Surveying fake news: Assessing university faculty’s fragmented definition of fake news and its impact on teaching critical thinking

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a survey of faculty members at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in Los Angeles, California regarding their understanding of and familiarity with the concept of fake news. With very few studies published on the attitudes of teaching faculty at universities, this study is a unique approach to the issues facing educators, knowledge creators, and information specialists. The paper examines the origins of the term "fake news", the factors contributing to its current prevalence, and proposes a new definition. It also reports upon the attitudes that teaching faculty hold, and how they define fake news within their specific disciplines. Though nearly all surveyed faculty felt fake news was an important topic that impacted them professionally, the researchers also find that faculty across all disciplines and ranks, ages, and gender, hold widely differing conceptions of fake news. This lack of consensus may have future implications for students in particular and higher education in general and are worth exploring further.

FakeBERT: Fake news detection in social media with a BERT-based deep learning approach

“…Their results improve the 0.14 F-score over existing state-of-the-art models. Weiss et al [ 48 ] have investigated the origins of the term “fake news” and the factors contributing to its current prevalence. This lack of consensus may have future implications for students in particular and higher education.…”

Toward a Comprehensive Model of Fake News: A New Approach to Examine the Creation and Sharing of False Information

“…They find that the role of the person (e.g., university student or faculty member) contributes to an information user's propensity to stop looking for more information, even if results are clearly insufficient. Weiss et al also allude to the issue of roles influencing behavior in their previous study, noting that faculty are less willing to admit they would be susceptible to fake news possibly because of their pride in the role of professor [9].…”

“…Indeed, as Weiss et al describe in their study, a simplified description fails to account for the other purposes, applications, causes, and effects of fake news as well as the reasons it spreads. These different variables range from fake news emerging as a side-effect of information overload; as a result of bad-faith rhetoric in a poisoned public discourse; the currency of a contextless post-truth society; new versions of propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation; the literary fruits of parody and satire; and even the result of catharsis arising from political theater [9]. This raises the issue, then, of how people are able to detect and contextualize fake news.…”

“…Attempting to reconcile these widely differing visions of and motivations behind fake news has compelled the authors to develop a more comprehensive definition. To accommodate this complexity and the multiple variables surrounding the use of, spread, and motivations behind fake news, Weiss et al propose that fake news should be defined as "the phenomenon of information exchange between an actor and acted upon that primarily attempts to invalidate generally accepted conceptions of truth for the purpose of altering established power structures" [9] (p. 7).…”

“…The authors propose one such model, identifying both the creators as well as the users as fake news' primary drivers, and devising a clearer sense of what impels information users to share it online. This paper builds upon the authors' previous research on university faculty attitudes toward fake news [8,9]; furthermore, the model described herein is an elaboration of the definition of fake news used in both of those studies. The authors, in turn, hypothesize that specific factors may predict a user's tendency to share fake news.…”