Who Posts Fake News? Authentic and Inauthentic Spreaders of Fabricated News on Facebook and Twitter

Computational Communication Methods for Examining Problematic News-Sharing Practices on Facebook at Scale

“…However, as outlined above, the term "fake news" unhelpfully limits our understanding of problematic news content. This is because verifiably "false" news, as tracked by Vosoughi et al (2018) or Dourado (2023), is only a subset of such problematic content. Other forms include outright conspiracist news sites, hyperpartisan outlets that use selective sourcing and bad-faith news frames to push specific political agendas, state-backed disinformation campaigns, as well as more mundane forms of false information (i.e., misinformation) sharing on social media.…”

“…This produces valuable results, but its observations cannot easily be generalized, for example, to hyperpartisan news that is not explicitly false, but instead presents facts selectively and out of context, or to biased news commentary that makes its claims without providing a factual basis and is therefore more difficult to debunk effectively. Likewise, Dourado (2023) produced a compelling account of the nature of over 1,000 online accounts that shared any of 57 fact-checked "fake news" articles relating to the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, but this approach cannot capture the circulation of other problematic content that did not come to the attention of fact-checking organizations. We do not intend to diminish the importance and rigor of these studies, but point out their (acknowledged) limitations: they rely on a small database of fact-checked "fake" articles and limit their scope to a singular event.…”

Guerras culturais, hacking e as vulnerabilidades do jornalismo à desinformação

“…Tais conteúdos eram distribuídos em um sistema escalonado, no qual influenciadores em redes sociais, mídia hiperpartidária e administradores de grupos em serviços de mensagens os distribuíam para seus seguidores, que por sua vez os difundiam em seus próprios grupos e canais, em iterações sucessivas do mesmo processo, atingindo uma grande massa de eleitores. Apesar da atenção dedicada pela opinião pública ao abuso de contas automatizadas, ou "bots", há evidências de que esta rede de apoiadores humanos teve mais importância para a propaganda da extrema direita nas eleições presidenciais de 2018 (Dourado 2023). Após o pleito, esse esquema não foi desmobilizado, mas, pelo contrário, foi reforçado ao longo do mandato de Bolsonaro, através da destinação de verbas publicitárias para veículos alinhados ao governo, contratação de influenciadores para cargos de confiança e concessão de acesso privilegiado a eventos ou fontes do Planalto, por exemplo.…”

Mapping automatic social media information disorder. The role of bots and AI in spreading misleading information in society

“…systems developed and deployed by online platforms to enhance their users' engagement significantly contribute to the effective and rapid dissemination of disinformation online [34]. Finally, specific bots connected to social network platforms might be designed with the aim of acting as fake-news super-spreaders [35].…”