A prominent British newspaper and its website publishes an inflammatory article stating that a lifeboat charity has been cynically abused by migrant traffickers who are using it as a ‘free ferry service’ to get their cargo of human beings into the United Kingdom. What reaction is generated on the Twitter social media network? What narrative, language usage and sentiment is formed? How does the charity react?This thesis examines this case and discovers through word frequency and conversational analysis how one news story reverberated in 280 characters or less. Themes impacted by this research include Twitter as a social media network service, fake news, echo chambers and their bubbles, trust and audience perception, news media literacy, social campaigning and awareness, and crisis communication and news/stakeholder management.The conclusion reached is that the story had the potential to adversely affect the charity’s reputation and future income stream even though it was doing its duty because of its unwillingness or inability to engage with stakeholders and correct any misunderstandings. The thesis discusses why this was not a good idea and considers how the story could have developed into a broader, more damaging entity with relative ease, especially with the role social media can play for news consumers in today’s society.

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

Conocer sobre el impacto de las noticias falsas, la desinformación durante la crisis del COVID19, así como las oportunidades y riesgos en el tratamiento de contenidos periodísticos

abstract: The development of the internet provided new means for people to communicate effectively and share their ideas. There has been a decline in the consumption of newspapers and traditional broadcasting media toward online social mediums in recent years. Social media has been introduced as a new way of increasing democratic discussions on political and social matters. Among social media, Twitter is widely used by politicians, government officials, communities, and parties to make announcements and reach their voice to their followers. This greatly increases the acceptance domain of the medium. The usage of social media during social and political campaigns has been the subject of a lot of social science studies including the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Arab Spring, the United States (US) election, more recently The Brexit campaign. The wide spread usage of social media in this space and the active participation of people in the discussions on social media made this communication channel a suitable place for spreading propaganda to alter public opinion. An interesting feature of twitter is the feasibility of which bots can be programmed to operate on this platform. Social media bots are automated agents engineered to emulate the activity of a human being by tweeting some specific content, replying to users, magnifying certain topics by retweeting them. Network on these bots is called botnets and describing the collaboration of connected computers with programs that communicates across multiple devices to perform some task. In this thesis, I will study how bots can influence the opinion, finding which parameters are playing a role in shrinking or coalescing the communities, and finally logically proving the effectiveness of each of the hypotheses. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2020

Due to the large increase in the proliferation of "fake news" in recent years, it has become a widely discussed menace in the online world. In conjunction with this popularity, research of ways to limit the spread has also increased. This paper aims to look at the current research of this area in order to see what automatic fake news detection methods exist and are being developed, which can help online users in protecting themselves against fake news. A systematic literature review is conducted in order to answer this question, with different detection methods discussed in the literature being divided into categories. The consensus which appears from the collective research between categories is also used to identify common elements between categories which are important to fake news detection; notably the relation of headlines and article content, the importance of high-quality datasets, the use of emotional words, and the circulation of fake news in social media groups.

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.

This thesis is a source of information and a practical guide for teachers' basic orientation in fake news issue. It presents various forms and examples of misinformation in the historical and political context. The history of hoaxes includes several centuries. Fake news accompany people from the invention of book printing to the present. For better understanding I will introduce them to teachers and students for their clear imagination of the situations in which mankind has encountered due to fake news from the past up to now. Knowledge or at least minimal awareness about the functioning of various information sources and the way how the fake news can influence users and customers help teachers to understand this problem and modern information sources as well. Then they can explain it to their students. Specific cases related to the environment of mystification of the public will help teachers to realize that information from the media should not be only blindly received and disseminated, but subjected to critical thinking about its credibility. First the educators should to be able to understand how to recognize false messages, what mechanisms does disinformation influence public opinion and where. Then they could pass this knowledge to their students. Findings from the overt non-standardised...

The aim of this study is to examine perceptions among civics teachersactive in upper primary and secondary schools in Sweden regardingdisinformation. In particular, the study focuses on ways in which disinformation inthe classroom interacts with media literacy as well as deliberative democraticideals. The study design is based in qualitative research and has been conductedthrough a series of interviews with said teachers, analyzed mainly through thetheory of deliberative democracy with focus also on media literacy. In terms ofresults, perceptions among teachers on the subject of disinformation generally linesup with established research in the fields of disinformation, deliberativedemocracy and media literacy. In particular, teachers of both primary andsecondary school in my sample calls for increased efforts when it comes to medialiteracy as the modern digital media landscape calls for extensive knowledge andskill in discerning credible sources from fake news. / <p>21-01-20</p>

This thesis deals with the transformation of the journalistic profession after the massive development and practical application of the new media. What does the current state of the media scene look like? What changes have taken place in connection with digitization and globalization? In examining these changes, I focus on how the journalistic profession has changed due to the influence of new media, the way they are used and their adaptation to them, based on the assumption that the field of journalism has been deprofessionalized. The aim of this thesis is to find and explain the key elements that caused the phenomenon, to demonstrate the correlation between the development of the new media and the declining prestige and professionalism of journalism by using quantitative and qualitative analysis.