Archives: Research

The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change and the 2030 agenda for sustainable development are two environmentally significant developments which provide a roadmap to achieve a low-carbon, climate-resilient world and eradicate global poverty. Given the country-specific implementation of environmental policies, many argue that building a society of climate and environmentally literate citizens is critical to success. This article looks into the deterring role of fake news when it comes to raising environmental consciousness about climate change among the public. 

With over 200 million active users India is WhatsApp's largest market. However, the rise of the platform has also led to an increase in the dissemination of misinformation campaigns. It's end-to-end encryption makes it a favourite among people or groups looking to spread fake news for personal profit or political gain. This has led to not just panic but also incidents of brutal violence caused by the spread of hateful fake information. The paper explores what makes WhatsApp such a popular application in the Indian context, the ways in which people use it and the existing laws in India which make it difficult to trace the origin of fake news. 

In February 2017, Wilton Park in association with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Article 19, and the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, convened experts from the technology industry, journalists, academia and the like to address questions regarding fake news. The aim of the convention was to generate critical conversations and understanding of the term 'fake news' on various levels. The participants aimed to generate a common vocabulary for thinking through 'fake news' and generated a research and reporting agenda for future participants and other to use. 

This article documents the efforts of fact-checking by StopFake, a volunteer organisation, as a counter-propaganda fight against fake news. The organisation was founded by young Ukrainian journalists in March 2014. In this article, the researchers documents the history of StopFake, describe its work practices and contextualise them within the literatures on fact checking and online news practices. 

The 2016 US Presidential elections 'fake news' scandal made apparent the need for more safeguards on social media to protect people from deceiving the public for personal gain. This study attempts to fulfil this need by building an automated system capable of detecting fake news published during the 2016 US presidential campaign season. For its data analysis, it uses a set of articles flagged as false by Snopes, another set from leading news organisations, and select machine learning algorithms trained to only understand textual content. These models are also the given sentiment-related-features of each article to better predict its factual accuracy. 

The rise of fake news and the rising distrust in the traditional news media poses a looming threat to American democracy and civic life. This report examines the rise of fake news which is defines as fraudulent information garbed as factual news report with the intention of deceiving the public. It identifies proposed solutions at the intersections of technology, journalism, and civil society to empower audiences with better skills and tools to fight fake news. 

This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and online fact-checkers who fight against the spread of fake news. The research uses intermedia agenda-setting theory and the Network Agenda-Setting (NAS) model to assess the relationship between fake news, fact-checkers, and online news media. It also takes a computational approach to investigate the role of fake news in the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016. 

This paper seeks to explore the phenomenon of 'fake news' in light of the increasing concern of the lack of truth in the online information ecosystem especially from the Alt-right. The researchers repeatedly find a connection between identity and truth and say the people who spread misinformation are not stupid or uneducated but spread these messages because it signals membership to their specific group. The term 'tribal epistemology' by David Roberts is used to describe these new social structures with similar tribal dynamic dynamics. The authors finds such "digital tribalism" at the heart of many successful Alt-Right and anti-liberal movements across the world since 2016. 

This research paper presents an analytic study on the language of news media in the context of political fact-checking and fake news detection. The authors compare the language of real news with that of satire, hoaxes, and propaganda to find the characteristics of untrustworthy text. Additionally, it probes the feasibility of automatic political fact-checking by presenting a case study using PolitiFact.com's factuality judgements on a 6-point scale. 

This thesis looks into the relationships between news media and trust from the perspective of the individual audience member using the term "fake news". It seeks to understand how audiences engage and define the term "fake news" in the contemporary media environment and its effects on the overall engagement with news media. The study used an inductive and qualitative approach of in-depth interviews with twelve transnational individuals, men and women within the age range of 25-35 years old. It further explores how the transnationalism of the subjects further affects their use of the term "fake news", their trust of certain information sources, and their overall engagement with news media.