Fake News: Weapon of Mass Destruction

Wikipedia describes fake news as “a type of yellow journalism that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via the traditional print, broadcasting news media, or via Internet-based social media. Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically, often with sensationalist, exaggerated, or patently false headlines that grab attention. As such, intentionally misleading and deceptive fake news is different from obviously satirical or parody articles or papers such as The Onion. Fake news often employs eye-catching headlines or entirely fabricated news stories in order to increase readership and, in the case of internet-based stories, online sharing and Internet click revenue. In the latter case, profit is made in a similar fashion to sensational online "clickbait" headlines and relies on advertising revenue generated from this activity, regardless of the veracity of the published stories.”

Neologism or fake news can be defines as the type of news called fabricated news which originated from the traditional news media but have take incursion to online media! It simply means ‘a lie from fiction’.

Claire Wardle of First Draft News identifies seven types of fake news:

1.    satire or parody ("no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool")

2.    false connection ("when headlines, visuals of captions don't support the content")

3.    misleading content ("misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual")

4.    false content ("when genuine content is shared with false contextual information")

5.    imposter content ("when genuine sources are impersonated" with false, made-up sources)

6.    manipulated content ("when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive", as with a"doctored" photo)

7.    fabricated content ("new content is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm")

The different motivations behind why this kind of news exists includes poor journalism, to parody, to provoke or to 'punk', passion(lieing,trouble-making), partisanship, profit, political influence, and propaganda

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form (pictured at right) to assist people to recognize fake news. Its main points are:

a)    Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)

b)    Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)

c)    Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)

d)    Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)

e)    Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)

f)     Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)

g)    Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)

h)    Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).

According to Milena Yankova(Senior IT Manager, now Head of Marketing at Ontotext AD), “fake news has been dominating the social media and political debates over the past year. Regular Facebook and Twitter users and journalists alike are faced with exponential growth of all kinds of unconfirmed and unsourced information that is often overshadowing credible professionally researched coverage of global and regional events.

Long before ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ became the words of the past few months, Ontotext and eight other partners started working in January 2014 on a EU-funded project aimed at creating a computational framework for automatic discovery and verification of information at scale and fast. We’ve just wrapped up work on the project -- ‘PHEME Computing Veracity Across Media, Languages, and Social Networks’ -- in which we used our expertise and semantic technology to develop a smart way to alert users to rumours and misinformation.

Ontotext’s semantic graph database GraphDB has been adapted as a semantic repository with scalable lightweight reasoning, used to distinguish between rumoursand facts. Datasets from the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud have been the factual knowledge sources for providing essential features for classifying the four kinds of rumours addressed: misinformation, disinformation, unverified information, and disputed information.

As part of the project, Ontotext and partners also developed an open-source digital journalism prototype dashboard and a fact-checking assistant, dubbed Hercule, to help journalists with sorting and retrieving newsworthy pieces of information from Twitter.

We are aware that there is no a cure-all remedy to stop once and for all the proliferation of fake news in a divided society, but we believe that semantic technology helps people sharpen their critical judgment in their pursuit of receiving accurate and reliable information.”

One of the most famous victim of fake news is Mark Antony,  Octavian delivered a fake news of Cleopatra’s death to Antony-in order to break him and he succeeded! Mark Antony committed suicide by stabbing himself with his sword in the mistaken belief that Cleopatra had already done so. When he found out that Cleopatra was still alive, his friends brought him to Cleopatra's monument in which she was hiding, and he died in her arms.

The end product of majority of fake news are tragic, while some does not have much impact! Be very careful before you swallow any news hook, line and sinker!

To be continue...