Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) are rapidly growing and have become a huge source of all kinds of global and local news for millions of users. However, OSNs are a double-edged sword. Although the great advantages they offer such as unlimited easy communication and instant news and information, they can also have many disadvantages and issues. One of their major challenging issues is the spread of fake news. Fake news identification is still a complex unresolved issue. Furthermore, fake news detection on OSNs presents unique characteristics and challenges that make finding a solution anything but trivial. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are still incapable of overcoming this challenging problem. To make matters worse, AI techniques such as machine learning and deep learning are leveraged to deceive people by creating and disseminating fake content. Consequently, automatic fake news detection remains a huge challenge, primarily because the content is designed in a way to closely resemble the truth, and it is often hard to determine its veracity by AI alone without additional information from third parties. This work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of fake news research as well as a fundamental review of existing approaches used to detect and prevent fake news from spreading via OSNs. We present the research problem and the existing challenges, discuss the state of the art in existing approaches for fake news detection, and point out the future research directions in tackling the challenges.

Identifying protective and risk behavior patterns of online communication in young people

“…Indeed, this “paradox mindset” is complex, there lies a question in how we “embrace tensions and foster creative solutions” (Yap & Lim, 2023, p. 2), as social media and online communication both offers positive aspects, as noted by young people themselves (O'Reilly, 2020), yet can host unsafe, unhealthy environments. This is particularly pertinent in an online world increasingly permeated with “fake news,” disinformation and misinformation (Aïmeur et al, 2023) as well as content automatically generated from AI tools and technologies (Dwivedi et al, 2023). Yap and Lim (2023) suggest that all stakeholders at the micro (i.e., parents), meso (i.e., educators and psychologists), and macro‐levels (i.e., policymakers, businesses) should ensure that the content children are exposed to is appropriate and empowering, with the macro‐level paying particular attention to regulation and safeguarding.…”

“They act like we are going to heaven”: pre-arrival information experiences, information crafting and settlement of immigrants in Canada

“…There has been an increase in research in the areas of misinformation and disinformation (e.g. Aı €meur et al, 2023;Guess and Lyons, 2020;Rubin, 2019Rubin, , 2022. Much of this scholarship focuses on misinformation and disinformation in online environments.…”

Why Do People Share Political Information and Misinformation Online? Developing a Bottom-Up Descriptive Framework

“…One key interest in research concerning users’ characteristics is that of psychological motives. Several reviews have described evidence driven by researchers’ ideas about users’ sharing motivations (Aïmeur et al, 2023; S. Chen, Xiao, et al, 2023; Metzger et al, 2021), overall providing a useful overview of top-down knowledge concerning a wide range of motivations for misinformation sharing.…”