Particulièrement popularisé pendant la campagne électorale américaine de 2016, le concept de fake news ou fausses nouvelles n’est pas nouveau, mais a évolué au cours de la dernière décennie, en concordance avec la numérisation des médias et l’arrivée des plateformes de réseaux sociaux. La notion de fausses nouvelles peut être considérée comme polysémique, alors qu’il n’y a pas de réel consensus quant à sa définition, autant chez les chercheurs.euses que pour le grand public. Pour certains.es, il peut s’agir de faux contenu prenant l’apparence d’une « vraie » nouvelle, et pour d’autres, il serait plutôt question de « mauvais » journalisme. Au Québec, le phénomène est bel et bien présent et inquiète experts.es et journalistes, mais nous en savons encore très peu sur les perceptions des Québécois.es de l’enjeu. À l’aide de l’apport des folk theories ou théories populaires, ce mémoire s’est intéressé aux perceptions de douze Québécois.es d’opinions diversifiées sur la question des fausses nouvelles et de l’écosystème médiatique. À travers trois groupes de discussions, les participants.es ont démontré ne pas avoir de définition à proprement dit du concept, mais repèrent plutôt les fausses nouvelles à l’aide de différents indices ou caractéristiques particulières. Ils.elles ont également fait part de certaines critiques qu’ils.elles entretiennent à l’égard des médias d’information au Québec, démontrant un scepticisme grandissant quant à la qualité et à la véracité du contenu de l’information. Certains.es ont également dit avoir de la difficulté à établir une distinction claire entre les « vraies » des « fausses » nouvelles. Finalement, une majorité d’entre eux.elles sont d’avis que les fausses nouvelles circuleraient non seulement dans les réseaux sociaux, mais également dans les médias d’information. / Particularly popularized during the 2016 American election campaign, the concept of fake news is not new, but has evolved over the last decade, in line with the digitization of media and the arrival of social networking platforms. The notion of fake news can be considered as polysemous, while there is no real consensus as to its definition, both among researchers and the general public. For some, it can be a question of false content taking on the appearance of “real” news, and for others, it is more a question of “bad” journalism. In Quebec, the phenomenon is well and truly present and worries experts and journalists, but we still know very little about Quebecers’ perceptions of the issue. Using folk theories, this paper explored the perceptions of twelve Quebecers with diverse opinions on the issue of fake news and the media ecosystem. Through three focus groups, the participants demonstrated that they do not have a definition of the concept, but rather identify fake news through various cues or specific characteristics. They also shared some of their criticisms of the news media in Quebec, demonstrating a growing skepticism about the quality and veracity of news content. Some also said they have difficulty making a clear distinction between “real” and “fake” news. Finally, a majority felt that fake news was circulating not only on social networks, but also in the news media.

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This thesis highlighted how disinformation campaigns on social media platforms and news outlets were used as tools to influence Swedish public diplomacy. To accomplish this, it aimed to answer the following research question “How are disinformation campaigns, through social media platforms and news outlets, impacting Sweden’s public diplomacy?”. The thesis applied two case studies, the first being a domestic context consisting of the Swedish Social Services (SSS) and the Swedish Care of Young Persons (Special Provisions) Act (LVU), and the second an international context being Sweden applying for a NATO membership. The analysis utilized a sociotechnical approach interpreting newspaper article, social media posts, and reports that made up the empirical material. In addition, an analytical framework, divided into three thematic sections, was used for the analysis. The thematic sections consisted of 1) background of the case; 2) the disinformation campaigns that were conducted including the actors involved; 3) the Swedish public diplomatic response based on Joseph Nye’s theory about political power and public diplomacy. The thesis discovered that both the domestic and international context impacted Sweden’s public diplomacy, where the government and governmental agencies took measures that they previously had not. Furthermore, it discovered that news outlets and social platforms could not be viewed as two separate entities when conducting disinformation campaigns, but instead as an additional third entity. Lastly, the thesis found the two cases to be similar, despite their different contexts, as disinformation campaigns often build on previous rumors.

This master thesis explores the media representation of deepfakes. The first part summarizes previous research followed by a comprehensive review of deepfakes, including the technology allowing for their emergence, current uses and methods of regulation and detection. The second part connects the phenomenon with important theoretical concepts such as social construction of reality and the crucial role of media in this process. The empirical part consists of research combining two methods - quantitative content analysis and qualitative critical discourse analysis. The research analysis is focused on media articles dealing with deepfakes in order to find out how the media represent this phenomenon. The results show that current media discourse of deepfakes is strongly negative as the media frame them as a security threat. This negative representation is highly speculative since journalists often invent their own stories of future disastrous consequences of the technology for national security due to lack of current examples. The findings show an apparent hierarchy of the harms posed by deepfakes which is present in media coverage, and reflects gender sereotypes and inequality in the current society. Harm in the form of non-consensual fake pornography targeting women is neglected in the media...

