Fake news in Social Media

What is fake news?

Fake news is this type of yellow press that consists of orchestrated misinformation or lies that are shared through the traditional media, relayed by channels or by internet media. Fake news is written to mislead the reader, often with the use of sensual, excessive or false headlines, in order to gain the attention of the reader for political or economic gains.

The types of fake news can be defined as follows:

1. Satire or parody that may not have the intention of harm but has the potential to create a false image to the public.
2. False link between the content and the headings and/or graphics that accompany it.
3. Misleading content to change the point of view of a subject or a person’s relationship with it.
4. Content that the actual data has been shared with false and supposedly related events.
5. Content that mixes fake and real sources.
6. Content that has been falsified to look like something other than what it is.
7. Completely crafted content designed to slander and/or hurt someone..

Impressive titles can make these stories extremely popular. This is also apparent from the results of a BuzzFeed News analysis that found that in the three months before the US election, the top fake news created more commitment than top stories from larger and more established news sites.

More specifically, the top 20 fake news gave 8,711,000 shares, responses and comments, while the top 20 news releases gave just 7,367,000. The BuzzFeed reported that the top fake story of the election in the three months before the election was “Pope Francis shocks the world by approving Donald Trump as president according to his statement.”

How to distinguish them:

The British Independent Charity Event Checklist, Full Fact, provided the following tips for detecting fake news:

1. Be skeptical of the titles. False news often has catchy headlines filled with exclamations.
2. Look carefully at the URL. A misleading or similar URL can be a false news warning.
3. Investigate the source. Make sure the story is written from a source you trust and which is famous for its accuracy.
4. Watch for unusual formatting. Many bogus news sites have spelling mistakes or random layouts.
5. Review the photos. False news often contains images or videos that have been manipulated.
6. Check the dates. The false news may contain time sequences that make no sense.
7. Check the evidence. Check the sources of the editor to confirm that they are accurate.
8. See other references. If no other news source reports the same story then it may indicate that the story is false.
9. Does the story a joke?
10. Some stories are deliberately false. Think critically the stories you read and share the only news that you know is reliable.

How social media is used and why

The main reason Facebook is used to disperse such news is that the spread and breadth you can achieve through this platform are extremely powerful and various reports have already shown that the platform can be used to change the views of people with Based emotional factors. Therefore, misuse is an important concern – for example, if a political party could identify specific users that were more prone to a particular type of message, they could target them with ads focusing on their fears.

This is essentially the way in which Cambridge Analytica has been able to help various political movements – including the Trump and Brexit campaigns – gain momentum.
Finding “already convinced” voters is the key to any campaign, and with such a treasure of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people with material that could excite them, for example, with pictures of immigrants “flooding” the country. The key to the campaign was to find emotional “scandals” for each individual voter.

What are the Social Networks about fake news

Social media and search engines have come to terms with the visibility of relevant articles. Facebook in the face of the British National Elections has taken steps to fight the worsened problem by conducting a national print advertising campaign in the UK to educate the British public on fake news. The ads appearing in the Telegraph, Times, Metro and Guardian newspapers list 10 things to keep in mind when deciding whether a story is genuine. These include checking the date of the article and the address of the site, as well as ensuring that it is not a satire. Advertisements will follow in similar newspapers in Germany and France a month before their parliamentary elections.

Facebook also revealed that it has deleted thousands of UK accounts and revised its newsfeed in an attempt to tackle fake news.

In February, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the site would focus on flagging inaccurate articles to users instead of banning them. He said:

“In a free society, it is important that people have the power to share their opinions, even if others believe they are wrong. We have made improvements to more readily recognize bogus accounts by identifying activity patterns – without evaluating. For example, our systems may detect a repeat publication of the same content or an increase in the messages being sent. With these changes, we expect to reduce the spread of Not generated by real user activity, including unwanted content, misinformation, or any other misleading content shared by bogus account creators. ”

Facebook has launched a program to work with independent event control organizations that have signed the Poynter International Trust Control Authority Code of Conduct. Facebook’s Facebook reporting system will be used by its community to send stories to these organizations along with other messages. If the event-controlling organization finds a story as fake, it will be marked as questionable and there will be a link to the relevant article explaining why. Stories that we may also have avoided will appear lower in the news feed. Facebook also announced that its latest measure to combat the spread of false and misleading news over its network would be to add a new list of “related” articles that will appear before the user clicks on a news article in his feed.

Google also moved to fight fake news when in October 2016 it added an event check tag to questionable stories and grouped them with credible articles that challenged them. It also announced plans to try to curb revenue from fake news sites by stopping them from using its ad networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/facebooks-stepping-efforts-stamp-out-fake-news-ahead-uk-election

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/facebooks-stepping-efforts-stamp-out-fake-news-ahead-uk-election

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/facebook-updates-news-feed-algorithm-combat-spread-fake-news