Fake news and misinformation

Abstract

Social media and internet have highly disrupted the ways in which we consume Information. This has led to dilution of journalism standards on such platforms which brings with it the problems of fake news and information disorders. Information is the new asset of the powerful world and can be used for both good and bad acts. Fake news can affect opinions of the people and disrupt the democratic system. Therefore, it has become extremely crucial to combat the misinformation and fake news in the system. Fake news and information disorders can be broadly divided into misinformation, disinformation and mal-information. Both misinformation and disinformation convey content that is false, however, in the case of misinformation, the creator/distributor believes it to be true. Mal-information refers to a news that is true but is intended to cause harm. Various tools and techniques can be used to fight the information disorders in the system including – media and information literacy, fact checking through different agencies and verification of content on social media using various algorithms and tools like reverse image search, geolocation etc. The report provides detailed information about these methods. To better understand the nature of fake news being circulated around the world, we looked at 10 different datasets obtained from different sources such as Kaggle, Github, etc. Most of the datasets revolved around news articles while some were repositories of tweets. Some datasets were pinpointed towards specific events such as coronavirus, while others were more general in nature. We observed that for some datasets, the proportion of fraudulent news articles to the real news articles was very small, while in others, the number was quite similar. Most of these datasets were static, as in, the datasets were not being updated; however, for other datasets which are being updated, the statistics of these would vary. We also conducted a survey as a part of our primary research. The respondents primarily comprised of students and working professionals. We observed that more than two-thirds of the respondents use social media as their primary source of information. Also, around 88% of the respondents are concerned about what is real and what is fake. This implies that there is a need for proper fact-checking mechanisms. On an average, people were willing to pay INR 45 for services of organizations such as Alt News, Boom etc. Therefore, we concluded that their business may still need grants and donations to survive.