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‘Fake News’

Snurb — Tuesday 16 July 2019 13:30

A Round-Up of Some Recent Publications

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.

Gatewatching and News Curation

But let’s begin with a reminder that my book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere was published by Peter Lang in 2018 and is now available from Amazon and other book stores. The book is the sequel (not a second edition) to Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and updates the story of …

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Snurb — Friday 12 July 2019 00:52

Towards Social Journalism: Rediscovering the Conversation

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | Online Publishing | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 17:43

A Theory of Flak as a Political Weapon

Politics | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brian Goss, whose interest is in flak as a socio-political force. This is influenced by the propaganda model of news media in the contemporary United States at the end of the Cold War. Media at the time were free from formal censorship, but several factors conditioned the performance of news workers, and this led to their allegiance to an overall (then mainly anti-communist) ideological positioning.

One of these factors is flak: a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside of news organisations. Flak comes into play when internal filters are insufficient …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 00:53

Satirical and Hard News Coverage of the Mayor of Bogotá

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | IAMCR 2019 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Andrea Cancino-Borbón, whose focus is on satirical ‘fake news’ in Colombia.

At present, Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá is highly unpopular with citizens, and an independent media outlet has been set up to publish satire and parody news about him – but articles from this site have been picked up at times by mainstream news outlets and misunderstood as real reporting. This moves such obviously ‘fake’ stories from a harmless and humorous context to a much more problematic place.

So, how is the personal and political profile of the mayor …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 00:38

Hate Speech during the Brazilian Presidential Election

Politics | Elections | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | IAMCR 2019 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Vanessa Cortez, whose focus is on hate speech in the recent presidential election in Brazil. This election was marked by increasing polarisation and hate speech, and to study this the project gathered content around the election itself.

Hate speech attacks others for specific individual or group characteristics. This is now quite prominent on social media in Brazil. The present project gathered data from comments around 16 leading news outlets in Brazil, and used a dictionary of some 260 hate speech terms in Brazilian Portuguese to identify hateful comments.

Some 175 of …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 00:27

Ethical Questions for ‘Fake News’ Detection Algorithms

Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | IAMCR 2019 |

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Changfeng Chen and Wen Shi, whose focus is on the ethical dimensions of AI-driven ‘fake news’ detection – as part of many ethical issues related to artificial intelligence more generally.

Detection mechanisms fall into two broad categories: context model-based and social context-based algorithms. The former of these applies deception detection approaches to news texts: it searches for linguistic clues about lies and truth in the articles. This can detect rumours and misinformation from the rich linguistic clues present in such articles.

Such models build on corpora of ‘fake’ and ‘true’ news …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 July 2019 00:13

Why Do People Share ‘Fake News’ on Social Media?

Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | IAMCR 2019 |

The final IAMCR 2019 panel I’m attending today is on ‘fake news’ and hate speech, and we start with Andrew Duffy. His focus is on why people share ‘fake news’ stories via social media.

Much of the research on ‘fake news’ points out that it damages democracy – but it can also have significant negative or positive impacts on personal relationships. The sharing of such content fits into existing sharing behaviours; sharing the news with others is now a widespread social practice, and news is usually shared especially because stories are useful, emotions, bizarre, positive, entertaining, or exaggerated.

’Fake news’ …

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Snurb — Wednesday 10 July 2019 22:16

The Long History of ‘Fake News’ in the Hebrew Press

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | IAMCR 2019 |

For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.

This was the case for 19th-century Jewish community: ‘fake news’ in Hebrew journalism is as old as journalism itself. This is in spite of religious commandments prohibiting lies, in …

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Snurb — Wednesday 10 July 2019 19:40

User Engagement with ‘Fake News’ in Israeli Politics

Politics | Elections | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | IAMCR 2019 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Yoav Halperin, who shifts our attention to the issue of ‘fake news’. This is a problem especially in social media: there is plenty of evidence for mis- and disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide range of countries, with the aim to influence public opinion and disrupt political processes.

The aim here is to shape users’ views about particular issues, but also to shape their perceptions of broader political opinion, especially to create the impression that specific views are at more popular or unpopular than they actually are. How do social …

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Snurb — Tuesday 9 July 2019 17:41

An Anatomy of a Taiwanese Misinformation Storm

Politics | Government | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Crisis Communication | IAMCR 2019 |

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

This event, and the information and misinformation that circulated around it …

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