The thesis considers with balance and objectivity of the main news program of Česká televize. It tries to unfold inaccurate coverages, being transmitted in Události from september 2009 until december 2009. Inadequacies are further described and analysed in detail. Based on personal judgement, there is a possible reason and inflictor stated. The objective of this thesis is to point out Inadequacies in main news service of statutory television from view of objectivity, balance, correctness and other faults. Further provides aspects, which are the most frequent purpose of making faults. Thesis supplements monthly reports of Czech info company, which judges balance of news service only in constrained scale. The results of analysis provides valueable ratings of Události not only for television management, but for redactors themselves and other members of news team. The thesis doesn't lack even consideration about possibility of minimalisation the mentioned inadequacies. The source of information and data are articles, documents from Česká televize database, news service online archiv and experience from working in news room ČT. First part of thesis is concentrated on theoretical base. Serves to understand the whole problematics and as starting point for rest of the thesis. Even contains practical examples of manipulation and disinformation from the past and present. Second part describes the way of investigation of Česká televize news service and defines criteria of ratings. Third part of the thesis summarises results of the analysis, judges frequency and importance of inadequacies in news service and summarises their characteristics and elimination possibility. Conclusion summarises knowledge of the thesis, their comments, and enrichment from ČT news room experience.

abstract: Social media has become an important means of user-centered information sharing and communications in a gamut of domains, including news consumption, entertainment, marketing, public relations, and many more. The low cost, easy access, and rapid dissemination of information on social media draws a large audience but also exacerbate the wide propagation of disinformation including fake news, i.e., news with intentionally false information. Disinformation on social media is growing fast in volume and can have detrimental societal effects. Despite the importance of this problem, our understanding of disinformation in social media is still limited. Recent advancements of computational approaches on detecting disinformation and fake news have shown some early promising results. Novel challenges are still abundant due to its complexity, diversity, dynamics, multi-modality, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. Social media data opens the door to interdisciplinary research and allows one to collectively study large-scale human behaviors otherwise impossible. For example, user engagements over information such as news articles, including posting about, commenting on, or recommending the news on social media, contain abundant rich information. Since social media data is big, incomplete, noisy, unstructured, with abundant social relations, solely relying on user engagements can be sensitive to noisy user feedback. To alleviate the problem of limited labeled data, it is important to combine contents and this new (but weak) type of information as supervision signals, i.e., weak social supervision, to advance fake news detection. The goal of this dissertation is to understand disinformation by proposing and exploiting weak social supervision for learning with little labeled data and effectively detect disinformation via innovative research and novel computational methods. In particular, I investigate learning with weak social supervision for understanding disinformation with the following computational tasks: bringing the heterogeneous social context as auxiliary information for effective fake news detection; discovering explanations of fake news from social media for explainable fake news detection; modeling multi-source of weak social supervision for early fake news detection; and transferring knowledge across domains with adversarial machine learning for cross-domain fake news detection. The findings of the dissertation significantly expand the boundaries of disinformation research and establish a novel paradigm of learning with weak social supervision that has important implications in broad applications in social media. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2020

The main purpose of this master's thesis is to offer a deeper understanding of disinformation trends and their causes in Slovakia by utilizing the theoretical and analytical framework of the concept of Truth Decay defined by the RAND Corporation in 2018. At the same time, the work also contributes to the exploration of the phenomenon of Truth Decay in general. The research stems from a premise that disinformation should not be strictly perceived as a tool of hybrid warfare. Hence, there is an increasing need to analyze disinformation as a wider societal problem that leaves its marks on society in different ways. Based on 11 expert interviews with professionals with different backgrounds (academia, think tanks, government institutions, security institutions, journalism, or psychology), this master's thesis consists of two main analytical chapters. The first one analyzes four trends of Truth Decay in a Slovak setting: an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increase in the relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact; and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information. The second analytical chapter is focusing on possible drivers of these...

The COVID-19 epidemic has spawned an "infodemic,"with excessive and unfounded information that hinders an appropriate public health response. This perspective describes a selection of COVID-19 fake news that originated in Peru and the government's response to this information. Unlike other countries, Peru was relatively successful in controlling the infodemic possibly because of the implementation of prison sentences for persons who created and shared fake news. We believe that similar actions by other countries in collaboration with social media companies may offer a solution to the infodemic problem. / Revisión por pares

The rise of 'information disorder' that undermine Western political principles has become one of the key political concerns in current Europe and United States and led to searching for new solutions how to fight the spread of mis- and dis-information. While the nature of this danger is still subject to much debate, we can already observe a rise of new experts explaining the threat of information war and how to deal with it. This research looks at how this novel problematization of security affects the politics of security expertise. Or, who gains power in this 'battle for truth'? Building on sociological approaches in security studies, this thesis focuses on the Czech Republic as a country that has become very active in the fight against disinformation and analyses the network of actors recognized as providing security expertise on information warfare. Based on social network analysis, the research maps the structure of social relations among actors recognized as experts and points out the empowerment of think-tanks and journalists, who build their expertise by bringing together their social capital, bridging knowledge of Russian politics and the new media environment, and introducing new practices to make the society resilient towards information warfare.

