The Fake News Spreading Plague

Abstract

In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" [8] won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues.

The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News

“…In their turn, humans were replying to humans more than to bots, another marker that humans and bots operate in largely disconnected subgraphs. These results are somewhat at odds with the political botnet studied by Metaxas and Mustafaraj (2010), which directed replies at recipients purposefully selected for their partisan interest in the Massachusetts elections, a quarter of whom went on to retweet the automated message they received (Mustafaraj & Metaxas, 2017). The variability of @-mentioning and retweeting practices indicate that bot masters are likely implementing a range of different strategies depending on the political objective set for the botnet.…”

Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection

“…Fake news spread fast. It spreads faster and penetrates social networks to a larger extent than credible news (Mustafaraj and Metaxas, 2017;Vosoughi et al, 2018). This may be due to its novelty, its capacity to generate outrage (which generates attention), or its role in confirming the preexisting biases of the reader.…”

Post-Truth, Philosophy and Law

“…If the original meaning of fake news thus referred to forms of communication blurring the boundaries between fiction and real world, and did not mean the spread of false information, the prevalent meaning of fake news is now rather different. Especially after the 2016 American election, the term has come to mean false stories describing events in the real world by mimicking the forms of traditional media reportages, fabricated and promoted on social media either for ideological reasons or for financial gain (Rubin et al 2015;Silverman 2016;Mustafaraj, Taxis Metaxas 2017;Allcott, Gentzkow 2017;Rini 2017;Jang, Kim 2018). In this new definition, the following features characterize fake news:…”

“…But this similarity concerns only a section of fake news and, even in this section, evidence coming from current research shows that there are specific features setting political fake news apart from old propaganda and manipulation. On the one hand, as many scholars hold, internet and social media seem to affect the selection process of the information one is exposed to (Sunstein 2007;Pariser 2011;Mustafaraj, Taxis Metaxas 2017), and, on the other hand, cognitive traps, heuristics and motivational interference are more easily triggered in social media contexts (Levy 2017). Moreover, there are consequences of the spreading of fake news, such as their agenda setting power on traditional media and public discourse (Vargo 2018).…”