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[pt] A credibilidade está em xeque de uma maneira global, o que ameaça a autoridade de instituições em geral, incluindo a imprensa, na chamada era da pósverdade. Por tratar com desimportância a verdade, os tempos atuais têm sido marcados pela circulação de informações falsas. É um tempo também conhecido como era pós-factual. A mesma sociedade em rede impulsionada pela internet com promessas de futuro mais horizontalizado viu nascer a plataformização algorítmica, a desqualificação da imprensa, a cultura da desinformação. É desse ambiente extremamente hostil e vulnerável para as instituições democráticas que partem as reflexões trazidas nesta tese. Tamanho é o nível de desinformação que hoje há uma proliferação de agências e serviços de checagem em diversos países. Por princípio, o fact-checking existe para apontar se discursos são verdadeiros ou falsos. No entanto, essas agências e serviços ganharam visibilidade e tornaram-se mais influentes no mercado jornalístico. O deslocamento do fact-checking para ambientes externos às redações de veículos de imprensa ou para espaços específicos nos veículos traz consigo uma pressuposição de que possa haver um deslocamento de uma das funções mais importantes do jornalismo: a checagem, que contribui para a construção de credibilidade e, consequentemente, funciona como sustentáculo da autoridade jornalística. Assim, o objetivo geral aqui foi entender qual o lugar ocupado pelas agências de checagem no universo do jornalismo brasileiro e que autoridade jornalística elas têm reivindicado. Uma questão central foi de que maneira o trabalho de fact-checking influencia a credibilidade/autoridade jornalística e se há – e em que medida – comprometimento dessa autoridade a partir do estabelecimento mercadológico dos serviços de checagem. Para isso, analisamos o conteúdo bruto de 677 posts sobre as eleições para presidência do Brasil feitos pelas agências Lupa e Aos Fatos e pelos serviços Fato ou Fake, Estadão Verifica e Folha Informações no período entre 16 de agosto e 30 de outubro de 2022, que compreende o dia do início da campanha eleitoral e o dia da votação do segundo turno das eleições. / [en] Credibility is being called into question in a global way, which threatens the authority of institutions in general, including the press, in the so-called post-truth era;. Due to its disregard for truth, the current times have been marked by the circulation of fake news. It is also a time known as the post-factual era. The same networked society driven by the internet with promises of a more horizontal future has witnessed the rise of algorithmic platformization, the disqualification of the press, and the culture of misinformation. It is from this extremely hostile and vulnerable environment for democratic institutions that the reflections brought in this thesis arise. The level of misinformation is such that today there is a proliferation of fact-checking agencies and services in various countries. In principle, fact-checking exists to determine whether speeches are true or false. However, these agencies and services have gained visibility and become more influential in the journalistic environment. The shift of fact-checking to external environments outside newsrooms or to specific spaces within news outlets carries with it an assumption that one of the most important functions of journalism, factchecking, can be displaced. This function contributes to the construction of credibility and, consequently, functions as the pillar of journalistic authority. Thus, the general objective here was to understand the place occupied by fact-checking agencies in the Brazilian journalism universe and the journalistic authority they have claimed. A central issue is how fact-checking work influences journalistic credibility/authority and whether there is - and to what extent – a compromise of this authority through the market establishment of fact-checking services. To this end, we analyzed the raw content of 677 posts about the presidential elections in Brazil made by the Lupa and Aos Fatos agencies and the Fato ou Fake, Estadão Verifica, and Folha Informações services in the period between August 16 and October 30, 2022, which includes the day campaign started and the day of the second round of voting in the elections.

[pt] Nos últimos anos, países democráticos presenciaram a participação de fake news em seus processos deliberativos. A forma como ela ocorreu variou de acordo com as especificidades da estrutura comunicacional de cada nação. A expressiva presença de fake news em eleições recentes suscitou a preocupação sobre a possibilidade de esses materiais estarem interferindo em processos deliberativos, causando contextos de desinformação, enganando e manipulando eleitores e, consequentemente, afetando seus resultados. Esta dissertação analisa a participação das fake news na eleição presidencial de 2016 nos Estados Unidos, bem como nas eleições presidenciais de 2018 e municipais de 2020 no Brasil. Busca compreender de que forma esses conteúdos foram utilizados em cada um dos contextos acima, quais os mecanismos de disseminação usados, as abordagens adotadas, os principais temas levantados, a abrangência da sua difusão, as possíveis influências que podem ter exercido e a sua relevância em cada um desses contextos. / [en] In recent years, democratic countries have witnessed the participation of fake news in their deliberative processes. The way it has taken place has varied according to the specifics of the communication structure of each nation. The significant presence of fake news in recent elections has raised concerns about the possibility that these materials are interfering with deliberative processes, causing contexts of disinformation, deception and manipulation of voters, consequently affecting their results. This dissertation analyzes the participation of fake news in the 2016 presidential election in the United States, as well as in the 2018 presidential and 2020 municipal elections in Brazil. It seeks to understand how these contents were used in each of the above contexts, which dissemination mechanisms were used, the approaches adopted, the main issues raised, the extension of their diffusion, the possible influences they may have had and their relevance in each one of those contexts.

