Disinformation, sharing false information to deceive and mislead others, can take many forms. From edited “deepfake” videos made on smartphones to vast foreign-led information operations, politics and elections show how varied disinformation can be. Hailed as “the year of elections”, with the majority of the world’s population going to the polls, 2024 will also be …
Context Yesterday (26/02), various news reports about a Willy Wonka-inspired experience in Glasgow started to circulate on social media. The articles, from outlets such as BBC News, Glasgow Live, and STV News, refer to ‘furious’ families who attended the underwhelming event. This included reports of the police being called as visitors deemed the event a …
Continue reading Generative AI and ‘Willy’s Chocolate Experience’
On Friday 5th January, media researcher and sociologist Joan Donovan wrote a piece for The Conversation about ‘networked incitement’. The concept, taken from a working paper by Donovan, Kaylee Fagan, and Frances Lee, is described as: a socio-technical infrastructure where insurgents use multi-platform communication to command and control mobilized social movements in the moment of …
Continue reading ‘Networked Incitement’, social media, and online premeditation.
Terms like misinformation, disinformation and ‘fake news’ are all words we are familiar with. They are also all modifications of existing words: Information → misinformation Information → disinformation News → fake news On this blog I talk a lot about terminology, and the importance of understanding these terms when we use them in research, whether …
Disinformation is a complex topic. Truth and lies are never clear-cut categories and there are fuzzy boundaries that separate them. Lots of work has focused on how disinformation exists, and how it spreads, is amplified and is received and consumed online and offline. This is all important work and contributes to our understanding of what …
What has happened? Yesterday afternoon (13/02), Social Science One announced what they called an “unprecedented” dataset of URLs shared to Facebook. The data, comprising about 38,000,000 URLs, spans from 2017/07/31–2019/07/31 and is the largest dataset Facebook have ever made available to researchers. Who are Social Science One? Social Science One is an organisation run by …
Continue reading Facebook, Social Science One and thirty-eight million URLs
LAST UPDATED: 01/11/2019 A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. What is this page for? One of the questions I get asked the most in my research is "where do I begin?". This is a question I get from academics, students, reporters and even politicians from all over the world. Normally I send …
Intentionally false news stories were shared more than 35m times during the 2016 US presidential election, with Facebook playing a significant role in their spread. Shortly after, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that 50m Facebook profiles had been harvested without authorisation and used to target political ads and fake news for the election and later …
Continue reading Facebook’s plan to protect the European elections comes up short
What is ‘fake news’? The working definition of fake news I use is the following: intentionally factually incorrect news that is published to deceive and misinform its reader This definition can be broken down into three smaller components: (1) intention; (2) veracity; (3) deception. All of these affect whether something can be classified as fake …
Misinformation and disinformation are two terms that are often used interchangeably in research, but what do they mean and what is the difference between the two? This is a quick blog post to clarify the notions of misinformation, disinformation and "fake news". The primary difference between mis- and dis- is intent to deceive. The prefix …
Continue reading What are the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation”?
FakeBelieve - The Disinformation Research Blog 