Search results for "misinformation"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
The Validity of Social Media-Based Career Information
2018
The use of social media expands the availability and sources of career information. However, the authorship of this information has changed from traditional print media and multimedia sources created by experts to social media–based career information created by the users themselves. Although variability in career information validity has been an issue for some time, rapid growth in the use of social media creates some unique challenges. The ease with which social media–based career information can spread creates the potential for rapid widespread dissemination of disinformation and biased perceptions. Potential sources of invalidity include intentional bias (with or without profit motive),…
Ubiquitous Co-Driver System and Its Effects on the Situation Awareness of the Driver
2008
The aim of this paper is to explore the effects of ubiquitous computing in cars on the situation awareness and expectations of the driver. In a driving simulation environment with participants using a co-driver system, we investigated how people took and recovered from misinformation provided by the system. The system presented safety-critical information about the upcoming curves on the road, but in the experiment part of the messages contained false information. The effects of this information on participants’ behavior were investigated. On the grounds of the experiment, we discuss two approaches for investigating drivers’ situational awareness, which are based on either mental workload o…
Learning Versus Knowing
2006
Many studies have shown that voters do learn about political issues from televised debates. Because debaters may not be interested in educating voters but in gaining votes, this does not necessarily mean that debate viewers improve their knowledge (i.e., learning something that is correct). Instead, they may become misinformed by watching a debate. Taking the second debate in the 2002 German general election as an example, we first compare people’s knowledge about economic facts before and after the debate with the actual situation as represented by official statistics. In a second step, we trace back the change or stability of their assessments of the state of the economy to candidates’ s…
Fake News Spreaders Detection: Sometimes Attention Is Not All You Need
2022
Guided by a corpus linguistics approach, in this article we present a comparative evaluation of State-of-the-Art (SotA) models, with a special focus on Transformers, to address the task of Fake News Spreaders (i.e., users that share Fake News) detection. First, we explore the reference multilingual dataset for the considered task, exploiting corpus linguistics techniques, such as chi-square test, keywords and Word Sketch. Second, we perform experiments on several models for Natural Language Processing. Third, we perform a comparative evaluation using the most recent Transformer-based models (RoBERTa, DistilBERT, BERT, XLNet, ELECTRA, Longformer) and other deep and non-deep SotA models (CNN,…
Exploratory study of the hoaxes spread via WhatsApp in Spain to prevent and/or cure COVID-19
2021
Objective: To review the hoaxes’ characteristics spread through WhatsApp in Spain during COVID-19 lockdown and identify what kind of substances were promoted for consumption or application. Method: A phone number was activated to receive hoaxes via WhatsApp. A total of 2353 messages were collected, and among those 584 different hoaxes were identified and validated, between March 18 and April 18, 2020. From these 584 hoaxes, a sub-sample of 126 was selected, exclusively related to the object of study, and a content analysis table with fourteen registration fields was applied. Besides, the averages and medians of the quantitative fields were extracted. Results: Most of the messages received w…
La desinformación en las redes de mensajería instantánea. Estudio de las fake news en los canales relacionados con la ultraderecha española en Telegr…
2021
espanolOne of the most uncontrolled and wides-pread sources of misinformation are the instant messaging platforms, mainly due to the privacy of the communication spaces created in them. The dissemination of false news on these networks makes it difficult to detect them and thus complicates the task of fact-checking. Both WhatsApp and Tele-gram were used and integrated in the elec-toral campaign of the previous elections in the United States (Journell, 2017; Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), in the United Kingdom on the occasion of the Brexit (Kucharski 2016), in Brazil (Novomisky, 2018), and recently in the autonomous elections of Andalusia (Spain) (Viejo, 2018). This research takes as a case stud…
Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Sentiment Analysis from June 2011 to April 2019
2021
Vaccine hesitancy was one of the ten major threats to global health in 2019, according to the World Health Organisation. Nowadays, social media has an important role in the spread of information, misinformation, and disinformation about vaccines. Monitoring vaccine-related conversations on social media could help us to identify the factors that contribute to vaccine confidence in each historical period and geographical area. We used a hybrid approach to perform an opinion-mining analysis on 1,499,227 vaccine-related tweets published on Twitter from 1st June 2011 to 30th April 2019. Our algorithm classified 69.36% of the tweets as neutral, 21.78% as positive, and 8.86% as negative. The perce…
Students’ evaluation of information during online inquiry: Working individually or in pairs
2019
Varying information quality and an increase of misinformation on the Internet accentuates the importance of supporting students’ competencies to critically evaluate information. This study compared how individuals and pairs of secondary students worked to evaluate the quality of online information across two inquiry topics. Two similar studies were conducted with 140 Finnish (Study I) and 52 US (Study II) students. Students were asked to conduct an online inquiry and then write an essay about one of two topics: allowing the genetic modification of organisms (GMO) or the effects of social media on people’s quality of life (SM). Students worked either individually or in pairs. Their work was …
Media Effects on Positive and Negative Learning
2017
While educational science in the past mainly focused on students’ formal or intentional learning from courses, textbooks, or online tutorials in university contexts, communication science usually deals with ordinary citizens’ informal or unintentional learning from the mass media in everyday life. One of the general aims of the PLATO project is to bring these research traditions together. Therefore, this paper sums up research on media effects on positive and negative learning recently conducted; our studies show that media coverage is often biased and news media, therefore, contribute to negative as well as positive learning. Which kind of learning occurs, heavily depends on the way inform…
Media polarisation over independence for Catalonia. A comparative study of coverage in RT
2019
espanolEl proces catalan ha experimentado una intensa polarizacion mediatica, tanto en medios tradicionales como en redes sociales, donde la corporacion rusa RT ha sido acusada de apoyar al independentismo. Desde una perspectiva cuantitativa, realizamos un analisis comparado de la cobertura en Facebook del proces catalan en las corporaciones RT, BBC y DW. A pesar de la proximidad de RT con el independentismo, los resultados no revelan diferencias significativas entre los medios. Asimismo, las reacciones de los usuarios a las publicaciones en Facebook sugieren su simpatia por el independentismo. EnglishThe process of the independence of Catalonia has experienced significant media polarisatio…