While the world grapples with a global pandemic, an equally dangerous disease in the form of an ‘infodemic’ has been quietly unfolding at an accelerated speed across the globe. The World Health Organisation defines an ‘infodemic’ as ‘excessive amount of information about a problem, which makes it difficult to identify a solution’. Read the rest of this entry »
Coronavirus: people want media to ramp up factchecking and question dubious claims – Stephen Cushion, Maria Kyriakidou, Marina Morani, Nikki Soo
14 05 2020
How well the media holds the UK government to account over its handling of the pandemic is a question that has been fiercely debated over recent weeks. Journalists have been attacked for asking difficult questions at press briefings, while broadcasters have been criticised for challenging government decisions. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Coronavirus, Fake News, Maria Kyriakidou, Marina Morani, Nikki Soo, Stephen Cushion, The Conversation
Categories : Journalism, Media
Fact checking in the time of COVID-19 – Pierre Andrews
26 04 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic not only represents a challenge for researchers and policymakers in the fields of medicine, international relations and economics, but also in media and communications. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Coronavirus, Fake News, LSE Media Policy Project Blog, Pierre Andrews
Categories : Journalism, Media, Social Media
Disinformation, data verification and social media – Ben Wagner and Lubos Kuklis
16 01 2020
What you don’t know can’t hurt you: this seems to be the current approach for responding to disinformation by public regulators across the world. Nobody is able to say with any degree of certainty what is actually going on. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Ben Wagner, Fake News, Lubos Kuklis
Categories : EU, Journalism, Social Media
You’re probably more susceptible to misinformation than you think – Darren Lilleker
14 01 2020
Online misinformation works, or so it would seem. One of the more interesting statistics from the 2019 UK general election was that 88% of advertisements posted on social media by the Conservative Party pushed figures that had already been deemed misleading by the UK’s leading fact-checking organisation, Full Fact. And, of course, the Conservatives won the election by a comfortable margin. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Darren Lilleker, Fake News, The Conversation
Categories : Journalism, Social Media
How to spot fake news this election – Amy Binns
12 12 2019
The 2019 UK election campaign has been particularly dispiriting for anyone who cares about the truth. Even established parties have proven they are not above using tricks to manipulate the news. Meanwhile, politicians are quick to shout “fake news” about anything they disagree with, even accurate stories. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Amy Binns, Election 2019, Fake News
Categories : Broadcasting, Journalism
The real news on ‘fake news’: politicians use it to discredit media, and journalists need to fight back – Andrea Carson and Kate Farhall
18 10 2019
During the 2019 Australian general election, a news story about the Labor Party supporting a “death tax” – which turned out to be fake – gained traction on social media. Now, Labor is urging a post-election committee to rule on whether digital platforms like Facebook are harming Australian democracy by allowing the spread of fake news. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Andrea Carson, Fake News, Kate Farhall, The Conversation
Categories : Journalism, Media
Disinfo Wars: a taxonomy of information warfare – Hossein Derakhshan
29 09 2019
In the Information Disorder report for Council of Europe (2017), Claire Wardle and I identified three types of bad-information (mis-, dis-, and malinformation), three phases (creation, (re)production, distribution), and three elements (agent, message, interpreter) to information disorder. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Fake News, Hossein Derakhshan, LSE. Media Policy Project
Categories : Journalism, Social Media
Users (and their bias) are key to fighting fake news on Facebook: AI isn’t smart enough yet – Gianluca Demartini
24 09 2019
The information we encounter online everyday can be misleading, incomplete or fabricated. Being exposed to “fake news” on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can influence our thoughts and decisions. We’ve already seen misinformation interfere with elections in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Fake News, Gianluca Demartini, The Conversation
Categories : Internet, Journalism, Social Media
Bad News: A Psychological ‘vaccine’ against fake news – Sander van der Linden and Jon Rozenbeek
7 09 2019
Journalists, politicians, academics, and governments all agree that the problem of news manipulation needs to be addressed, even if no one seems to be able to agree on what to call it. The terms ‘fake news’, ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, and ‘propaganda’ are all used interchangeably. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Bad News, Fake News, LSE. Media Policy Project, Sander van der Linden and Jon Rozenbeek
Categories : Journalism, Media
