I examine the determinants and implications of false news on client business risk and firm credibility. False news is defined as information presented as factually accurate, but which contains fabricated facts and is deliberately made public to mislead the reader. Importantly, it is later denied by a credible source. There is a significant concern about the influence of false news on individuals’ decision-making and judgment processes. However, our knowledge regarding false news and its implications for financial markets is minimal. I investigate false news by focusing on negative false news that is not initiated from within the company. Building on financial and political motives behind incidents of false news, I examine whether industry competition and media coverage play a role in making a firm a target for false news. I further examine the impact of false news on the firm’s financial reporting behavior and investigate whether the firm’s auditor prices false news. Lastly, based on the argument that false news increases distrust and uncertainty, I examine whether false news decreases the credibility of the firm’s disclosures and test whether the earnings response coefficient (ERC) is lower after the release of false news. I find that lower competition and higher media coverage are associated with higher likelihood of false news. Consistent with my predictions, I also find that false news target firms have higher abnormal accruals, higher abnormal real earnings activities, and higher audit fees. However, I do not find support for the notion that false news reduces credibility of firm’s disclosure. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis Abstract Banks have done factoring for 10 years and have always viewed the operation as a self-compensatory and low-risk sort-term loan. Hoever, banks have suffered great credit losses in cases such as Procomp, Ya-Hsin and Everskill in recent years, which have made banks adopt a more careful approach when dealing this kind of business. By collecting rules of factoring of some banks and making references to international practices, this research attemps to recognize alarming signs and builds a better warning system in the hope of reducing or avoiding potential Credit losses. This warning system does audits from different approaches such as 3 major transaction subjects of factoring, 4 risk aspects, and 6 operation processes. It also uses analytical double-checking mechanism to audit the accuracy and rationality of each transaction from both the seller and the buyer, thus greatly reduces risks by detecting fake transaction at earliest possible time. Key Words: Factoring, Dispute, Fake deal, Risk Management.

Vi står idag inför ett växande problem där falsk information sprids som faktaenliga nyheter i diverse olika medieformat ut till allmänheten. Detta problem kan resultera i väldiga konsekvenser på många olika sätt för både privatpersonen, den rådande politiken och samhället i stort. Denna studie är en explorativ undersökning i hur individer uppfattar falska nyheters och dess spridning samt deras tilltro till medieväsendet. Uppsatsen är en ‘’mixed methods’’ studie som bygger på en kvantitativ enkätundersökning och åtta kvalitativa intervjuer. Syftet med studien är att undersöka huruvida spridningen av falska nyheter har ökat misstron till media hos den allmänna nyhetspubliken. Studiens urvalsgrupp är 16–30 åringar då dessa är den åldersgrupp som befinner sig mest på sociala medier där den största spridningen av falska nyheter sker. Resultatet visar att det finns en allmänt stor medvetenhet om att det sker en spridning av falska nyheter. Studien visar även att denna spridning av falska nyheter har bidragit något till en ökad misstro gentemot generell nyhetsmedia. Publikens medvetenhet om falska nyheter framgår i denna undersökning klart tydligare än den uppfattade ökade misstron till nyhetskanaler, något som både den här presenterade kvantitativa och kvalitativa datan styrker. / Today we face a growing problem where false information is spread as common news out to the public. This could result in enormous consequences in many ways for people, politics and in the society as a whole. This exploratory study addresses false news and how the dissemination of these affects people and their confidence in the general news-media. The essay is a mixed method study based on a quantitative survey and eight qualitative interviews. The purpose of the study is to investigate whether the spread of false news increases the distrust of the media in the general news republic. The study's selection group are people in the ages of 16–30, as these are the age groups that most using social media where the largest spread of false news occurs. The result shows that there is an overall high awareness-rate regarding the existence of false news. The study also shows that the spread of false news has contributed to an increased mistrust towards the general news-media by the public. However, both the quantitative and qualitative data presented in this paper points to the fact that the level of awareness regarding the spreading of false news is much higher than the level of mistrust in general news outputs.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / Drug counterfeiting or adulteration is a worldwide concern due to the serious consequences they generate, especially in the health and economic sectors. This concern is greater in Peru, as it is among the top five countries with drug counterfeiting incidents in the Americas, according to a study carried out in 2018 by the Pan American Health Organization. In this paper, we present our project, which aims at implementing a technological solution that provides reliable information on the origin and authenticity of these products in Peru to the drug consumer user, preserving the security and integrity of the exposed information using Blockchain technology. Likewise, it allows showing detailed drug characteristics, such as: composition, pharmaceutical form, active ingredients, among other relevant information. The technological solution, proposed by our project, aims at publishing the commercial origin of drugs from their sale in laboratories and distributors to the sale to the public in pharmacies. In the development of this paper, a bibliographic review of research on the use of blockchain technology is presented, as well as its benefits in the health sector, the architecture used by the system and the conceptual commercialization chain that supports it, and the qualitative and quantitative validation for the drug query service is shown. / Revisión por pares

