Fake News and How Detection Could be the Solution

Fake News

Fake news, or the spread of misinformation has increaced over the last decade thanks to social media platforms that deceive users into believing harmful stories, change perceptions, and alter public opinions. 
(Seddari et al, 2022).
 
The result:
  • negatively influence the public and their perceptions
  • fake news change the way people inter-pret and react to real news
  •  circulating  hoaxes, rumors, and conspiracies on social media
  • viral news culture of panic
 


TiKToK Fake News Culture

News gathering on video platform TikTok is on the rise, especially for its younger users. According to Pew Research Center, the percentage of adults receiving their news regularly from the app has tripped from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022. The largest percent of user obtaining news form TikTok is adults ages 18-29 (Matsa, 2023). The platforms largest growing population of younger users will benefit from knowing that TikTok is not free of fake news (Tucker, 2022).  2022 Data collected by News Guard revealed that 20% of videos on TiKTok contained misinformation (Brewster et al, 2022).

Fake News Detection
 While some platforms may utilize their own protocol for flagging fake news, one research article suggest a method to prevent the spread of misinformation through detection. 
 
 

A Hybrid Linguistic and Knowledge-Based Analysis Approach for Fake News Detection on Social Media

    Advancements in technology have made it easier for fake news to be spread online. This academic journal 
explores solutions for detecting fake new bases on content, context, and knowledge.
 It is becoming more important for professional communicators to come up with strategies to separate misinformation
 with research based methods and fact checking. The authors support the flagging of fake news to alert readers of an
 articles loss in credibility for the sake of protecting the validity of accurate reporting. The researchers propose 8 features
 to evaluate fake news with an accuracy of 94% (Seddari et al, 2022).

  The research summarizes a solution for fake news detection including three main catagories:  

  • content-based
  • social context-based
  • knowledge-based approaches. 
Figure One, A Hybrid Linguistic 

and Knowledge-Based Analysis Approach for Fake News Detection on Social Media.

 Data Utilized for Fake News Detection

 linguistic features: title, number of words, reading ease, lexical diversity,and sentiment

 fact-verification features : comprise three types of information      

  • reputation of the website where the news is published
  • coverage 
  • number of sources that published the news
  • fact-check 
  • opinion of well-known fact-checking websites about the news

The fake news detection utilized combined linguistic featured with fact verification receiving 5% more accuracy than using linguistics alone and 13% higher than using only fact verification. (Seddari et al, 2022). As fake news and the spread of misinformation creeps into more news delivering platforms, new detection research will help to separate facts from misleading information.

 

References


Brewset, J. Arvanitis, L. Pavilions, V. & Wang, M. (2022, September 14). Misinformation monitor: 

            September 2022. https://www.newsguardtech.com/misinformation-monitor/september-2022/ 

Matsa, K. E. (2023, June 12). More Americans are getting news on Tiktok, bucking the trend on other 

            social media sites. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/21

            /more-americans-are-getting-news-on-tiktok-bucking-the-trend-on-other-social-media-sites/


Seddari, N., Derhab, A., Belaoued, M., Halboob, W., Al-Muhtadi, J., & Bouras, A. (2022). A Hybrid Linguistic 

and Knowledge-Based Analysis Approach for Fake News Detection on Social Media. IEEE Access, Access, 

IEEE, 10, 62097–62109. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3181184


Tucker, E. (2022, September 18). TikTok’s search engine repeatedly delivers misinformation to its 

majority-young user base, report says | CNN business. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/18/business

/tiktok-search-engine-misinformation/index.html 

 


 

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