Fake news, or information disorder, is a societal problem that could be partially remedied by automatic detection tools. While still a young research field many such tools have been proposed in academic writing. This systematic mapping study gives an overview of the current research in Natural Language Process-based fake news detection utilising Machine Learning and Neural Network classification algorithms in regards to which classification algorithms have been studied and which datasets have been used. Furthermore, we attempt to make a generalised description of the performance (measured in f-score and accuracy) of the most commonly occurring classification algorithms. From a corpus of 124 research articles and other scientific texts we identify 63 different datasets mainly written in English, and 116 different classification algorithms. The seven most commonly occurring algorithms (Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Long Short- TermMemory, K-Nearest Neighbors, Convolutional Neural Network) together make up almost 50% of all algorithm occurences in the article corpus. For these seven, the ten occurrences with the best performance are listed. Out of the datasets, the six most common datasets (ISOT, FakeNewsNet, Patwa 2021, LIAR, Bisaillon, and UTK-MLC) together make up 44% of all dataset occurrences. Apart from English, the represented languages were mainly Chinese (Mandarin), Portugese, Indonesian, Bangla, and Albanian. / Olika typer av desinformation (så kallade fake news), är ett problem för dagens samhälle. En av flera möjliga dellösningar på problemet utgörs av automatiserad fake news-detektion. Trots att detta forskningsfält är relativt nytt finns det en uppsjö av olika föreslagna modeller för automatiserad fake news-detektion. Denna systematiska kartläggning syftar till att ge en överblick över den aktuella forskningen inom Natural Language Processing-baserad automatiserad fake news-detektion med klassifikationsalgoritmer både inom maskininlärning och neurala nätverk. Översikten avser vilka klassifikationsalgoritmer samt vilka dataset som förekommer inom forskningen. Vidare försöker vi göra en generell beskrivning av prestandan hos de vanligast förekommande klassifikationsalgoritmerna, mätt i accuracy och f-score. Kartläggningen omfattar en samling på 124 artiklar och andra vetenskapliga texter, ur vilka vi identifierade 63 förekommance dataset och 116 olika förekommande klassifikationsalgoritmer. De sju vanligast förekommande algoritmerna (Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Long-Short Memory Network, K-Nearest Neighbors, Convolutional Neural Network) utgör tillsammans 49% av alla förekomster inom artikelsamlingen. Vi har tagit ut santliga förekomster av prestandaresultat för dessa sju algoritmer, och listat de tio bästa prestandaresultaten för var och en av de sju algoritmerna. De sex vanligast förekommande dataseten (ISOT, FakeNewsNet, Patwa 2021, LIAR, Bisaillon, and UTK-MLC) utgör tillsammans 44% av alla förekomster. Engelska var med stor marginal det vanligast förekommande språket inom dataseten, andra språk som förekom var kinesiska (mandarin), portugisiska, indonesiska, bangla, och albanska.

The spread of disinformation in Sweden is not a new phenomenon and has long been considered a problem for the Swedish Social Services. Though in recent years, misinformation and rumours about the Social Services have increased. The main narratives revolve around the Social Services allegedly kidnapping children of foreign descent without the support of LVU (Care of Young Persons Act) and are commonly referred to as the LVU campaign. Previous research primarily focuses on the portrayal of the Social Services by traditional media, creating a knowledge gap regarding the Social Services and social media. The aim of this study is to examine and increase understanding of discourses about the Social Services among users on the social media platform Flashback. By using a thematic analysis method, we have reduced and sorted the posts found in our Flashback forum of choice. The thematic analysis method enabled the construction of different themes that appeared frequently in the forum. Subsequently, a critical discourse analysis was applied to the material to identify the discourses that emerged in the forum. The critical discourse analysis includes a three-dimensional model and several concepts used to conduct the analysis. The main findings of the study shows that discussions among users on Flashback can involve several different aspects, and users have varying perspectives on the Social Services. This means that the portrayal of the Social Services on Flashback becomes complex as both positive and negative opinions are constantly expressed, along with different problem representations. The Social Services are often described negatively, and when multiple users agree with each other, the negative image of the Social Services becomes a "truth". Positive and negative discourses are also expressed in the Flashback forum, and these are constantly in opposition to each other. In the negative discourses, there is also an expression of fear towards the Social Services and the removal of children, which can be problematic as it may deter people from seeking the care they need.

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