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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I en tid av minskande tilltro till objektiv sanning och expertis blir konsten att övertala och kontrollera information avgörande i samhällsdebatten och en utmaning för demokratin. Inom den retoriska traditionen gör man dock en etisk distinktion mellan påverkan med den ömsesidiga nyttan som mål (argumentation) respektive påverkan med syfte att manipulera (propaganda). Retoriken utger sig också ha potential att vitalisera det demokratiska samtalet. Det finns i dagsläget begränsad forskning om hur samhället kan arbeta mot informationspåverkan och forskningen är tämligen frikopplad från den retoriska traditionen. Samtidigt finns ett retoriskt intresse för beredskapsretorik och för politisk retorik som med moderna medier når oss i det privata. Mot denna bakgrund kommer denna uppsats att studera kampanjen Bli inte lurad framtagen av Myndigheten för psykologiskt försvar, som är en beredskapskampanj om att möta informationspåverkan. För att synliggöra retoriken som präglar denna folkbildningskampanj används en retorisk analysmetod. Genom analysen och den teoretiska bakgrunden i klassisk retorik och modern visuell retorik kunde argumentationen, det publika tilltalet och den ickeverbala kommunikationen synliggöras. Argumentationen som analysen synliggör är informativ och söker vinna tillit genom ett starkt pathos som uppmålar en hotfull situation och genom ett starkt ethos som framställer myndigheten som folklig, men argumenterar mindre utifrån logos, utan underminerar motståndarnas trovärdighet. Det publika tilltalet som analysen synliggör framhäver medborgarnas demokratiska ansvar och hävdar rationalitet och social sammanhållning som gemensamma värderingar. Medborgarna uppmuntras både till källkritik och källtillit med anspelningar på samvetet och solidaritet. Den ickeverbala kommunikation som synliggörs i analysen förtydligar känslor och attityder i symboliska illustrationer samt kopplar problematiken till vardagliga upplevelser. Illustrationer och layout skapar en viss distans till problematiken och förmedlar trygghet. Att kampanjen på hemsidan presenteras i samarbete med magikerna Brynolf och Ljung skapar intresse, men kan förstärka en ogrundad misstänksamhet mot främmande perspektiv av rädsla att bli lurad. / In an era of decreased trust towards objective truth and expertise the art of convincing and controlling information becomes paramount to the public debate and to the democracy. Within the rhetorical tradition there is an ethical distinction between influence towards the common good (argumentation) and influence with the intent to manipulate (propaganda). The rhetorical tradition also claims potential to invigorate the democratic discourse. There is today limited research on how society can counter information influence and the research is quite disconnected from the rhetorical tradition. Meanwhile there is a rhetorical interest in emergency preparedness and for political rhetoric that through modern media reach us in our privet life. Against this background this essay will study the campaign Don’t be fooled, created by the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency, which is an emergency preparedness campaign about countering information influence. To make visible the rhetoric that marks this popular education campaign a rhetorical method of analysis is applied. Through the analysis and the theoretical framework of classical rhetoric and modern visual rhetoric the argumentation, the public appeal and the nonverbal communication could be made visible. The argumentation that the analysis show is informative and seeks to gain trust through a strong pathos which describes a threatening situation and through a strong ethos that depicts the agency as affable, though argue less from logos, but undermine the credibility of the opponent. The public appeal that the analysis show holds up the citizens democratic responsibility and claim rationality and social cohesion as common values. The citizens are encouraged to both source criticism and source trust with reference to the conscience and solidarity. The nonverbal communication that the analysis shows illustrates feelings and attitudes through symbolic illustrations and connect the problems to everyday situations. Illustrations and layout create somewhat of a distance to the problems and mediate safety. The choice to present the campaign through the website with the magicians Brynolf and Ljung creates interest but can also reinforce an ill-founded suspicion towards different perspectives by fear to be fooled.

The curiosity for source criticism was something that sparked in us during our internships. We discovered that students, even at an early age, frequently use digital sources and social media to find information and news. The purpose of this meta-study is to find out how the Swedish school system teaches the younger students about critical thinking and source criticism. The current Swedish curriculum mentions in the introductory chapters, along with the core content for Swedish and civics education, that the students should get the opportunity during their education in compulsory school to develop a source-critical approach. The research question posed was therefore “Are the younger students in compulsory school given the right tools and conditions to develop their critical thinking in civics education, to thus understand contemporary society?”. To find answers to this question, a qualitative textual analysis was conducted to determine a selection of related literature. The results showed that the schools lacked practical work regarding critical thinking and source criticism. As a result the teachers find it difficult to determine how it should be incorporated, along with which subject is responsible for it. Studies have shown confusion mainly among Swedish and civics teachers, since both teachers considered source criticism to be the other teacher's area of responsibility. The results also included which abilities are needed for a student to be able to develop a source-critical approach to thinking, also how a phenomenon can be interpreted differently depending on the experiences of the observer. The primary conclusion drawn was that there is a significant lack of research focusing on students in elementary school and how they relate to media and other information they meet every single day. It was also concluded that there is a lack of communication regarding this topic in the Swedish school system and how important it is for young students to develop critical thinking skills to be able to participate in our society as democratic citizens.

