This book serves as a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains. The contributors to this volume describe the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. This edited volume will appeal to students, researchers, and professionals working on disinformation, misinformation and fake news in social media from a unique lens.

New perspectives on the misinformation ecosystem that is the production and circulation of fake news. What is fake news? Is it an item on Breitbart, an article in The Onion, an outright falsehood disseminated via Russian bot, or a catchphrase used by a politician to discredit a story he doesn't like? This book examines the real fake news: the constant flow of purposefully crafted, sensational, emotionally charged, misleading or totally fabricated information that mimics the form of mainstream news. Rather than viewing fake news through a single lens, the book maps the various kinds of misinformation through several different disciplinary perspectives, taking into account the overlapping contexts of politics, technology, and journalism. The contributors consider topics including fake news as “disorganized” propaganda; folkloric falsehood in the “Pizzagate” conspiracy; native advertising as counterfeit news; the limitations of regulatory reform and technological solutionism; Reddit's enabling of fake news; the psychological mechanisms by which people make sense of information; and the evolution of fake news in America. A section on media hoaxes and satire features an oral history of and an interview with prankster-activists the Yes Men, famous for parodies that reveal hidden truths. Finally, contributors consider possible solutions to the complex problem of fake news—ways to mitigate its spread, to teach students to find factually accurate information, and to go beyond fact-checking. Contributors Mark Andrejevic, Benjamin Burroughs, Nicholas Bowman, Mark Brewin, Elizabeth Cohen, Colin Doty, Dan Faltesek, Johan Farkas, Cherian George, Tarleton Gillespie, Dawn R. Gilpin, Gina Giotta, Theodore Glasser, Amanda Ann Klein, Paul Levinson, Adrienne Massanari, Sophia A. McClennen, Kembrew McLeod, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, Paul Mihailidis, Benjamin Peters, Whitney Phillips, Victor Pickard, Danielle Polage, Stephanie Ricker Schulte, Leslie-Jean Thornton, Anita Varma, Claire Wardle, Melissa Zimdars, Sheng Zou

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.

This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news. Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of “alternative facts”, this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.

This book is an accessible introduction to the study of detecting fake news on social media. The concepts, algorithms, and methods described in this book can help harness the power of social media to build effective and intelligent fake news detection systems. In the past decade, social media is becoming increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research that is attracting tremendous attention. From a data mining perspective, this book introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates advanced settings of fake news detection on social media. In particular, the authors discuss the value of news content and social context, as well as important extensions to handle early detection, weakly-supervised detection, and explainable detection. This is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners to understand, manage, and excel in this area. This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, datasets, tools used in this book, and the source code of representative algorithms.

This book is a collection of chapters penned by practitioners from around the world on the impact that disinformation and fake news has had in both the online and social sphere. While much has been said about individual disinformation campaigns in specific countries, this book offers a panoramic view of how these campaigns are conducted, who they target, and how they are spread. By bringing together research on specific countries and international data mined from questionnaires and online studies, the understanding of the term 'fake news' is greatly expanded and the issues we face are brought to light. The book includes contributions by experts such as Jean-Baptiste Vilmer (Macron Leaks), and includes case studies from Asia, such as Singapore and Myanmar, written in an accessible manner for the general interested reader, practitioners and policymakers in the field.