Social Bots are spreading the Fake News in the Internet

[tao]

Clearly, there is an urgent need for a plan to restrict the spread of fake news. And that puts an important question: how does fake news extent in the first place?

Today we get an explanation of sorts recognition to the work of Chengcheng Shao and pals at Indiana University in Bloomington. For the first time, these people have orderly studied how fake news publishes on Twitter and provide a unique page into this murky world. Their activity implies clear strategies for restraining this epidemic.

At issue is the discovery of news that is false or misleading. So popular has this suit that a number of independent fact-checking groups have emerged to confirm the credibility of online news. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.

These places list 122 websites that routinely write fake news. These fake news websites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com. “We did not eliminate satire because many fake-news experts label their content as sarcastic, making the contrast problematic,” say Shao and co.

Shao and co then watched some 400,000 claims presented by these websites and read the way they spread through Twitter. They did this by getting some 14 million Twitter posts that stated these claims.

At the same time, the team observed some 15,000 stories recorded by fact-checking organizations and over a million Twitter posts that discuss them.

Next, Shao and co studied at the Twitter accounts that spread this news, getting up to 200 of each account’s most recent tweets. In this way, the group could study the tweeting habits and work out whether these accounts were most likely run by humans or by bots.

 

< Here >

[pc71520]

http://shaochengcheng.github.io/

[luisam]

You should consider "news" on social media the modern equivalent to neighborhood gossip... more or less as trustworthy.  It's meanless to talk about "restricting" fake new in social media. It is about the same as restricting the lady on fifth floor telling her neighbour on the secong the latest about the unexpected pregnancy of the daughter of Mrs. Avery who lives in the other condo. Neighbourhood gossip might be true, haft true or completely false.

Same goes for "news" in social media, blogs and even for not well credited "news" pages. People should rermember that anyone with some funding and initiative can manage a webpage!

In TOO MANY cases bots and webpages are promoted by governments, political or religious groups with the idea to create a false opinion matrix, in many cases citing as reference another "webpage" managed by the same agent or comments and hashtags spread by their own twiitter, instagram or facebook bots! Bots are used to create false and inflated number of followers and "friends".

The point is to make understand people the "confidence level" concept!