Sedan år 2017 har många internetanvändare fått bekanta sig med fenomenet deepfakes som är en slags digital imitation där en persons ansikte kan fogas samman med en annan persons kropp. Så kallade face swap-appar och filter är inget nytt men det som särskiljer deepfakes är att de skapas med hjälp av artificiell intelligens som kan ge extremt verk- liga resultat. Dessutom blir tekniken allt mer avancerad och lättillgänglig för gemene man, vilket innebär större risk för att den missbrukas t.ex. för att skapa fake porn där en persons ansikte infogas i en existerande bild med sexuellt innehåll. Syftet med uppsatsen är att utreda om det genom befintlig svensk straffrätt går att lagföra den som skapar eller sprider fake porn. Detta innefattar en utredning av huruvida skyddet för den personliga integriteten omfattar sådant sexuellt material som inte visar en persons faktiska kropp men ändock dennes ansikte, eller om fake porn avslöjar luck- or i det straffrättsliga skyddet för den personliga integriteten. För att uppnå syftet utreds brotten sexuellt ofredande och ofredande när det gäller skapande av fake porn samt för- tal och olaga integritetsintrång när det gäller spridande av sådant material. De slutsatser som dras är att det i allmänhet inte går att lagföra den som skapat fake porn men att det i många fall troligtvis går att bedöma spridande av materialet som för- tal. Detta är dock inte ett önskvärt sätt att angripa fake porn på då det inte fokuserar på skyddet för den personliga integriteten utan istället skyddet för en persons ära, vilket kan ge en del märkliga resultat vid tillämpningen på fake porn. Detta visar på ett behov av att lagstiftaren agerar proaktivt mot fake porn, innan det blir ett utbrett problem som är svårt för rättsväsendet att komma åt. / Since 2017 many internet users have gotten acquainted with deepfakes which is a type of digital imitation that allows you to attach a person’s face onto a picture or video of somebody else’s body. So called face swap apps and filters are hardly a novelty any- more but what distinguishes deepfakes is the fact that they are created using artificial in- telligence which can provide extremely realistic results. This technology is becoming increasingly more advanced and easily available even for those lacking more than aver- age skills in technology and computers. This increases the risk of deepfakes being abused e.g. for the purpose of creating fake porn where a person’s face is inserted into existing sexual content. The purpose of the thesis is to examine whether creating and spreading fake porn constitutes a crime according to Swedish criminal law. This includes investigating whether the protection of personal integrity extends to this sort of sexual material that portrays a person’s face but not their own body, or if fake porn has revealed blind spots in the protection of personal integrity in Swedish criminal law. For this purpose, the crimes sexual molestation and molestation will be tried regarding the creation of fake porn while defamation and unlawful intrusion of integrity will be tried regarding the spread of such content. It is concluded that, in general, creating fake porn is not punishable by criminal law, although it is likely that spreading it in many cases could constitute defamation. However, this is not a desirable way of managing fake porn since defamation is a crime designed to protect a person’s honor or reputation, not a person’s personal integrity. Applying the defamation provision on fake porn can therefore make for odd results in some cases. This highlights the need for proactivity from the legislator before fake porn becomes a widespread problem that the criminal justice system cannot handle.

Gender-based discrimination is an issue that permeates many aspects of today's society and is influenced by numerous factors, including the presence of fake news, or emotionally driven, factually inaccurate, and misleading media. This study aimed to examine fake news' impact on consumer attitudes regarding women and to investigate how certain demographic factors relate to consumers' attitudes towards women. The current study had two main hypotheses: (1) participants exposed to fake news materials will report higher levels of both old-fashioned and modern sexism than those in other conditions and (2) participants with higher levels of sociodemographic factors such as right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and levels of religious involvement will have higher levels of both types of sexism. Data for the current study was collected from male students at the University of Central Florida. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: watching three consecutive real news clips about women, watching three consecutive fake news clips about women, or watching nothing. Participants then completed online questions related to the study's aims. Analyses conducted included correlational analyses of all variables, analysis of variance to determine if there are differences in level of sexism based on experimental condition, and linear regression analysis to determine how various sociodemographic factors relate to consumer sexism. Results indicated no significant impact of fake news on participants' levels of sexism but does demonstrate justification for future research on the topic.

