Fake news continues to proliferate - but how much do you know about separating fact from opinion, or truth from hoax?
Fake news: What it is, and how to spot it - The World Economic Forum
Sorting the real news from fake news on our social media networks isn't easy. Malicious actors use our psychology against us to get us to believe fake news is true. By following the theories of human cognition and behavioural sciences, we can calculate quantitative measures and apply natural language processing techniques to help us spot fake news.
A recent survey highlights the growing concerns about fake news and disinformation and the potential impact on public discourse and democratic processes.
From spreading fake news to enabling financial fraud and cybercrime, deepfake attacks are on the rise, causing substantial financial losses. The World Economic Forum's Global Coalition for Digital Safety aims to accelerate public-private cooperation to tackle harmful online content, including deepfakes, and promote digital media literacy.
Disinformation – including fake news, hacked accounts and deepfakes – has caused billions of dollars in market losses and led to poor financial decisions. Artificial intelligence technologies, especially deepfakes and bots, are making disinformation faster, more convincing and harder to detect. With trust becoming a key business asset, companies need to invest in early detection, crisis ...
Yet it has also allowed disinformation and so-called fake news campaigns to proliferate and flourish. Disinformation—which includes false and out-of-context information spread with the intent to deceive or mislead—is largely propagated by people looking to distort public opinion and advance particular agendas.
The game is called Bad News. It lets players create a dummy social media account and then shows them how easy it is to gain attention online using 6 common disinformation techniques. The creators tested the game on 516 Swedish secondary-school students. Bad News made players better at spotting manipulative techniques in social media posts and sharper at distinguishing between real and fake news.