Media Smart Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of exercises
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A Brief History of Media and Media Manipulation
- 2 The Psychology of Memory and Learning
- 3 The Internet, Technology and the Media
- 4 Selecting Sources of Information
- 5 Expertise, Authority and Credibility
- 6 Language in Media Messages
- 7 Algorithms, Bots, Trolls, Cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence
- 8 Statistics and Data Visualization
- 9 Images, Reverse Image Searching and Deepfakes
- 10 Media Manipulation and Fact Checking
- 11 The Ethics of Likes, Clicks, Shares and Data Harvesting
- 12 How We Can Help Ourselves
- Resources
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Media Manipulation and Fact Checking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of exercises
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A Brief History of Media and Media Manipulation
- 2 The Psychology of Memory and Learning
- 3 The Internet, Technology and the Media
- 4 Selecting Sources of Information
- 5 Expertise, Authority and Credibility
- 6 Language in Media Messages
- 7 Algorithms, Bots, Trolls, Cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence
- 8 Statistics and Data Visualization
- 9 Images, Reverse Image Searching and Deepfakes
- 10 Media Manipulation and Fact Checking
- 11 The Ethics of Likes, Clicks, Shares and Data Harvesting
- 12 How We Can Help Ourselves
- Resources
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Fact checking has become a priority in news consumption today. News providers have various motivations for providing information and not all of it prioritizes truthful reporting of facts. The rise in media manipulation and the resulting spread of disinformation caters to subcultures on the internet and causes a rise in the distrust of any news source.
Evaluating information and the source of the information
People get news in two ways. They can retrieve news from self-selected sources and they can receive news that is selected and supplied to them by algorithms. The workings of most algorithms are proprietary, meaning that their inner workings are only known to the companies that create them. Why and how you get the news you get on newsfeeds is not public information. In social media settings, the news that is fed to the user has not been selected by the user, nor is it clear to the user why a particular source has been selected. Sources of news that are supplied via algorithms may or may not provide reliable and accurate information. Because media manipulation is so common, it is necessary to evaluate both the news and the source of the news.
In a report published in 2017 by Data & Society, the executive summary lists the following key factors in media manipulation:
1 Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas.
2 Far-right groups develop techniques of ‘attention hacking’ to increase the visibility of their ideas through the strategic use of social media, memes, and bots – as well as by targeting journalists, bloggers, and influencers to help spread content.
3 The media's dependence on social media, analytics and metrics, sensationalism, novelty over newsworthiness, and clickbait makes them vulnerable to such media manipulation.
4 While trolls, white nationalists, men's rights activists, gamergaters, the ‘altright’, and conspiracy theorists may diverge deeply in their beliefs, they share tactics and converge on common issues.
5 The far-right exploits young men's rebellion and dislike of ‘political correctness’ to spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture.
6 Media manipulation may contribute to decreased trust of mainstream media, increased misinformation, and further radicalization.
(Data & Society, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, 2017)In this report, Data & Society also provides several case studies showing how groups or individuals use disinformation to create news coverage for stories that are non-issues.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Media SmartLessons, Tips and Strategies for Librarians, Classroom Instructors and Other Information Professionals, pp. 147 - 164Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2022