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Since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 US presidential election, media organizations, pundits, academics, and technology leaders are panicking not only over what they see as the sudden emergence of fake news but also over the difficulties of finding effective and sustainable solutions. But how new or even real is this idea of inaccurate or intentionally misleading news? This chapter shows that fake news is by no means a new phenomenon but has, in fact, been an integral part of the media ecosystem throughout the history of media effects research. The second section of the chapter provides a discussion of factors that do in fact create new problems for our democratic system and pose new challenges for media systems transitioning to on-demand and online-only modes of delivery. The chapter closes with an outlook on promising research areas that offer solutions for some of the challenges facing our democratic system.

Chapter 6 focuses on the role of a changing media landscape in disseminating misinformation to a disproportionately underinformed audience to support Donald Trump. It shows how the Trump campaign and its allies, including the contract firm Cambridge Analytica as well as Russian operatives, exploited the changing media landscape to spread misinformation to sow racial division and stoke white outgroup hostility. The chapter examines the nexus between Fox News, fake news, and Trump to provide evidence of the specific connection that demonstrates the key role of the mass media, social media included, in disseminating misinformation about outgroups and sustaining high levels of outgroup hostility among whites.

Semantic news tags processed via cloud servers are in amongst big data and machine learning systems. The latter may have influenced Murdoch’s acquisition of a ‘social media news agency’, and other partnerships, as a mix of new roles across journalism, analytics, and search emerged. Some editing roles in journalism focus on SEO, but Murdoch’s Storyful, which started as a verification business created jobs for cloud operations engineers, viral video editors, and trends editors. Data-mining techniques were a lure for news and social media partnerships circa 2013–2016. In the name of verification, access to big data was matched by social media gaining credibility, evident in Facebook Newswire and other journalism projects. Deep learning methods in search, referrals, and automated tagging have also produced mutual benefits, mostly via third party agreements. However, data sharing for political ends by targeting particular users, and verification projects, have not stopped fake news.

Fake news has been cyclically surfacing in the history of journalism and public opinion. In the vein of some classic authors, the chapter identifies ideas that are surprisingly useful in the present media environment. It interweaves three historical threads relevant to today’s fake news: (1) the growth of canards in 19th-century Paris, observed by both Honoré de Balzac and Gérard de Nerval as the habitual invention of news when facts were not sufficiently attractive for readers; (2) the diffusion of fausses nouvelles during the Great War, described by Marc Bloch and propelled by the tendency, in times of crisis, to search for oracles more than information proper; (3) the propensity, suggested by Richard Hofstadter, to spread conspiracy theories, notably in the development of McCarthyism.

This chapter examines the issue of electoral integrity at the 2017 general election and in British politics more generally. While elections are generally administered to high standards and are free of some of the problems found in other democracies, a number of recent party-funding scandals and localised incidents of misconduct have greatly increased the issue’s salience. Moreover, the 2017 election was also contested under the shadow of the alleged rise of ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ politics. Looking to the future, changing behaviour around social media raise important questions about the long-term integrity of British elections.

This chapter explores policy options for novel harms like privacy, fake news, or hate speech in digital markets. The discussion shows that the novel harms allegedly inherent in big tech firms are not strictly related to monopoly power. Regulation is thus the way forward, not competition. And consumer protection regulation is a better approach than competition spirited “utilities regulation” or revenue-sharing driven “retail regulation.”

This chapter argues that we are at a difficult juncture in protecting online speech and privacy when states resist applying principles they have endorsed internationally to their domestic legislation and practice. Although governments have welcomed the internet’s globalizing effect on economic development, they now fear its ability to amplify messages such as terrorism, revolution, pornography, or propaganda. But sacrificing basic freedoms to control the internet’s powers is neither effective nor wise. How well we protect privacy and speech in the digital age will determine whether the internet liberates or enchains us.

This chapter provides the first overview of political bots, fake accounts, and other false amplifiers in Poland. Based on extensive interviews with political campaign managers, journalists, activists, employees of social media marketing firms, and civil society groups, the chapter outlines the emergence of Polish digital politics, covering the energetic and hyper-partisan “troll wars,” the interaction of hate speech with modern platform algorithms, and the recent effects of “fake news” and various sources of apparent Russian disinformation. The chapter then explores the production and management of artificial identities on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks—an industry confirmed to be active in Poland—and assesses how they can be deployed for both political and commercial purposes. Overall, the chapter provides evidence for a rich array of digital tools that are increasingly being used by various actors to exert influence over Polish politics and public life.

Chapter 7 tackles the challenges posed by misinformation campaigns and fake news, an issue of growing concern in America and around the world. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, academics and pundits alike struggled to make sense of what happened, and many pointed to the role of fake news and misinformation more broadly in leading voters astray in their assessments of the two major candidates for president. This chapter draws on survey data to investigate how media use in general, and use of social media and partisan media more specifically, affected belief in six fake news stories directly following the 2016 election. The analysis assesses whether use of different types of media affected belief in misinformation—including messages congruent and incongruent with their own candidate preferences—providing insight into what was to blame for belief in fake news in the 2016 elections.

