Eradication of Fake News on Social Media: Possible Solutions and Prospects
CHAPTER ONE
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The Main Objective of the study is to appraise the eradication of fake news on social media possible solutions and prospects; The specific objectives include:
- To find out the prevalence of fake news on social media.
- To investigate the effects of the increasing fake news in the social media.
- To identify the possible solutions to the problem of fake news in social media.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
INTRODUCTION
The web provides a highly interconnected world-wide platform for everyone to spread information to millions of people in a matter of few minutes, at little to no cost [12]. While it has led to ground-breaking phenomenon such as real-time citizen journalism [34], at the same time it has led to increased visibility and impact of both true and false information [57]. False information on the web and social media has affected stock markets [17], slowed responses during disasters [32], and terrorist attacks [27, 96]. Recent surveys have alarmingly shown that people increasingly get their news from social media than from traditional news sources [75, 88], making it of paramount importance to curtail false information on such platforms. With primary motives of influencing opinions and earning money [1, 46, 56, 94], the wide impact of false information makes it one of the modern dangers to society, according to the World Economic Forum [39]. Understanding the reasons for why and how false information is created is important to proactively detect it and mitigate its impact. In this survey, we review the state of the art scientific literature on false information on the web and social media to give a comprehensive description of its mechanisms, rationale, impact, characteristics, and detection. While recent surveys have focused on fake news in social media [90, 120], the current survey broadly focuses on three types of false information on the web and social media—fake reviews in e-commerce platforms, hoaxes on collaborative platforms, and fake news in social media. For ease of explanation and understanding, we categorize false information based on its intent and knowledge content. We also broadly focus on false information that is public and targets many people at the same time, such as false reviews or fake tweets, as opposed to targeted false information as in cases of scam. According to intent, false information can be categorized as misinformation, which is created without the intent to mislead, and disinformation, which is created with the intent of misleading and deceiving the reader [25, 35]. Both have negative influences, but the latter is arguably more dangerous as its creator’s primary aim is expressly malicious. Based on knowledge, false information is categorized as opinion-based, where a unique ground truth does not exist as in cases of reviewing products on e-commerce websites, or as fact-based, which consists of lies about entities that have unique ground truth value [101]. We study both these types of false information in this survey.
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This chapter is concerned with the methodology used in achieving the objectives of the study. It covers research design, study area, population of the study, sample size, sampling techniques, instrument for data collection, sources of data collection, validity of research instrument, reliability of the instrument, administration of the instrument, method of data analysis and decision rule.
Research Design
This study employed the use of survey research design. The choice of this research design was considered appropriate because of its advantages of identifying attributes of a large population from a group of individuals. The design was suitable for the study as the study sought to examine subject matters using Uyo Social media experts as a case study.
CHAPTER FOUR
PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
This section presents the results of the field study; it shows the descriptive information of the respondents, the results of each of the research questions and the test of hypothesis.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Summary
This study focused on the eradication of fake news on social media: possible solutions and prospects. The study was set to address three objectives and one research hypothesis. The objectives which include:
- To find out the prevalence of fake news on social media.
- To investigate the effects of the increasing fake news in the social media.
- To identify the possible solutions to the problem of fake news in social media.
- Based on the above stated objectives and the study carried out, the following findings were made:
- that the prevalence of fake news on the social media is high.
Conclusion
The main purpose of this study is to assess the eradication of fake news on social media: possible solutions and prospects. Three research questions and one research hypothesis guided the study
In this study, a survey research design was adopted, the population of this study consisted of all the social media experts in Uyo, Akwa Ibom state, a simple random sampling technique was used to select 28 respondents for the study and a questionnaire was the instrument for data collection. Relevant literatures were reviewed which guided the objectives and methodology of this study. As result of the field study and analysis of results, the following findings were made:
- that the prevalence of fake news on the social media is high.
- that the effects of the increasing fake news in the social media can lead to crises; it leads to the destruction of properties and human life; it makes the citizens to loose trust in their government; it breads in corruption and it leads to ethnic profiling.
- that the possible solution to the menace of fake news on the social media are that social media should be regulated like the print media; there should be a proper orientation of the masses; the government should be more transparent in running her affairs; corruption should be reduced and tribal politics should be dealt with.
Recommendations
Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations are made:
- Efforts should be made to eradicate the menace of fake news on the social media.
- Government agencies should be more transparent in their activities.
- There should be a reduction in tribal politics in Nigeria.
REFERENCES
- Sadia Afroz, Michael Brennan, and Rachel Greenstadt. Detecting hoaxes, frauds, and deception in writing style online. In ISSP’12.
- Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow. Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Technical report, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017.
- Solomon E Asch and H Guetzkow. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. Groups, leadership, and men, pages 222–236, 1951.
- Meital Balmas. When fake news becomes real: Combined exposure to multiple news sources and political attitudes of inefficacy, alienation, and cynicism. Communication Research, 41(3):430–454, 2014.
- Michele Banko, Michael J Cafarella, Stephen Soderland, Matthew Broadhead, and Oren Etzioni. Open information extraction from the web. In IJCAI’07.
- Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara. Social bots distort the 2016 us presidential election online discussion. First Monday, 21(11), 2016.
- Prakhar Biyani, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, and John Blackmer. ” 8 amazing secrets for getting more clicks”: Detecting clickbaits in news streams using article informality. In AAAI’16.
- Jonas Nygaard Blom and Kenneth Reinecke Hansen. Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines. Journal of Pragmatics, 76:87–100, 2015.
- Paul R Brewer, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, and Michelle Morreale. The impact of real news about fake news: Intertextual processes and political satire. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 25(3):323–343, 2013.
