Misinformation on Social Media

Recently, fake news and misinformation about the mass shooting in Las Vegas are circulated and shared on social media. For example, a person was wrongly identified as the shooter and started to get death threats after his name was spread across the internet. Also, the fake news said that the ISIS made the attack.

New technologies and social media sites allow large numbers of amateur individuals to post online with little or no "gatekeepers" or filters. Tweets, Facebook posts, and blogs are not fact-checked before they get published on social media platforms. Misinformation is circulated across social media. The slides on Misinformation have been posted on Blackboard, and the following are supplemental readings about fake news and misinformation.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/best-way-quash-fake-news-choke-off-ad-money/

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/journalism-fights-survival-post-truth-era/

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/podcasts-news-tech-politics/

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

Please write a report about misinformation/fake news and social media platforms (2 or 3 pages, single spacing, 12 font size). More specifically, you want to answer the following questions.

 

• How does misinformation affect public policies? (30 points)
• How does misinformation affect organizations? (30 points)
•  How to stop the dissemination of misinformation/fake news? (20 points)
• Any issues of misinformation or other impacts that you find important?  (20 points)

Please discuss those questions in your report and submit it on Blackboard by the due date. You need to cite your references in your report. You may use the articles mentioned above or cite other sources that you find online.

  

Media Production

• All content and information need to be approved before it was aired or published by traditional "gatekeepers" such as newspaper editors, publishers, and news shows. - In the 1970s and 1980s.
  
  
  •       A Small handful of media corporations reach a mass audience
  •       Prevent anything controversial, distasteful, or too op positional
  •       Independent voices are kept out of the conversation
  •       False national consensus
   
  

• New technologies and social media sites allow large numbers of amateur individuals can post online with little or no "gatekeepers" or filters. -in the 1990s and 2000s.

 

User Generated Content

•      User -generated content (UGC) is defined as "any form of content created by users of an online system or service, often made available via social media websites"-Wikipedia

•      Blogs

•      Wikis (Wikipedia)

•      Video (YouTube)

•      Tweets (Twitter)

•      Digital images (Flickr, Instagram)

•      Chats (What’s up, WeChat, Snapchat (image chats))

•      Discussion forums (product reviews on Trip Advisor, Yelp!)

 

• News is shared by readers (Retweets, likes, etc.). If a story is not shared by anybody, it might as well never have been written.

• To get people to share a story is by appealing to their feelings.

•      Anger was the “key mediating mechanism” determining whether someone shared information on Facebook.

•      More partisan and enraged someone was, the more likely they were to share political news online. (Positive and negative product reviews)

Misinformation

•      Drivers Behind Fake news.

•      News on Fake News

•      False tweets.

•      e.g., Dow Jones Industrial average plunged 128 points in seconds after the false news on explosions in the White House

•      e.g., on March 7, from President Trump, "122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!“ false by FactCheck.org (the vast majority were released under George W. Bush)

 

• Fake followers: followers can be bought or sold online.

•      e.g., candidate Ted Cruz only has 48% of followers who are real.

• Twitter bots: generate automated tweets.

•      Spamming and getting users to click on ads links.

•      Generating fake trending topics.

•      Opinion manipulation.

 

•  More.

Why?

• Social network structure: 
  
  

•      Networks cannot differentiate misinformation from accurate information.

•      Networks allow misinformation to spread instantaneously.

• Information bubble:

•      Confirmation bias: we are selectively exposed to information aligned with our beliefs.

•      Trust bias: We accept ideas from our social circles and reject information that contradicts our experience.

•      We tend to visit narrower, smaller, more homogeneous set of sources.

• The attention economy: 

•      If we pay attention to a certain topic, more information on that topic will be produced. It's cheaper to fabricate information and pass it off as the fact that it is to report the actual truth.

•      Personalized recommendations: algorithms decide what we see and what we don't, using what posts we have clicked and what we're likely to click on, react to and share.

Confront Misinformation on Social Media

• Facebook flags fake news.

  •      To flag a fake news article, users click on the upper right-hand corner of a post. News articles flagged by users will be sent to third-party fact-checking organizations that are part of Poynter's International Fact Checking Network, Facebook says.

• AppNexus banned Breitbart News for violating its hate speech policies.
• Integral Ad Science  prevents fraudulent ads from being served to users.
• Double Verify designed a tool for advertisers to avoid fake news websites and launched a filter for “Inflammatory News and Politics” that includes both fake news and heavily partisan sites like Breitbart and Rawstory.