Summary:
In this paper, researchers explored the stylistic and linguistic differences between real news, fake news, and satirical news. They used three different data sets with the first one being a BuzzFeed election data set, the second being the authors’ political news data set, and the last being the Burfoot and Baldwin data set of satire and real news stories. They concluded that there are significant differences between fake news stories and real news stories and that fake news stories resembled satirical news stories.
Reflection:
In June of 2017, Facebook announced an update that would help limit the spread of fake news on their site. They found that some users were sharing a lot of links to “low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation” [1]. Along with other solutions, such as banning fake news sites from their ad-selling services, Facebook also ‘deprioritized’ these links so that it would show up less frequently on users’ timelines [1]. In their research, Horne and Adah discovered that fake news articles tend to be shorter and less complex than real news articles, amongst other findings. Upon reflecting on this research, some questions that are prompted are:
- How could the analytic techniques in this article be used by social media companies in limiting the spread of fake news?
- How can we better provide resources to the public to distinguish between real and fake news?
In the methodology section of the paper, Horne and Adah explained the limitations of their data sets and what they did with their own data set to counter these limitations. Their primary target was real news, fake news, and satirical news related to the United States election and other political news. As far as future work goes,
- How does the style, language, and content of fake news differ in different regions, particularly, regions where English is not the dominant language?
- What other ‘genres’ show stylistic and linguistic similarities with fake news?
An interesting finding in this study is the significant differences in the titles of fake news articles versus that of real news articles. They found that fake news articles typically have longer titles and what seems to be attention-grabbing techniques such as more capitalization, more proper nouns and less stop words [2].
- How do the titles of fake news articles and real news articles differ for the same story?
- How does political bias play a role in fake news?
According to the study, fake news requires a lower education level to read, have less substantial information, and persuades through heuristics rather than arguments [2]. They also acknowledge that the purpose of fake news is to spread misinformation. It seems as if fake news specifically targets people with lower levels of education and who are less-inclined to check the credibility of these stories.