In recent years, deceptive contents such as fake news and fake reviews, also known as opinion spams, have increasingly become a dangerous prospect, for online users. Fake reviews affect consumers and stores a like. Furthermore, the problem of fake news has gained attention in 2016, especially in the aftermath of the last US presidential election. Fake reviews and fake news are a closely related phenomenon as both consist of writing and spreading false information or beliefs. The opinion spam problem was formulated for the first time a few years ago, but it has quickly become a growing research area due to the abundance of user-generated content. It is now easy for anyone to either write fake reviews or write fake news on the web. The biggest challenge is the lack of an efficient way to tell the difference between a real review or a fake one; even humans are often unable to tell the difference. In this thesis, we have developed an n-gram model to detect automatically fake contents with a focus on fake reviews and fake news. We studied and compared two different features extraction techniques and six machine learning classification techniques. Furthermore, we investigated the impact of keystroke features on the accuracy of the n-gram model. We also applied semantic similarity metrics to detect near-duplicated content. Experimental evaluation of the proposed using existing public datasets and a newly introduced fake news dataset introduced indicate improved performances compared to state of the art. / Graduate

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / Online social media has made the process of disseminating news so quick that people have shifted their way of accessing news from traditional journalism and press to online social media sources. The rapid rotation of news on social media makes it challenging to evaluate its reliability. Fake news not only erodes public trust but also subverts their opinions. An intelligent automated system is required to detect fake news as there is a tenuous difference between fake and real news. This paper proposes an intelligent gravitational search random forest (IGSRF) algorithm to be employed to detect fake news. The IGSRF algorithm amalgamates the Intelligent Gravitational Search Algorithm (IGSA) and the Random Forest (RF) algorithm. The IGSA is an improved intelligent variant of the classical gravitational search algorithm (GSA) that adds information about the best and worst gravitational mass agents in order to retain the exploitation ability of agents at later iterations and thus avoid the trapping of the classical GSA in local optimum. In the proposed IGSRF algorithm, all the intelligent mass agents determine the solution by generating decision trees (DT) with a random subset of attributes following the hypothesis of random forest. The mass agents generate the collection of solutions from solution space using random proportional rules. The comprehensive prediction to decide the class of news (fake or real) is determined by all the agents following the attributes of random forest. The performance of the proposed algorithm is determined for the FakeNewsNet dataset, which has sub-categories of BuzzFeed and PolitiFact news categories. To analyze the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the results are also evaluated with decision tree and random forest algorithms. The proposed IGSRF algorithm has attained superlative results compared to the DT, RF and state-of-the-art techniques. / Revisión por pares

Thesis (M.A. (Media Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2020 / This study examined the effect of digital news reporting on professional journalistic practice focusing on fake sport news websites. It evolves from the fact that, despite the progressive benefits of the digital revolution, the rise of fake news websites has become common practice associated with the clickbait that spreads rumours posted on unofficial accounts often with a journalistic pretext. The aim of this study was to examine how fake digital sport news reporting impacts on professional journalistic practice. The objectives of the study were: to describe the nature of internet-based fake sport news stories and websites; to assess the credibility of sport news disseminated through fake news sites, and to determine the implications of fake sport news stories and websites on standard news practice. The descriptive design within the qualitative interpretive paradigm was used to determine the negative effect that fake sport news has on professional journalistic practice. Qualitative content analysis of ten sample news excerpts and in-depth interviews with sixteen expert informants were complementarily used to collect data. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was applied to generate discursive themes which yielded the study outcomes. The data from screenshots and interviews were collected, corroborated and analysed, using content and thematic analysis techniques. After analysing both the screenshots and the interviews, a total of eight themes emerged from the study. The study notes how fake sport news and its associated litany of misinformation and/or disinformation has contributed to the creation of false hypes about sports news to the detriment of professional journalism practice. The study revealed that fake sport news is prominent on social media and poses a major challenge to journalistic integrity and credibility. From the various screenshots, fake headlines were identified as a contributing factor to the rise of fake news stories. It was also found that fake sport news has a negative effect on journalism practice, as it spreads lies, makes people more interested in emotional stories and forces credible news agencies to also use sensational headlines to gain the attention of an audience. The interviews revealed that characteristics of fake sport news stories are exaggerated, misleading, have no source or attributions, no by-lines or unknown authors and misrepresent so-called facts. iv vi The study recommends that research, fact-checking, naming and shaming people/websites that popularize fake sport news should be made known to the public; proper training and assertion of certain rules, regulations and ethics for new reporters and journalists to follow and stick to; there must be thorough research and cross checking of information gained from a secondary source; a governing body to possibly monitor and crack down on serial propagators and spreaders of fake sports news stories; sport journalists should alert readers of fake sport news and fake sport news websites, as these are common in sport due to the popularity of sport news sites; and sport journalists should stay away from reporting/re-writing and sharing fake news in order to maintain credibility and ethics in sport news reporting.