It is seemingly accepted that a democracy functions better with a reasonably informed citizenry. As we cannot acquire knowledge about a complex reality on our own, democratic societies operate through a set of institutions of which two are attributed the explicit task to assist citizensa legitimate pathway to knowledge. These institutions include news media and science. Evidence from recent years indicates that more and more elected politicians across the democratic world engage in attacks towards these institutions, with the deliberate aim to undermine their legitimacy. Because the functionality of news media and science essentially relies on their legitimacy, this trend has raised societal concerns in parallel with scholarly interest. While recent research has made important contributions to better understand political attacks towards institutional knowledge providers, several dimensions are still understudied. This thesis addresses such dimensions. Using quantitative content analysis, the research conducted in this thesis explores prevalence, party distribution and expressions of delegitimizing criticism (characterized by a presence of incivility and/or absence of reasoning) towards news media and science(conceptualized as epistemic authorities) among tweeting Members of Parliament (MP) in Sweden. The study analyzes single tweets by all Swedish MPs represented in the national parliament (and on Twitter) over a one-year study period (31st of October 2020 - 31st of October 2021) (N = 1828). Results from the exploration show that Swedish politicians engage in delegitimizing evaluations of epistemic authorities in a small and concentrated scale. Findings are several; Swedish politicians are remarkably more hostile towards the news media than towards science;one party affiliation contribute to more than half of all delegitimizing evaluations; delegitimizing criticism takes on several expressive forms but addresses to a large extent dimensions surrounding poor quality and partiality. The conducted study contributes to research about political hostility towards institutional knowledge providers in empirical and theoretical regards and provide entrances for further discoveries. A special request for futureresearch is to engage in more in-depth and detailed assessments of dimensions having been explored, for example by mixing in qualitative methods.

This study investigates the application of machine learning (ML) techniques in detecting fake news, addressing the rapid spread of misinformation across social media platforms. Given the time-consuming nature of manual fact-checking, this research compares the robustness of basic machine learning models, such as Multinominal Naive Bayes classifiers, with complex models like Distil-BERT in identifying fake news. Utilizing datasets including LIAR, ISOT, and GM, this study will evaluate these models based on standard classification metrics both in single domain and cross-domain scenarios, especially when processing linguistically manipulated data. Results indicate that while complex models like Distil-BERT perform better in single-domain classifications, the Baseline models show competitive performance in cross-domain and on the manipulated dataset. However both models struggle with the manipulated dataset, highlighting a critical area for improvement in fake news detection algorithms and methods. In conclusion, the findings suggest that while both basic and complex models have their strength in certain settings, significant advancements are needed to improve against linguistic manipulations, ensuring reliable detection of fake news across varied contexts before consideration of public availability of automated classification.

This study examined the level of trust of information on social media. Specifically, I investigated the factors of performance expectancy with information-seeking motives that appear to influence the level of trust of information on various social network sites. This study utilized the following theoretical models: elaboration likelihood model (ELM), the uses and gratifications theory (UGT), the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model (UTAUT), the consumption value theory (CVT), and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) Model to build a conceptual research framework for an exploratory study. The research investigated the extent to which information quality and source credibility influence the level of trust of information by visitors to the social network sites. The inductive content analysis on 189 respondents’ responses carefully addressed the proposed research questions and then further developed a comprehensive framework. The findings of this study contribute to the current research stream on information quality, fake news, and IT adoption as they relate to social media.

This thesis explores to what extent Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers can be used to determine the polarity of news, specifically the news coverage of Sweden by the Russian state-funded news outlets RT and Sputnik. Three experiments are conducted.  In the first experiment, an MNB and an SVM classifier are trained with the Large Movie Review Dataset (Maas et al., 2011) with a varying number of samples to determine how training data size affects classifier performance.  In the second experiment, the classifiers are trained with 300 positive, negative, and neutral news articles (Agarwal et al., 2019) and tested on 95 RT and Sputnik news articles about Sweden (Bengtsson, 2019) to determine if the domain specificity of the training data outweighs its limited size.  In the third experiment, the movie-trained classifiers are put up against the domain-specific classifiers to determine if well-trained classifiers from another domain perform better than relatively untrained, domain-specific classifiers.  Four different types of feature sets (unigrams, unigrams without stop words removal, bigrams, trigrams) were used in the experiments. Some of the model parameters (TF-IDF vs. feature count and SVM’s C parameter) were optimized with 10-fold cross-validation.  Other than the superior performance of SVM, the results highlight the need for comprehensive and domain-specific training data when conducting machine learning tasks, as well as the benefits of feature engineering, and to a limited extent, the removal of stop words. Interestingly, the classifiers performed the best on the negative news articles, which made up most of the test set (and possibly of Russian news coverage of Sweden in general).