Perhaps the most interesting yet somewhat obvious conclusion of this paper happens on the sixth page where they state simply that “Titles are a strong differentiating factor between real and fake news”. This begs the question, for real or fake news who do we put the engagement decider on, as in, given that a real news article wants to communicate without giving away the best parts of the story, fake news articles seem to by and large explain exactly what they say in the article in the title. This is interesting proposition because it could be the basis for further explaining the phenomena of fake news. Particularity, the self-referential notions that people consider that is inherent to our bias is really in the fake news articles that we click, if we suppose that the title explains most of the story then could we delve deeper in the psyche of someone who frequently reads fake news? For example, if we were to run a study in which people who were identified were frequent consumers of fake news sites, the research question that I would ask is how long do they spend reading the article? If the title alone describes each story point as was presented in the paper then why do they even need to read the article in the first place, well I believe that in the first it is a form of social validation and constrained exploration in the form that, people will not venture out of their comfort zones into places where they disagree, this is what I believe can be explained through this study. Secondly, I believe it is like instant gratification, we know what is going to happen because we read the title of the article, so we feel gratified when we click on the story and confirm that notion. Finally, to answer the research question I believe that compared to a real news story, much less time would be spent on a fake news article because of the over-descriptive title however, the fake news website would likely try to drive inter-site engagement by presenting the user with further fake news articles to click on after. I am fixated on the titles of fake news more so than the content, because the titles themselves drive users to click their articles to the detriment of public discourse.
When it comes to the heuristical claim, I am very interested because I wanted to understand where they could possibly derive these statistics from in a way that would allow them to actively make claims without just simply synthesizing the numbers. This notion is complicated, but I remember my relatively basic statistics class about Simpsons Paradox, this is a particularity interesting jump where you could get data to “work for you”. If you can take statistics and decouple them and present them by stripping previous context from them then you can essentially make radicicolous claims, like this segment from a webpage (https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/07/a-great-example-of-simpsons-paradox.html)
Since 2000, the median US wage has risen about 1%, adjusted for inflation.
But over the same period, the median wage for:
- high school dropouts,
- high school graduates with no college education,
- people with some college education, and
- people with Bachelor’s or higher degrees
have all decreased. In other words, within every educational subgroup, the median wage is lower now than it was in 2000.
Considering most fake news is motivated by a specific special interest, working to shift perspectives of people by claiming fallacious statistical claims that would never be valid. I believe that through an extension of this paper we can look at the incidence of statistical claims within fake news articles in order to build a classifier that can take regular real news statistical claims, a separate one that can classify fake news claims and figure out whether there is a predominate style in either. My conjecture is that fake news will follow a format to the degree of citing singular statistics in isolation so that many of their readers may be unable to consider the context and externalities that need to be consider with that statistic in order to give it context. This would be an interesting project because it would give us some meta-knowledge within the field of data analytics to be on the lookout for publications that may commit this fallacy. As well as keeping people informed that the statistics that they are reading could be skewed to implant a specific idea into their heads.
