Fake News and The Economy of Emotions

Abstract

This paper examines the 2016 US presidential election campaign to identify problems with, causes of, and solutions to, the contemporary fake news phenomenon. To do this we employ textual analysis and feedback from engagement, meetings and panels with technologists, journalists, editors, non-profits, public relations firms, analytics firms and academics during the globally-leading technology conference, South-by-South West, in March 2017. We further argue that what is most significant about the contemporary fake news furore is what it portends: the use of personally and emotionally targeted news produced by algo-journalism and what we term 'empathic media'. In assessing solutions to this democratically problematic situation, we recommend that greater attention be paid to the role of digital advertising in causing, and combating both the contemporary fake news phenomenon, and the near-horizon variant of empathically-optimised automated fake news.

A Topic-Agnostic Approach for Identifying Fake News Pages

“…If we further examine the results from LIWC, we can see that combining LIWC with other features often leads to higher accuracies: for all datasets, the accuracy gains vary between 0.012 and 0.21. This reinforces previous findings [2,14] that psychological factors play an important role in the disinformation ecosystem. The web-markup features also lead to improvements, in particular when compared against readability for the PoliticalNews corpus.…”

“…For example, the pages contain a large number of ads -this is not surprising given that providers can gain significant advertising revenue by attracting users to their web site with appealing fake news headlines [1]. Recent works have also argued that fake news articles are designed to induce inflammatory emotions in readers, and contain text patterns related to understandability that differ from mainstream news [2,9,14]. Figure 1 shows some examples of fake and real news pages.…”

“…Unlike traditional print media, information can be published on Web sites and shared among users in social media platforms with no third party filtering or fact-checking [1]. Given that 62% of adults in the US consume news from social media [8] and many who see fake stories report that they believe them [21], these platforms have become a target for propaganda campaigns [2,11].…”

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“…disinformation) is designed to be emotionally arousing and stimulating. A recent analysis suggests that what most effectively differentiates fake news from other forms of content is its use of emotional targeting (Bakir & McStay, 2018). Emotional reactivity to fake news has also been proposed as an explanation for why fake news stories are spread faster and further than real news stories (Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018).…”

Consumo de noticias y percepción de fake news entre estudiantes de Comunicación de Brasil, España y Portugal

“…Noticias que en algunos casos son virales y que han dado pábulo a que la investigación relacionada se pregunte si han sido desencadenante, al menos en ocasiones, de cambios radicales en los sistemas políticos de cada país. Como caso paradigmático encontramos los estudios referidos a las últimas elecciones presidenciales en Estados Unidos que dieron la victoria a Donald Trump (Bakir & McStay, 2018;Guess, Nyhan & Reifler, 2018;Shane, 2017;Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017;Ott, 2017).…”