• International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.35-51
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• 2021

This study measured the effects of fake news and propaganda on managing information on COVID-19 among the Nigerian citizenry. This study examined sources of information on COVID-19 available to the people, evaluated reasons behind spreading fake news, examined how fake news has affected the spread of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, established the consequences of fake news on managing COVID-19 pandemic and as well identified ways to contain fake news at a time like this in Nigeria.It is a survey with a sample size of 375 participants selected using simple random technique. Instrument of data gathering was questionnaire widely distributed in the six geo-political zones of Nigeria using Survey monkey. Data was analysed using frequencies, counts and percentages, tables and charts. Findings revealed that people rely more on radio, television, and social media for information on COVID-19. Fake news is spread by people mostly for political reasons and intention to cause panic. In Nigeria, fake news has led to disbelief of the existence of the virus thereby leading to violation of precautionary measures among the citizenry and lack of trust in the government. Concerted effort on the part of the government is required to give public enlightenment on the danger of fake news. Also, directorate of anti-fake news should be established to censor and reprimand sources of fake news. People should always check source of information to confirm its credibility and be weary of sharing unconfirmed information especially on the social media.

• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.40-53
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• 2019

Although fake news has been present in human history at any time, nowadays, with social media, deceptive information has a stronger effect on society than before. This article answers two research questions, namely (1) Is the dissemination of fake news supported by machines through the automatic construction of filter bubbles, and (2) Are echo chambers of fake news manmade, and if yes, what are the information behavior patterns of those individuals reacting to fake news? We discuss the role of filter bubbles by analyzing social media's ranking and results' presentation algorithms. To understand the roles of individuals in the process of making and cultivating echo chambers, we empirically study the effects of fake news on the information behavior of the audience, while working with a case study, applying quantitative and qualitative content analysis of online comments and replies (on a blog and on Reddit). Indeed, we found hints on filter bubbles; however, they are fed by the users' information behavior and only amplify users' behavioral patterns. Reading fake news and eventually drafting a comment or a reply may be the result of users' selective exposure to information leading to a confirmation bias; i.e. users prefer news (including fake news) fitting their pre-existing opinions. However, it is not possible to explain all information behavior patterns following fake news with the theory of selective exposure, but with a variety of further individual cognitive structures, such as non-argumentative or off-topic behavior, denial, moral outrage, meta-comments, insults, satire, and creation of a new rumor.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.945-963
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• 2022

With the widespread use of social media, online social platforms like Twitter have become a place of rapid dissemination of information-both accurate and inaccurate. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the overabundance of fake information and rumours on online social platforms about the COVID-19 pandemic has spread over society as quickly as the virus itself. As a result, fake news poses a significant threat to effective virus response by negatively affecting people's willingness to follow the proper public health guidelines and protocols, which makes it important to identify fake information from online platforms for the public interest. In this research, we introduce an approach to detect fake news using deep learning techniques, which outperform traditional machine learning techniques with a 93.1% accuracy. We then investigate the content differences between real and fake news by applying topic modeling and linguistic analysis. Our results show that topics on Politics and Government services are most common in fake news. In addition, we found that fake news has lower analytic and authenticity scores than real news. With the findings, we discuss important academic and practical implications of the study.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.19-36
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• 2023

As advances in information and communication technology have made it easier for anyone to produce and disseminate information, a new problem has emerged: fake news, which is false information intentionally shared to mislead people. Initially spread mainly through text, fake news has gradually evolved and is now distributed in multimedia formats. Since its founding in 2005, YouTube has become the world's leading video platform and is used by most people worldwide. However, it has also become a primary source of fake news, causing social problems. Various researchers have been working on detecting fake news on YouTube. There are content-based and background information-based approaches to fake news detection. Still, content-based approaches are dominant when looking at conventional fake news research and YouTube fake news detection research. This study proposes a fake news detection method based on background information rather than content-based fake news detection. In detail, we suggest detecting fake news by utilizing related video information from YouTube. Specifically, the method detects fake news through CNN, a deep learning network, from the vectorized information obtained from related videos and the original video using Doc2vec, an embedding technique. The empirical analysis shows that the proposed method has better prediction performance than the existing content-based approach to detecting fake news on YouTube. The proposed method in this study contributes to making our society safer and more reliable by preventing the spread of fake news on YouTube, which is highly contagious.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.01-23
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• 2022

Purpose This study aims to propose a deep learning-based fake review detection model by combining authors' linguistic features and semantic information of reviews. Design/methodology/approach This study used 358,071 review data of Yelp to develop fake review detection model. We employed linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) to extract 24 linguistic features of authors. Then we used deep learning architectures such as multilayer perceptron(MLP), long short-term memory(LSTM) and transformer to learn linguistic features and semantic features for fake review detection. Findings The results of our study show that detection models using both linguistic and semantic features outperformed other models using single type of features. In addition, this study confirmed that differences in linguistic features between fake reviewer and authentic reviewer are significant. That is, we found that linguistic features complement semantic information of reviews and further enhance predictive power of fake detection model.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.197-216
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• 2022

