Article:
This Just In: Fake New Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News
By: Benjamin D. Horne and Sibel Adah
Brief Summary:
The main problem addressed in this paper is if there are any systematic stylistic and other content differences between fake and real news.
Reflection:
There are a few quotes from this article that spawned some questions and thought:
- Quote 1: “… we find that real news articles are significantly longer than fake news articles and that fake news articles use fewer technical words, smaller words, fewer punctuation, fewer quotes, and …”
- Reflection 1: I found these findings from the paper fairly obvious, without the need of going through a mountain of data using statistical analysis. Fake articles are always gonna have fewer quotes, due to the fact that the news article aren’t real to begin with, and therefore lack most valid documentation. Same goes with the finding that real news articles are significantly longs that fake news articles, as real news articles should typically have more data from an actual event, more opinions from multiple parties, and more importantly, a network of other news stations reporting the same thing, therefore creating a much larger pool of data.
- Quote 2: “Precisely, we find that fake news titles are longer than real news titles.. “
- Reflection 2: I find these findings to be surprising, given that I would assume that most fake news articles would try to get viewers to click, almost like ads, by having a shorter and catchy title, to draw the user in. However, it appears that they do the opposite. They try to provide the user as much information up front, almost trying to prevent the user from looking further into the story and noticing the lack of accurate sources, eye witness account, quotes, ect…
- Quote 3: “Fake content is more closely related to satire than to real”
- Reflection 3: I found this finding to be very straight forward. Given the fact that satire is fake news, except with different intentions, I would suspect that fake news and satire articles would share largely similar structures.
- Quote 4: “We collected this data by first gathering known real, fake, and satire news sources, which can be found in Table 1.” The fake news sources were collected from Zimdars’ list of fake and misleading news websites (Zimdaras 2016) and have had at least 1 story show up as false on a fact-checking website like snooper.com in the past. The real sources come form Business Insider’s “Most-Trusted” list (Engel 2014), and are well established news media companies.
- Reflection 4: There were a few things from this quote that I noticed. First, it was interesting to see that FOX and CNN were left off of the table that showed “Real”, “Fake”, and “Satire” sources. I wonder if this is because of the latest presidential election and the fire that these two news outlets were under, and if they were removed to prevent any controversy. Second, there is no mention about how Zimdar determined if a news website was either fake or real, or how Business Insider determined there “Most-Trusted” list. I find this information skeptical, because “Trusted” websites can differ from source source and you’re putting all your eggs in one basket, research wise, if you only draw from one source.
I find that the problem with fake news today, isn’t necessary the smaller fake websites, which this paper seems to focus on, but the major and well established news media companies, which this paper seems to immediately mark as innocent because of their reputation that they have to maintain. The issue from this past presidential campaign was that the major news outlets like “FOX” and “CNN” had conflicting reports of what actually happened during the presidential election. Well established news media companies are just as capable of spreading fake news. In today’s society, there are some media companies that are politically motivated, and if they are twisting stories to conform to a political agenda and influence peoples decisions on how they should view certain topics, isn’t that fake news?
Future Work:
Some future work that can build off this article is examining the rates of fake news posts before the 2016 presidential election, when fake news was first highly publicized and if there is any trend between the US Election cycle and the rise of fake new posting rates on social media. Also, more future work that can be done is analyzing to see where the vast majority of fake news is read from. Whether it is a specific social media site, or mobile platform.
