Fake News A Survey of Research, Detection Methods, and Opportunities - Economics Assignment Help

Assignment Task -                 
 

INTRODUCTION
Fake news is now viewed as one of the greatest threats to democracy, journalism, and freedom of expression. It has weakened public trust in governments and its potential impact on the contentious “Brexit” referendum and the equally divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election – which it might have affected [Pogue 2017] – is yet to be realized. The reach of fake news was best highlighted during the critical months of the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, where the top twenty frequently-discussed false election stories generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, ironically, larger than the total of 7,367,000 for the top twenty most-discussed election stories posted by 19 major news websites [Silverman 2016]. Our economies are not immune to the spread of fake news either, with fake news being connected to stock market fluctuations and massive trades. For example, fake news claiming that Barack Obama was injured in an explosion wiped out $130 billion in stock value [Rapoza 2017]. These events and losses have motivated fake news research and sparked the discussion around fake news, as observed by skyrocketing usage of terms such as “post-truth” – selected as the international word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2016 [Wang 2016].

While fake news is not a new phenomenon [Allcott and Gentzkow 2017], questions such as why has it emerged as a world topic and why is it attracting increasingly more public attention are particularly relevant at this time. The leading cause is that fake news can be created and published online faster and cheaper when compared to traditional news media such as newspapers and television. The rise of social media and its popularity also plays an important role in this surge of interest. As of August 2017, around two third (67%) of Americans get their news from social media.1 With the existence of an echo chamber effect on social media, biased information is often amplified and reinforced [Jamieson and Cappella 2008]. Furthermore, as an ideal platform to accelerate fake news dissemination, social media breaks the physical distance barrier among individuals, provides rich platforms to share, forward, vote, and review, and encourages users to participate and discuss online news [Zhou et al. 2019]. This surge of activity around online news can lead to grave repercussions, but also substantial potential political and economic benefits. Such generous benefits encourage malicious entities to create, publish and spread fake news.

1.1 What is Fake News?
There has been no universal definition for fake news, even in journalism. A clear and accurate definition helps lay a solid foundation for fake news analysis and evaluating related studies. Here we (I) theoretically distinguish between several concepts that frequently co-occur or have overlaps with fake news, (II) present a broad and a narrow definition for the term fake news, providing a justification for each definition, and (III) further highlight the potential research problems raised by such definitions.

Where news2 broadly includes claims, statements, speeches, posts, among other types of information related to public figures and organizations. The broad definition aims to impose minimum constraints in accord with the current resources: it emphasizes information authenticity, purposefully adopts a broad definition for the term news [Vosoughi et al. 2018] and weakens the requirement for information intentions. This definition supports most existing fake-news-related studies, and datasets, as provided by the existing fact-checking websites (Section 2.1 has a detailed introduction). Current fake news datasets often provide ground truth for the authenticity of claims, statements, speeches, or posts related to public figures and organizations, while no information is provided regarding intention.

 Fundamental Theories 

Fundamental human cognition and behavior theories developed across various discipline such as psychology, philosophy, social science, and economics provide invaluable insights for fake news analysis. Firstly, these theories introduce new opportunities for qualitative and quantitative studies of big fake news data, which to date, has been rarely available. Secondly, they facilitate building well-justified and explainable models for fake news detection and intervention, as well as introducing means to develop datasets that provide “ground truth” for fake news studies.

We haveconducted a comprehensive literature survey across various disciplines and have identified twenty well-known theories that can be potentially used to study fake news. These theories are provided in Table 2 along with short descriptions. These theories can be used to study fake news from three different perspectives: (I) style: how fake news is written, (II) propagation: how fake news spreads, and (III) users: how users engage with fake news and the role users play (or can play) in fake news creation, propagation, and intervention. In the following, we detail how each perspective and its corresponding theories facilitate fake news analysis.
 

This Economics Assignment has been solved by our Economics Experts at My Uni Paper. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment Experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.