Archives: Research

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. 

Social media platforms have increasingly come to shape public discourse and accused of engineering people's behaviour in ways that affect democratic functioning. This project creates the much-needed multistakeholder approach to corrective measures against the spread of misinformation. It addresses expert perspectives experts from academia. social media, governments and the industry. 

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. 

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. 

This study analyses website traffic to websites known for publishing fake news preceding the 2016 US Presidential elections. It uses 114 days of combined data from two popular desktop web browsers: Internet Explorer 11 and Edge. The analysis began on July 18th, 2016 (the start of the Republican national convention) and ended on November 8th, 2016 (election day). This study contributes the body of academic and journalistic work on this subject through a fine-grained geographic and temporal perspective. 

 The political climate of the 21st century is rife with campaigns of  disinformation, misinformation and propaganda. It has increasingly become harder to judge what is true or false in an echo-chamber like world. This reflection paper prepared for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO looks into the trajectory of the phenomenon of "fake news" and how new technology has compromised the traditional anchors of authenticity.