networks. The online social networks, similarly to System of Systems, cause emergent properties, which makes authentication processes difficult, given availability of multiple sources. In this study, we show how this conflict can be modeled as a volunteer's dilemma. We also show how the public contribution through news subscription (shared rewards) can impact the dominance of truth over fake news in the network.Comment: System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSE), 2017 12th. IEEE, 201

Detección de relaciones causales entre noticias en medios en español

Las noticias dadas en artículos de diferentes medios raras veces tienen múltiples fuentes. Es habitual encontrar artículos cubriendo un evento, que sean redactados en distintos medios, sin que estos estén basados en experiencias personales o siquiera en fuentes propias. En los últimos tiempos se ha empezado a dudar de los medios y del origen de estas fuentes comunes entre ellos. Se ha empezado a hablar del fenómeno llamado fake news (popularizado en EEUU) como instrumento de manipulación, que hace que haya una mayor preocupación e interés por conocer la fuente y procedencia de las noticias que se exponen al público. Este es un tema de visible preocupación siendo unos de los centrales en redes sociales y blogs de opinión en el último año. Es por ello por lo que este trabajo trata de establecer la relación entre los artículos de noticias que existen en los medios de comunicación utilizando métodos estadísticos, empíricos y de la teoría de información. Esto ha motivado la creación de un sistema con el que poder extraer artículos de principales medios en la web, clasificarlos por evento y construir una base para el estudio y análisis de estas relaciones. Como resultado final se ofrece un sistema capaz de reflejar qué medios comparten fuentes entre sí a la hora de escribir artículos sobre una misma noticia

Hacker, influencer, counter-culture spy: cyberspace actors’ models of misinformation and counter-operations

As misinformation continues to spread on social media, its residents have begun to fight back, independent of any platform. This organic resistance to the diffusion of misinformation is a clearly observable phenomenon with roots in Anonymous’ distributed campaigns from the 2010s outwards. Hacker and information security communities are acting in defense of some of their favorite spaces, most notably, Twitter. Security researchers of all stripes use it for sharing indicators of compromise but, as the diffusion of misinformation becomes more problematic it becomes more difficult to find signals in the noise. These actors’ response to the issues at hand is polarizing, some convinced that political (counter) argumentation is a perpetual nuisance while others passionately attack the roots of misinformation, wherever they perceive it. In this study, researchers interview twenty-three cyberspace actors, highly active on Twitter & Discord, to better understand their mental models of misinformation, how they conceptualize counter operations and their thoughts on the efficacy of the tactics, tools and procedures involved therein