University of Kwazulu-Natal

We Follow The Disinformation Conceptualizing And Analyzing Fact

Bonisiwe Shabane
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we follow the disinformation conceptualizing and analyzing fact

Fascinating work that deserves attention and further study. The point that most piqued my interest was the finding that Brazilian fact-checkers often look to see if mis/dis-info has been published in other languages as a potential clue to its original source. Do you work with fact-checkers? How do you perceive the current state of fact-checking generally? 📣 New publication on fact-checking cultures across countries in collaboration with Meg Jing Z., Mike S. Schäfer, Fernando Antonio Egert, and Thaiane Oliveira.

Open Access in The International Journal of Press/Politics: https://lnkd.in/emtPEZ8Z 🎯 Theoretically, we introduce a context-sensitive framework for the analysis of fact-checking cultures, proposing three conceptual and analytical components: organizational roots, issue selection, and information... 📈 Empirically, we illustrate the application of this framework using Brazil and Germany as case studies, combining computational, qualitative, and quantitative content analysis of 11 fact-checking organizations and 13,498 fact-checking articles over 11 years... 💡 Our findings suggest that fact-checking cultures transcend organizational and national boundaries. This could be interpreted as an indicator of mimetic isomorphism, where organizations resemble each other and new initiatives adopt the practices of established peers―but not at the expense of diversity within the (trans)national fact-checking... 🙏🏻 Thanks to the guest editors―Frank Esser, Dr. Edda Humprecht, Edson Tandoc, and Sebastian Valenzuela―of the Special Issue on “Advancing the Study of Political Misinformation Across Countries and Platforms” for their thoughtful feedback and support.

🙏🏻 Thanks to the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds SNF for funding this research! This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. We present an extensive study on disinformation, which is defined as information that is false and misleading and intentionally shared to cause harm. Through this work, we aim to answer the following questions: Can we automatically and accurately classify a news article as containing disinformation?

What characteristics of disinformation differentiate it from other types of benign information? We conduct this study in the context of two significant events: the US elections of 2016 and the 2020 COVID pandemic. We build a series of classifiers to (i) examine linguistic clues exhibited by different types of fake news articles, (ii) analyze “clickbaityness” of disinformation headlines, and (iii) finally, perform fine-grained, veracity-based article classification through... For the latter, we built a new dataset that is annotated with generic, veracity-based labels and ground truth evidence supporting each label. The veracity labels were formulated based on examining standards used by reputable fact-checking organizations. We show that disinformation derives features from both propaganda and mainstream news, making it more challenging to detect.

However, there is significant potential for automating the fact-checking process to incorporate the degree of veracity. We provide error analysis that illustrates the challenges involved in the automated fact-checking task and identifies factors that may improve this process in future work. Finally, we also describe the implementation of a web app that extracts important entities and actions from a given article and searches the web to gather evidence from credible sources. The evidence articles are then used to generate a veracity label that can assist manual fact-checkers engaged in combating disinformation.

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Fascinating work that deserves attention and further study. The point that most piqued my interest was the finding that Brazilian fact-checkers often look to see if mis/dis-info has been published in other languages as a potential clue to its original source. Do you work with fact-checkers? How do you perceive the current state of fact-checking generally? 📣 New publication on fact-checking cultur...

Open Access In The International Journal Of Press/Politics: Https://lnkd.in/emtPEZ8Z 🎯

Open Access in The International Journal of Press/Politics: https://lnkd.in/emtPEZ8Z 🎯 Theoretically, we introduce a context-sensitive framework for the analysis of fact-checking cultures, proposing three conceptual and analytical components: organizational roots, issue selection, and information... 📈 Empirically, we illustrate the application of this framework using Brazil and Germany as case s...

🙏🏻 Thanks To The Schweizerischer Nationalfonds SNF For Funding This

🙏🏻 Thanks to the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds SNF for funding this research! This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemi...

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