Sources and Evaluation of Fake News in Media

This article discusses the sources of fake news in media and evaluates them based on academic value. It covers the impact of fake news on the US Presidential Election, fraudulent research linking MMR vaccine and autism, and fake images of Hurricane Sandy circulated on Twitter.

Running head: MEDIA
MEDIA
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
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Part 1: SOURCES
List of websites involved in publishing fake news includes primarily Facebook,
which during the U.S Presidential Election in the year 2016, circulated false news that had
spread all over the social media. Another such source is Twitter which showed fake images
of the hurricane Sandy. Another such false news was published by Onion which claims to be
a satirical news agency. The story it ran mentioned “Entertainment scientists warn Miley
Cyrus will be depleted by 2013”. This story was also later proved to be fake. Another website
namely Yournewswire.com, before the US election circulated a news that mentioned that the
then First Lady, Michelle Obama had taken a step to unfollow Clinton on twitter. However
the news was declared as fake after a twitter survey. A website Christiantimes.com,
published a news article that declared that “tens of thousands” of ballots have been found in a
warehouse in Ohio that was already been marked for Hillary Clinton before the elections
which was fake news (Wardle, 2017). Fake news started from the publishing of a fraudulent
research paper on The Lancet that linked the vaccine for Measles, Mumps and Rubella
(MMR) with autism spectrum disorders in children.
Part 2: EVALUATION
Evaluation 1
Reference: Allcott, H. and Gentzkow, M., 2017. Social media and fake news in the 2016
election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), pp.211-36.

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The article was published in 2017. It was authored by Allcott, H. and Gentzkow, M. The
reliability of the data lied in the fact that is was published in a peer reviewed journal hence it
has academic value.
Several fake news that was circulated on Facebook on 2016, during the election
campaigns between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in United States have been considered
to have swayed the public opinion to the extent that it helped Donald Trump win the
elections. The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zukerberg testified to a joint Senate Committee that
the Facebook did not have systems in place to check the validity of news or information
shared on their platform, and thus to identify a fake news. This fake news were mainly
circulated on the social media, due to which it was accessible by a large number of people
who were misinformed and their opinions swayed, thereby causing a possible change in the
outcome of the elections (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017).
The news showed that the population of the US was largely in favour of Donald
Trump, which was not the actual scenario. It was later reported in a study that the stories that
were in favour of Trump was all fake and that 30 million times this fake story was shared
through Facebook while there was 41 fake stories that was shared about 7.6 million times that
was related to Clinton.
Evaluation 2
Reference: Godlee, F., Smith, J. and Marcovitch, H., 2011. Wakefield’s article linking
MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent.
The article was published in 2011. It was authored by Godlee, F., Smith, J. and Marcovitch,
H. The reliability of the data lied in the fact that is was published in a peer reviewed journal
hence it has academic value.

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The Fake news started from the publishing of a fraudulent research paper on The
Lancet that linked the vaccine for Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) with autism
spectrum disorders in children. This research was widely circulated by the media, after which
there was a nationwide panic, and a subsequent drop in MMR vaccinations (Godlee et al.
2011). Because of the fraudulent information being shared, the parents avoided vaccinating
their children with the MMR vaccine, and thus there was a significant increase in the
incidence of measles, mumps and rubella infections, often leading to lifelong disabilities or
even deaths of these (unvaccinated) children. The apparent link between MMR and autism
was researched by Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, US National Academy of
Sciences, American Academy of Pediatrics, Institute of medicine, UK National Health
Service and Cochrane library, and it was found to be incorrect, and that MMR vaccinations
did not cause autism. The research paper was consequently debunked and rejected and its
findings were considered to be manipulated and fake (King and Leask 2017). This showed
how fake information can directly jeopardize the health and wellbeing of the public.
Evaluation 3
Reference: Berkowitz, D. and Schwartz, D. 2015. Miley, CNN andThe Onion.
Journalism Practice, 10(1), pp.1-17.
The article was published in 2015. It was authored by Berkowitz, D. and Schwartz, D. The
reliability of the data lied in the fact that is was published in a peer reviewed journal hence it
has academic value.

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Another such false news was published by Onion which claims to be a satirical news
agency. The story it ran mentioned “Entertainment scientists warn Miley Cyrus will be
depleted by 2013”. This story was also later proved to be fake. It was seen that CNN.com
had made Cyrus’ performance the top website news story for the next day. Following this,
The Onion responded using a parody article saying, “Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’
VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning.” This was written “first person” by a
parody version of CNN.com managing editor Meredith Artley. This led the online readers
believe that the real Artley had been involved in writing the parody article. However she
denied any involvement with The Onion’s column and later issued a Twitter post saying: “To
clarify, I did not write this... But I accept all compliments and deny all accusations”
(Berkowitz and Schwartz 2015).
Evaluation 4
Reference: Gupta, A., Lamba, H., Kumaraguru, P. and Joshi, A. 2013. Faking Sandy.
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '13
Companion.
The article was published in 2013. It was authored by Gupta, A., Lamba, H., Kumaraguru, P.
and Joshi, A. The reliability of the data lied in the fact that is was published in a peer
reviewed journal hence it has academic value.
Another such source is Twitter which showed fake images of the hurricane Sandy. It
fake news had alarmed the authorities after finding 10,350 different tweets that was circulated

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throughout the social media. The sources later mentioned that there was a conduction of a
characterization analysis in order to understand the influence of patterns on the spread of the
fake images. It was seen that about eighty six percent of tweets that circulated were mostly
retweets and not original tweets. The results showed that top thirty users out of 10,215 users
(0.3%) resulted in 90% of the retweets of fake images. Additionally there was use of the
classification models which helped to distinguish the fake images of Hurricane Sandy from
real images of. Decision Tree classifier was involved for obtaining the best results by which
97% accuracy was received that helped in distinguishing the fake images from the real ones.
Certain tweet based features were also very efficient in differentiating the fake images tweets
from real although the performance of user based characteristics were of poor quality. It was
also seen that certain automated techniques could have been used in recognising the real
images that were posted on Twitter (Gupta et al., 2013).

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References
Allcott, H. and Gentzkow, M., 2017. Social media and fake news in the 2016
election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), pp.211-36.
Berkowitz, D. and Schwartz, D. 2015. Miley, CNN andThe Onion. Journalism Practice,
10(1), pp.1-17.
Godlee, F., Smith, J. and Marcovitch, H., 2011. Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine
and autism was fraudulent.
Gupta, A., Lamba, H., Kumaraguru, P. and Joshi, A. 2013. Faking Sandy. Proceedings of the
22nd International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '13 Companion.
Lazer, D.M., Baum, M.A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A.J., Greenhill, K.M., Menczer, F.,
Metzger, M.J., Nyhan, B., Pennycook, G., Rothschild, D. and Schudson, M., 2018. The
science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), pp.1094-1096.
library.nwacc.edu, 2018, Fake News vs. Real News: Statistics, retrieved on July 4th, 2018,
from: https://library.nwacc.edu/c.php?g=593440&p=5174227
Rubin, V., Conroy, N., Chen, Y. and Cornwell, S., 2016. Fake news or truth? using satirical
cues to detect potentially misleading news. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on
Computational Approaches to Deception Detection (pp. 7-17).
Schwartz, A.B., 2015. Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of
Fake News. Macmillan.
Wardle, C., 2017. Fake news. It’s complicated. First Draft News.

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