Studying the Dissemination of News, ‘Fake’ or Otherwise

The next speaker in this ‘fake news’ session at ICA 2018 is Tommaso Venturini. He begins by noting how bad he feels about researching ‘fake news’: this is largely because the term is so very poorly defined and so frequently misused.

It is vague: researchers mean very different things when they use the term. It is politically dangerous: political actors are misusing it to attack mainstream news media they disagree with. It is indistinguishable from past concepts of mis- and disinformation: there really is no need to introduce a new term for these forms of content. It is charged with a simplistic idea of journalistic truth: it assumes that ‘good’ news simply reports truth accurately and without journalistic filtering. And it is missing some of the most important features of this type of content: it is not necessarily used only to promote ideological views, but also to generate revenue, connect communities, and for satire.

What if the important thing about ‘fake news’ isn’t its ‘fake-ness’, then? What if the virality of such news content is the more interesting story here? What if the processes of dissemination, independent of the specific nature of the content, should be studied here? How can we advance the empirical study of such processes, without getting hung up on definitional matters of what is or is not ‘fake’?

The Public Data Lab’s Field Guide to Fake News has been attempting to advance this aim. It covers the study of public discussion hotspots on Facebook; the circulation of news stories (through endorsements as well as debunkings) through news Websites; the Web attention tracker ecologies that assess the engagement with such content; the memetic, visual content spheres that arise around such stories; and the techniques of trolling that are used to promote such content.

’Fake news’ then becomes simply a useful test and application case for the advanced computational methods that are emerging for the study of news dissemination, visibility, and engagement. This might be the most valuable contribution to our understanding of the news that ‘fake news’ is able to make.