In the context of increasing technologicalization and the growing interconnectedness of our world through social media, this thesis aims to answer the question, why is disinformation not being sufficiently handled in the United States in the wake of the foreign meddling in the 2016 Presidential Elections, and what can and should be done about the threat? This master thesis therefore aims to delve into the inherent vulnerabilities in the U.S. societal fabric, and thus conduct an in-depth explanatory case study model analysis of what should be done to further combat and counteract disinformation and election meddling within the country. The author argues that disinformation and election meddling are not only a serious security threat, but are also not being properly handled as they are only being addressed technologically, and not through the realm of information, and societal resilience. This thesis therefore argues that strategic communication, which should be redefined and expanded in definition, should be used to combat disinformation campaigns to prevent further election meddling. The author posits that a two-level approach is best, one which aims to negate the negative disinformation campaigns through a single governmental body, while also addressing the root causes through education.

The submitted thesis focuses on the photograph and its role in the process of disseminating disinformation in the online environment. The thesis deals with the opinion that, despite the fundamental changes in the understanding of photography and its credibility, which together with the transition from its analogue form to digital one, photography retains the status of an authentic medium. For this reason photography is becoming a very powerful tool for spreading misinformation. The thesis deals with the theoretical basis of objectivity of photography, its documentary value and expectation of authenticity. The role of the context, which is crucial for understanding the photographic message, will be emphasized. The thesis also defines the basic concepts related to the phenomenon of disinformation. The strategies used to spread disinformation via photography is also presented. In the practical part of the thesis particular disinformative photographic messages is analyzed. Ways to verify the authenticity of particular photographic images are presented. Keywords: photography, authenticity, disinformation, hoax, fake news, online environment, manipulation

The diploma thesis consists of two main parts. In the theoretical part, we deal with the basic terminological framework of fake news, the development of misinformation, fake news, hoaxes, propaganda and their form and the form they acquired. We will also look at misinformation, hoax and propaganda as a specific genre of false news. Furthermore, we analyze the spread of hoaxes and disinformation and the criteria by which hoaxes are recognized and labeled. An important part of the theoretical part of the thesis is also the manipulation with the content and the determination of the criteria on the basis of which false information can be recognized. We will focus primarily on the electronic and new media domains, which are mainly represented by social networks. In the research and analytical part of the thesis we look at the ways in which different sites classify misinformation and hoaxes, by what criteria they approach their classification, and whether these methods are unambiguous and consistent. The second important part of the research will analyze the attitudes of traditional and alternative media to work with false news and hoaxes. We will try to bring a glimpse of both stakeholders, that is to say, representatives of traditional media and alternative media.

The master thesis Incorrect expression in selected news sites ́s Facebook pages: comparative analysis deals with uncivil comments in the Facebook pages of two news web sites, which are considered as disinformation - Aeronet.cz and ParlamentníListy.cz, and two news web sites, which are considered as serious - Aktuálně.cz and Novinky.cz. The theoretical part describes previous research with a similar focus, on the results of which I set hypotheses. The reader will be acquainted with the incivility, which is indecency, rudeness, but also with new media or social networks. The aim of the research is to find out whether incivility appear in the Facebook comments under the articles dealing with the migration crisis, and if so, to whom these incivility comments are directed. Comments were collected on articles shared on Facebook pages in the period from 1st January 2019 to 30th June 2019. Qualitative coding of comments identified several regularly recurring categories of incivility, as well as typologies of persons against whom incorrect expressions were directed. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that incivility occurs in the comments, they are most often directed against migrants, using contempt or vulgarisms. As part of the analyzed comments, more incivility appeared on the Facebook pages...

We live in a world driven by fast technologies. The same technologies that make information more accessible have created a dilemma by which the same conduits have also enabled access to mass amounts of counter-factual information. It is the assertion of this thesis project that counter- factual information poses a growing risk to the security and stability in liberal democratic societies and warrants a proportional response. The body of work which follows will explore what I have characterized as an information crisis. The information crisis, so presented, is a multi-faceted issue. It's constituent causes and outcomes concern both scholars of security studies and sociology. To address breadth of scope and immediacy of the crisis, the conceptual framework purposed in this project offers an interface between actor-network theory and security studies (ANT-security interface). Actor-network theory is a material-semiotic approach that preferences engagement with human and technological actants as an assemblage. Or, in other words, a network of relationships. The first chapter will introduce the dimensions of the information crisis, providing relevant examples of how counter-factual information embodies a human, and societal security issue. It will delineate important concepts such as misinformation, and...