No description available.

Fake news is nowadays part of our everyday lives, especially for those who are exposed to social media. As 8 out of 10 Swedish teenagers mainly read news on social media, this study was conducted to investigate to what extent students are taught to deal with fake news. This was done by examining exercises in English workbooks currently used at the upper secondary level. Skolverket (2021) clearly states that it is part of Swedish teachers’ mission to educate students so that they can orientate and act in a complex reality with a large flow of information, increased digitization and a rapid pace of change. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to examine how and to what extent workbooks in the Swedish EFL classroom provide students with tasks which can be said to further skills related to source criticism and critical thinking. It also aims to address the possible prevalence of insufficient skills of the above-mentioned kind and its potentially harmful consequences. This was done by investigating how exercises in workbooks can be said to promote an improvement of source criticism and critical thinking. The method of the presented study emanates from the theoretical framework of critical literacy from a pragmatic perspective. The study is qualitative as the examined material is limited. The results show that the workbooks vary in how they enable the ability to detect bias and critical thinking and that the workbooks rely on teachers to elaborate instructions. This indicates that the exercises in the workbooks may not be sufficient to fulfil the mission stated by Skolverket (2021).

Der (radikale) Konstruktivismus scheint auf den ersten Blick kein Kandidat für ideologiekritische Forschung. Wenn man sich jedoch nicht vorschnell von der Kritik am Konstruktivismus beeindrucken lässt, kann dessen erkenntniskritisches Potenzial herausgearbeitet werden. Am Beispiel von Fake News wird deutlich, dass deren Kritik nicht epistemologisch naiv von der Dichotomie Richtigkeit vs. Falschheit von Informationen und Tatsachenbehauptungen ausgehen kann, sondern eine differenziertere Argumentation erfordert. Diese Forderung wird konstruktivistisch eingelöst und abschließend kritisch geprüft.

This diploma thesis focuses on the dissemination of conspiracy theories, fake news and hoaxes and the role of media in this process. First, the basic concepts are explained and the topic of the thesis is put in a broader context. The functioning of disinformation media is described including the description of the local scene. Other channels used to deceive recipients include e-mails and applications, social networks, and word of mouth. Special attention is paid to the regular media and the rules according to which they should operate. The theory is followed by a practical part, which maps the spreading of specific misinformation not only through the media, but also fact-checking initiatives. Examples include conspiracy theories about the fire in Notre-Dame Cathedral, hoaxes about alleged refugees in Cheb, Czech Television journalist Marek Wollner and MP Olga Richterová, and the case of the dubious non-profit organization International Children's Cross. The analysis of these cases is conducted through a mixed research model: Data collection is carried out by a quantitative method, while working with them, qualitative methods associated with grounded theory are applied. The aim is to define and describe the forms that the media give to misinformation in their outputs, and to determine in which cases...

The phenomenon of fake news has a significant impact on our social life, especially in the political world. Fake news detection is an emerging area of research. The sharing of infor-mation on the Web, primarily through Web-based online media, is increasing. The ability to identify, evaluate, and process this information is of great importance. Deliberately created disinformation is being generated on the Internet, either intentionally or unintentionally. This is affecting a more significant segment of society that is being blinded by technology. This paper illustrates models and methods for detecting fake news from news articles with the help of machine learning and natural language processing. We study and compare three different feature extraction techniques and seven different machine classification techniques. Different feature engineering methods such as TF, TF-IDF, and Word2Vec are used to gener-ate feature vectors in this proposed work. Even different machine learning classification al-gorithms were trained to classify news as false or true. The best algorithm was selected to build a model to classify news as false or true, considering accuracy, F1 score, etc., for com-parison. We perform two different sets of experiments and finally obtain the combination of fake news detection models that perform best in different situations.

The work is based on the increasing absence of local journalism, that continue to grow in rural areas and in suburbs to large cities. The consequences are so-called white spots or news desserts, areas with weak or with out any journalistic presence at all. Disappearing advertising revenues and attempts to get readers to become paying subscribers, in order to survive as a local newspaper, place limits on both time and resources.  The difficulty of reaching out to young adults in age 25 - 39 with local journalism, grows and news agencies are working hard to find a solution. The lack of time and resources make it difficult for journalists to address schools. Children’s insight into their parents’ media habits are also disappearing as the newspaper moving into digital platforms. Today’s children and youths are therefore in risk of growing up without relation to the local media. This project put focus on the children. The work contains a process that has led to a concept, that aims to create a strong and early relationship with local media. The project resulted in an application for children, where they have the opportunity to enter the role of a journalist, to create, choose and assemble their own news together with friends. The start of the activity will take place within the school. Where the student learns about source criticism, press ethics, editing, the journalist’s responsibility and what distinguishes journalism from other communication. The learning element runs parallel to a playful approach to increase the student’s motivation and engagement. The concept aims at a collaboration between local media and students. / Arbetet grundar sig i den ökande frånvaron av lokal journalistik, som vi ser växa fram på landsbygd och i förorter till storstäder. Konsekvenserna blir så kallade vita fläckar, områden med svag eller helt utan journalistisk närvaro. Försvinnande annonsintäkter och försöken till att få läsarna att bli betalande prenumeranter, för att överleva som lokal tidning, sätter begränsningar på såväl tid som resurser. Att nå ut till unga vuxna ålder: 25-39 med lokal journalistik, är en problematik som växer sig allt större och nyhetsbyråerna arbetar febrilt för att finna en lösning. Lite tid och bristande resurser gör det svårt för journalister att hinna ut till skolor och barns insyn i föräldrarnas medievanor är liten då papperstidningen flyttat in i mobilen. Dagens barn och ungdomar riskerar därför att växa upp helt utan eller med en mycket svag anknytning till lokala medier och dess varumärke. Det här projektet fokuserar på barnen. Arbetet innehåller en process som lett fram till ett koncept, som syftar på att skapa en stark och tidig relation till lokala medier. Projektet resulterade i en applikation för barn, där de har möjligheten att gå in i rollen som journalist för att skapa, välja ut och färdigställa sina egna nyheter tillsammans med vänner. Aktivitetens startpunkt kommer ske inom skolan, där eleven lär sig om källkritik, pressetik, redaktörskap, journalistens ansvar och vad som skiljer journalistik från övrig kommunikation. Lärandemoment löper parallellt med lekfullhet som ska öka elevens motivation och engagemang. Konceptet syftar på att vara ett samarbete mellan lokala medier och elever.