With the development of Internet and mobile technology and the spread of social media, a large amount of information is being generated and distributed online. Some of them are useful information for the public, but others are misleading information. The misleading information, so-called 'fake news', has been causing great harm to our society in recent years. Since the global spread of COVID-19 in 2020, much of fake news has been distributed online. Unlike other fake news, fake news related to COVID-19 can threaten people's health and even their lives. Therefore, intelligent technology that automatically detects and prevents fake news related to COVID-19 is a meaningful research topic to improve social health. Fake news related to COVID-19 has spread rapidly through social media, however, there have been few studies in Korea that proposed intelligent fake news detection using the information about how the fake news spreads through social media. Under this background, we propose a novel model that uses Graph2vec, one of the graph embedding methods, to effectively detect fake news related to COVID-19. The mainstream approaches of fake news detection have focused on news content, i.e., characteristics of the text, but the proposed model in this study can exploit information transmission relationships in social engagement networks when detecting fake news related to COVID-19. Experiments using a real-world data set have shown that our proposed model outperforms traditional models from the perspectives of prediction accuracy.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.87-103
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to explore the factors influencing acceptance (e.g., comprehension,) and diffusion of information recipients' by depending on the authenticity of news. Specifically, this study has examined the effects of the news contents(political vs. general), need for cognition(high vs. low) and authenticity of the News(real news vs. fake news) on both acceptance and diffusion of news. Based on previous work, this study has developed a conceptual model to present each research hypothesis and tested it by conducting experiments as the follows. As a result, according to the authenticity of the news and the contents of the news (political and general), the acceptance of political contents was high regardless of the authenticity of the news, and the acceptance of real news was higher than that of fake news. However, in the proliferation (comment), both the political contents and the general contents showed the characteristic of spreading (commenting) fake news rather than real news. contrary to this, the cognitive level did not show any significant difference in acceptance (understanding) and proliferation (comment, sharing, recommendation). This study provides academic implications in that it examines the influences of accepting (comprehension) and diffusion (comment, sharing, recommendation) of real news and fake news. It also provides practical implications for responding to fake news and new marketing strategies in an environment where contents are delivered through diverse social media.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.1-12
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• 2019

On the Internet age, the news is generated and distributed not only by traditional news media, but also by a variety of online news media, news platforms, content websites/content farms, and social media. Since it is an easy task to create and distribute news, some of these news reports may contain fake or false facts. In the end, the cyberspace is full of fake or false messages. People may wonder if these fake news actually influence our decision making. In this paper, we discussed a real case of fake news. In this case, a Taiwanese company used some fake news, advertorial news, and news placement to manipulate or influence its stock price and trade volume. We collected all news for the case company during a period of four years and five months (from January 2013 to May 2017). We analyzed the relationship between published news and stock price. Based on the analysis results, we conclude that we should not ignore the influence of news placement and fake business news on the stock price.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2014.05a
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• pp.79-81
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• 2014

People increasingly rely on sources of information from E-commerce reviews. Product reviews is an important determinant of potential customers' buying choices. They are also utilized by product manufacturers to find problems of their products and to collect competitive intelligence information about their competitors. Unfortunately, it is well-known that many online product reviews are not made by genuine costumers of products. Reviewers could write some undeserving positive reviews to promote or fake negative reviews to defame some certain product, and we call them fake product reviews. Fake product review detection makes an attempt to detect fake reviews and removes them to restore the truthful ones for readers. To the best of our knowledge, there is still less published study on this problem. In this paper, we make a survey and an attempt to give a brief overview on fake product review detection. The related work of fake product review detection is presented including web spam and spam email. Then some methods to detect fake reviews are introduced and summarized. The trend of fake product review detection is concluded finally.

• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-16
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• 2022

This study aimed to understand young adults' attitudes concerning news and news resources they consumed, and how they encounter the fake news phenomenon. A qualitative approach was used with semi-structured interviews with 41 young adults (aged 20-30) in Tehran, Iran. Findings revealed that about half of the participants favored social media, and a smaller group used traditional media and only a few maintained that traditional and modern media should be used together. News quality was considered to be lower on social media than in traditional news sources. Furthermore, young adults usually followed the news related to the issues which had impact on their daily life, and they typically tended to share news. To detect fake news, they checked several media to compare the information; and profiteering and attracting audiences' attention were the most important reasons for the existence of fake news. This is the first qualitative study for understanding news consumption behavior of young adults in a politicized society.