This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in
Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News
Summary:
In this paper, Benjamin D. Horne and Sibel Adalı set out to answer the question “Is there any systematic stylistic and other content differences between fake and real news?”. To answer the question the authors, use three separate data sets. The first is a dataset that has been featured by Buzzfeed through their analysis of real ad fake news items from the 2016 US election. Next is a data set that the authors collected themselves that focused on US politics in the form of real, fake, and satire new sources. The last data set is one that the authors got from a passed study containing real and satire articles. The authors showed that “real news articles are significantly longer than fake news articles”, That fake news use fewer technical words, and that fake news titles are longer than real news ones.
Reflection:
- “The content of fake and real news articles is substantially different.”
- In this paper, the authors claim that real news articles are longer, use more technical words, more nouns, more analytics and more quotes. All of this is not surprising to me because when you are coming with a lie it’s easier to be less precise than when you are telling the truth. Hence real news should find it easier to find quotes and facts that back up their argument.
- “Titles are a strong differentiating factor between fake and real news.”
- I find this completely unsurprising because as the fake news will use a more clickbait titles than real news sites. Also, I find that the finding that fake news use more proper nouns not surprising because I feel like fake news titles will include any name to try and hook people.
- “Fake content is more closely related to satire than to real”
- This is also really not surprising because satire is meant to entertain and make fun of things. So it’s really not hard to see that satire site would “fewer technical, and fewer analytic words, as well as, fewer quotes, fewer punctuation, more adverbs, and fewer nouns than real articles”. I did think it was interesting that they were still able to predict that the article was satire and not fake news 67% of the time.
Additional Questions:
- I think it would be instructing to see if it’s easier to tell whether an article is fake or real depending on which political party the article is targeting.