This thesis presents a feasibility study on unobtrusive localization of GSM en- abled cellphones using a Fake Base Station (FBS). An FBS is a radio transceiver that emulates the behaviour of a legitimate GSM Base Station (BS) to fool unal- tered cellphones to connect with it. This feasibility study investigates how an FBS can be utilized to estimate positions of connected cellphones in an area of interest. We present a proof of concept system that consists of a mobile FBS that measures the Time Of Arrival (TOA) and Received Signal Strength (RSS) to a cell- phone. The positions of the mobile FBS are determined with GPS. We employ calibration-free localization algorithms as we assume unknown environments and unknown hardware. Our experiments in an outdoor 180x100 m2 Line-Of- Sight (LOS) environment show that our calibration-free localization algorithms provide an average localization error less than 10 meters, which is sufficient for most applications of interest. In addition, our experiments show that RSS-based localization outperforms TOA-based localization when the average distance be- tween the FBS and cellphone is roughly 50 meters. Our experiments show that TOA-based localization outperforms RSS-based localization when the average dis- tance increases to roughly 75 meters. This research is part of the Smart Savannah project in which a wide range of different surveillance systems are developed to protect rhinos from poachers. We envision that our localization system can be used to detect and localize these poachers in an unobtrusive way. In addition, we envision that our localization sys- tem can be used in Search And Rescue (SAR) operations to estimate the positions of cellphones of missing persons. / Detta examensarbete undersöker möjligheten att lokalisera mobiltelefoner med GSM teknologi genom att använda en Falsk Basstation (FBS). En FBS är en radio transceiver som emulerar beteendet hos en legitim GSM basstation för att lura omodifierade mobiltelefoner att ansluta till den. Undersökningen tar reda på hur en FBS kan användas för att estimera positionerna av anslutna mobiltelefoner inom ett målområde. För att undersöka detta har ett Proof-Of-Concept-system ta- gits fram. Systemet består av en mobil FBS som som mäter propageringstid (TOA) och mottagen signalstyrka (RSS). FBS:ens positioner bestäms med GPS. Systemet använder kalibreringsfria algoritmer för lokalisering, då vi antar att miljön och mobiltelefonernas hårdvara är okänd. Tester av systemet har utförts utomhus i ett 180x100 m2 Line-Of-Sight-område. Dessa tester visar att lokaliseringsalgorit- merna ger ett genomsnittligt fel på mindre än 10 meter. Detta anses vara till- räckligt för de flesta tillämpningar av intresse. Utöver detta visar även testerna att RSS-baserad lokalisering ger bättre resultat än TOA-baserad lokalisering när medelavståndet mellan FBS och mobiltelefon är omkring 50 meter. TOA-baserad lokalisering ger däremot ett bättre resultat än RSS-baserad lokalisering när me- delavståndet ökar till omkring 75 meter. Denna undersökning är en del av Smart Savannah projektet som innefattar flera olika övervakningssystem, utvecklade för att skydda noshörningar från tjuv- skyttar. Målet med vårt lokaliseringssystem är att det ska kunna användas för att upptäcka och lokalisera tjuvskyttar utan deras vetskap. Vi tror även att lokalise- ringssystemet kan användas vid eftersökning- och räddnings-operationer för att lokalisera försvunna personers mobiltelefoner. / Project Ngulia