Article: Fake News

Question 1

disinformation

Answer 1

information that is false or inaccurate, and that was created with a deliberate intention to mislead people

Question 2

Hyperpartisan news

Answer 2

• news content that is not entirely fabricated, but which covers events that actually occurred with a strong partisan bias
• hyperpartisan news is typically
  misleading, and we therefore include it as a form of misinformation

Question 3

yellow journalism

Answer 3

content from newspapers, magazines, or websites that is poorly researched and sensationalist, and that is created with the goal of increasing sales or, on the internet, clicks

Question 4

two different ways to conceptualize belief in true and false news

Answer 4

1. Truth discernment
2. Overall belief

Question 5

Discernment

Answer 5

• typically calculated as belief in true news minus belief in false news
• captures the ‘overall’ accuracy of one’s beliefs
• gives insight into failures to distinguish between true and false content

Question 6

Overall belief

Answer 6

extent to which news – regardless of its accuracy – is believed (calculated as the average or sum of belief in true news and belief in false news)

Question 7

Current approaches for fighting misinformation

Answer 7

• use of algorithms to detect problematic content and making it less likely for users to see it
• attaching warnings to content that
  professional fact-checkers have found to be false
• emphasizing the publishers of news
  articles, could be effective because people are actually fairly good at distinguishing between low- and high-quality publishers (hasn’t been experimentally shown to be very effective)

Question 8

Why is it difficult to create an effective misinformation classifier?

Answer 8

1. truth is not a black-and-white, may disagree on how to classify content
2. problem of nonstationarity: misinformation content tends to evolve rapidly, and therefore the features which are effective at identifying misinformation today may not be effective tomorrow

Question 9

New approaches for fighting misinformation

Answer 9

• proactive ‘inoculation’ or ‘prebunking’ against misinformation, ex. ‘Bad News Game’ uses a
  10–20 minute interactive tutorial to teach people how to identify fake news
  -simple accuracy prompt - having participants rate the accuracy of a single politically neutral headline before making judgments about social media sharing

Question 10

Figure 1.A Truth Discernment

Answer 10

• graph compares truth discernment—the ability to believe in true statements and reject false ones—under two distinct factors: cognitive relflection and partianship
• y-axis indicates the difference in z-scored discernment, meaning how well individuals discern truth relative to their baseline ability, further the points are from the horizontal line at 0, the greater the discernment effect
• High cognitive reflection consistently improves truth discernment across all conditions, as indicated by the positive values
• Concordant partisanship shows very little or no improvement in truth discernment, with values clustering around 0
  Key takeaway: High cognitive reflection significantly improves truth discernment, whereas partisanship alignment does not meaningfully contribute to discerning truth from falsehood

Question 11

Figure 1.B Overall Belief

Answer 11

• Higher cognitive reflection results in lower overall belief, indicated by negative z-scores.
• suggests that individuals with higher cognitive reflection tend to reject information overall (both true and false), reducing overall belief
• Concordant partisanship (when the information aligns with one’s political beliefs) increases overall belief significantly, as shown by the positive z-scores
  Key takeaway:
• Cognitive reflection is associated with a critical stance, leading to reduced belief overall
• Partisanship alignment increases belief in information, regardless of its truthfulness

Question 12

Figure 2.A. : Accuracy and Sharing

Answer 12

participants were much more likely to
rate true headlines versus false headlines as being accurate in the accuracy condition, headline veracity had little impact on sharing intentions in the sharing condition

Question 13

what is the role of reflective reasoning in the ability to discern fake
news from truth?

Answer 13

• earlier-referenced work on political identity, argues that deliberative (‘System 2’) reasoning is often motivated by political identity
• account predicts that engaging in more deliberation should lead to more politically polarized beliefs
• more deliberation should be associated with worse truth discernment
• more ‘classical’ reasoning accounts portray System 2 reasoning as being responsible for correcting faulty intuitions, predicts that people who
  deliberate more will simply be less likely to believe false content
• evidence supports the classical reasoning account over the
  motivated System 2 reasoning account

Question 14

what are the specific features of fake
news that influence people’s intuitions or cause them to make mistakes when reasoning?

Answer 14

1. familiarity: single prior exposure to a fake news headline increases
   later belief in the headline
2. source: Participants are
   more likely to believe information provided by people whom they view as being credible
3. emotionally evocative