The Power of Related Articles – Improving Fake News Detection on Social Media Platforms

Social media is increasingly used as a platform for news consumption, but it has also become a breeding ground for fake news. This serious threat poses significant challenges to social media providers, society, and science. Several studies have investigated automated approaches to fighting fake news, but little has been done to improve fake news detection on the users’ side. A simple but promising approach could be to broaden users\u27 knowledge to improve the perceptual process, which will improve detection behavior. This study evaluates the impact of a digital nudging approach which aims to fight fake news with the help of related articles. 322 participants took part in an online experiment simulating the Facebook Newsfeed. In addition to a control group, three treatment groups were exposed to different combinations of related articles. Results indicate that the presence of controversial related articles has a positive influence on the detection of fake news

Online media use of false news to frame the 2016 trump presidential campaign

U.S. presidential election campaigns witnessed an unprecedented viral false news -A type of misinformation referred to as factitious information blend that is motivated to discredit political rivals. Despite the different speculations of factors that might have influenced Donald Trump\u27s surprised victory, empirical and theoretical research on the potential impacts of false news propagated by online news media during election campaigns on influencing voters\u27 attitudes and public opinion is seriously lacking. By drawing on the literature on framing political-effects research and by developing our computational text analytics programs, we addressed questions regarding how online news media used false news to negatively frame the Trump presidential campaign. Our text analytics results indicate that although the negative frames against Trump far outnumbered those against Hillary Clinton, weak frames of unverifiable misinformation might have failed to influence the mass audience, leaving them to the power of Trump\u27s direct political communications via Twitter