The aim of the study was to perform a systematic literature review to locate the field of researches about fake news in social media. In addition, the purpose was also to investigate what type of social media were used in each of the studies. The amount of articles that were used in the systematic literature review is 13. The use of the method contributes to a deeper understanding of how far we have come to combat fake news in social media. In this study we use the definition of fake news to be articles that purposely mislead a reader by using fabricated news. The problem with fake news is that the term is relatively new and it’s happening considerably on the digital front. Based on the result from the method we noticed several types of tools to combat fake news in different social media platforms.

The Russian Federation has recently implemented a foreign policy strategy aimed at subverting the West’s ability to deter Russia from destabilizing its neighbors. This strategy combines elements of conventional military strategy with “weaponized information” in order to achieve success in the political and military arenas of conflict. “Weaponized Information” goes beyond the “network-centric” warfare envisioned by cyber security experts, focused instead upon the development of “fake news,” disinformation, and encouraging conflicting media narratives. This thesis explores this strategy through Thomas Schelling’s framework of deterrence elucidated in Arms and Influence and uses recent events in Ukraine, Syria, the United States, and Europe to describe the development and implementation of “weaponized information” in 21st Century international conflicts. / Master of Arts

Trovärdighet – en allt viktigare del att upprätthålla för journalister då falska nyheter blir vanligare. På senare tid har begreppet fake news används frekvent, speciellt i nyheter angående amerikanska presidentvalet 2017. Det blir således intressant att undersöka hur journalister arbetar för trovärdighet och hur läsare upplever den. Detta är en kvalitativ studie som undersöker hur journalister arbetar med trovärdighet i flerkanalspublicering på två lokala nyhetsredaktioner. Uppsatsen tar även upp hur journalister arbetar med sina kollegor för att öka trovärdigheten vid flerkanalspublicering. Journalisterna som har intervjuats för uppsatsen har flera års erfarenhet av nyhetspublicering i lokala sammanhang. Uppsatsen undersöker även läsare av de lokala nyhetsredaktionerna som interagerar med journalisterna på sociala medier. Slutsatsen är att journalisterna tar trovärdighet på allvar. Majoriteten av journalisterna anser att nyheter ska innehålla underbyggda fakta, äkthet och ett korrekt språk. Journalisterna arbetar på ett tydligt sätt tillsammans för att skapa en hög trovärdighet men har även olika tillvägagångssätt i hur de arbetar med läsarna på sociala plattformar. Detta kan bekräftas av läsarnas erfarenhet av interaktion med journalisterna, dock är läsarna av åsikten att trovärdighet skapas via närvaro i sociala medier där journalisten är beredd att bemöta sina läsare men även rimliga rubriksättningar är avgörande för trovärdigheten. / Credibility - an increasingly important part to maintain for journalists as fake news becomes more common. Recently, the term fake news has been used frequently, especially in news about the US presidential election in 2017. Thus, it becomes interesting to investigate how journalists work for credibility and how readers perceive it. This is a qualitative study that investigates how journalists work with credibility in multi-channel publishing on two local news releases. The essay also addresses how journalists work with their colleagues to increase the credibility of multi-channel publishing. The journalists interviewed for the paper have several years of experience in publishing news in local contexts. The essay also examines readers of local news editors that interact with journalists on social media. The conclusion is that the journalists take credibility seriously. The majority of journalists believe that news should contain substantiated facts, authenticity and a correct language. The journalists work in a clear way together to create high credibility, but also have different approaches to how they work with readers on social platforms. This can be confirmed by readers' experience of interaction with journalists, but readers believe that credibility is created through presence in social media where journalists are prepared to respond to their readers, but even reasonable rankings are crucial to credibility.

Fake news detection gained an interest in recent years. This made researchers try to findmodels that can classify text in the direction of fake news detection. While new modelsare developed, researchers mostly focus on the accuracy of a model. There is little researchdone in the subject of explainability of Neural Network (NN) models constructed for textclassification and fake news detection. When trying to add a level of explainability to aNeural Network model, allot of different aspects have to be taken under consideration.Text length, pre-processing, and complexity play an important role in achieving successfully classification. Model’s architecture has to be taken under consideration as well. Allthese aspects are analyzed in this thesis. In this work, an analysis of attention weightsis performed to give an insight into NN reasoning about texts. Visualizations are usedto show how 2 models, Bidirectional Long-Short term memory Convolution Neural Network (BIDir-LSTM-CNN), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT), distribute their attentions while training and classifying texts. In addition, statistical data is gathered to deepen the analysis. After the analysis, it is concluded thatexplainability can positively influence the decisions made while constructing a NN modelfor text classification and fake news detection. Although explainability is useful, it is nota definitive answer to the problem. Architects should test, and experiment with differentsolutions, to be successful in effective model construction.