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
As noted in the title, this paper claims that fake news is more similar to explicit satire than to real news. Although the study utilized many data features that seemed to be useful and topical, no raw data was ever shown and the authors provided little reflection on the results.
Reflection
First, I would like to discuss the insufficiency of reflection shown for each finding. The features seemed very in-depth, but were later somewhat disregarded in the overall picture of analysis. While at a glance it seems like there’s plenty of content and discussion after each major finding is presented, very little of the discussion provokes thought or brings up new ideas.
For example, at one point the author writes,
The significant features support this finding: fake news places a high amount of substance and claims into their titles and places much less logic, technicality, and sound arguments in the body text of the article.
This is hardly a “finding”; I’m sure this statement is an early realization for anyone who has seen a few fake news articles. Furthermore, despite the fact that there is a lack in reflection, this paper does a better job than the one we read last week.
Secondly, I would like to note the lack of expansive data sets. I am unsure why the authors used a data set by Buzzfeed — a source that is not exactly professional — as a major basis for their academic findings. I believe that if they truly needed more scholarly information to analyze, they should have expanded their own set of articles (which only had 75 pieces from each type of news source).
Lastly, I would like to say that though most of the findings are not surprising, it is good to see that our notions of fake news are actually supported by concrete, statistical evidence.
Further Questions
- What would the distribution across source types look like if we had a feature that denoted the frequency of misspellings throughout the article? I predict that it would be “Fake > Satire = Real.”
- How would the distribution of these same features look:
- across articles that are not political in nature?
- across the Real News sources that were mentioned?
- between more polarized news sources such as CNN vs. Fox News?