Electoral integrity faces many challenges in America. To understand these issues, the first part of this chapter starts by identifying the major concerns arising during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, including issues about fraud, fakery, and meddling. To place these issues in a broader perspective and establish whether systematic evidence justifies these sorts of anxieties, the second part clarifies the core concept of electoral integrity as the key yardstick used to evaluate elections around the world and outlines the sequential steps in the electoral cycle, as well as how this concept can best be measured. The third part demonstrates that many countries face multiple challenges in meeting international standards of electoral integrity. Compared with similar affluent democracies, American contests perform particularly poorly. The analysis also uses expert and public evaluations to diagnose the electoral performance of all 50 U.S. states. To understand the reasons for these ratings in more depth, the fourth part outlines the chapters contained in the rest of the book. Contributors analyze evidence for a series of contemporary challenges facing American elections: the weaknesses of electoral laws, photo ID requirements for electoral registers, gerrymandering district boundaries, fake news, the lack of transparency, and the hodgepodge of inconsistent state regulations. The conclusion sets these challenges in comparative context and draws out the broader policy lessons for improving electoral integrity and thereby strengthening American democracy.

The nature of news reporting and data gathering has changed with the advent of social media, equipping journalists with new methods of uncovering news stories and providing the necessary background and context for their readers. Even though a presence online is indispensable for journalists, there are risks from these practices. Affordances of media technologies can influence a journalist´s decision to cover an event, select sources, or engage in conversations, but they also result in cues and residues that can reduce a journalist’s credibility. In this chapter, we use the four classes of technological affordances outlined by the MAIN model (Sundar 2008)—modality, agency, interactivity, and navigability—to examine the various actions and cues in social media that both aid and ensnare journalists. We discuss how interface cues trigger cognitive heuristics (or mental shortcuts) that lure journalists, sometimes to their detriment. We provide recent examples of journalistic misadventure and potential solutions.

The volume’s introduction locates the current digital dimension of “fake news” phenomenon in the nascent days of the Internet and broadly discusses the issues with information online and the often frustrating pursuit of truth in that context. Given the vast topic of truth in journalism, the chapter outlines the selective inquiries the book makes to bridge discussions of digital disruption in journalism. Precipitated by social media technologies, it probes deeper questions about truth and objectivity in journalism. It discusses several key approaches to truth in journalism that may be taken, and then reviews different perspectives on “news”—practitioner’s, democratic, sociological, psychological, economic, and political views. The introduction next previews the volume’s contents, organized under the main themes of “democracy, news, and society,” “pillars of truth in journalism,” the “craft of journalism,” and “reception and perception” of news, and closes with a description of how the volume treats its tripartite prongs of politics, truth, and technology.

The Internet and social media were originally viewed as democratizing technologies that would lead to a more vibrant digital public sphere. Following the outcomes of the 2016 US Presidential Election and the UK Brexit referendum, however, social media platforms have faced increasing criticism for allowing fake news, disinformation campaigns, and hate speech to spread. But how much bad information was spread? What can be done to address the problem? This chapter examines how social media algorithms and computational propaganda are reshaping public life. The authors explore how modern citizens are especially susceptible to computational propaganda, due not only to the prevalence of disinformation, but also to a political psychology that is often called “elective affinity” or “selective exposure.” The authors use their findings to discuss the responsibilities of both users and platforms for protecting the digital public sphere.

The UK is a fortunate country with high levels of education, well-developed public and civil society institutions, and some highly trusted media. Nevertheless, there is evidence that the public is substantially misinformed on key issues of public debate, and leading figures have pointed to consistent issues involving the inaccurate use of facts in public debate. Full Fact is the UK’s independent, nonpartisan, factchecking charity. We aim to stop the spread of specific bits of inaccurate information and to secure systemic changes that help make misinformation rarer and less harmful. In this piece we discuss the state of misinformation and disinformation in the UK, the role that we think factchecking has in tackling it, and the research we are eager to learn from to inform our work.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Rollerball, the 1975 dystopian science fiction film of Canadian-born director and producer Norman Jewison. Rollerball was based on a short story in Esquire magazine, ‘Roller Ball Murder’, by William Harrison. While the increasingly extreme nature of reality television remains a central framework within which to critically analyse Rollerball, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States in November of 2016 opens up new ways of watching the film and heightens other ways in which it remains relevant. The most obvious of these is Rollerball's depiction of unchecked corporate power. Another aspect of Rollerball's narrative highlighted by the Trump presidency is the rise of so-called ‘fake news’. This book examines how the film simultaneously exhibits the cinematic aesthetics of mainstream, exploitation, and art-house cinema, in the process transcending its commercial prerogative of action entertainment to be a sophisticated and disturbing portrayal of a dystopian future.

Taiwan is a country with a rich history and cultural ties to mainland China. Though there has been much research and effort dedicated to propaganda and censorship in the People’s Republic of China over the years, less attention has been paid to the digital propaganda sphere in Taiwan. This report explores computational propaganda in Taiwan and finds that digital propaganda in Taiwan can be divided into two types: (1) internal propaganda on domestic political issues and campaigns, and (2) cross-Strait propaganda—emanating from the mainland and promoting reunification of the two countries. Furthermore, recent computational and social research points to manual propaganda being the main method used in campaigns in both countries. The use of two political bots in Taiwan, an anti-fake news bot and an intelligence-gathering crawler bot used in a 2014 electoral campaign, is explored in detail.

This chapter foregrounds the essential role of critical analysis in an era when facts, feelings, opinions, news, and propaganda have become increasingly hard to disambiguate. Carla Della Gatta explains that Shakespeareans are in an excellent position to help students navigate this terrain, thanks to our field’s “lengthy, cross-cultural, and international history of determining, disputing, and reinterpreting facts,” a habit that can be put to especial use in identifying various modes of misinformation and bias. This chapter relates exercises in introductory scholarly editing and comparative theatrical/film analyses that enable students to be makers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Putting primary sources directly in students’ hands empowers them to apply rigorous analysis, solve interpretive problems, and hone their confidence in questioning established authority and venerated “facts.” The payoffs span from the understanding of Renaissance literature to informed encounters with “fake news,” biased sources, or unresearched content.