At the XV Hispano-Mexican Seminar on Library and Information Science, held in Mexico City at the Institute of Bibliological Research, the topic “Truth and Falsehood in Information” has been addressed. This is a highly relevant theme given the significant impact of fake news in the media, due to the influence of false information, its implications in predatory journals, fraudulent scientific research, lack of transparency in electoral processes, among other issues.
The objective of the presented work is to clarify the influences, motivations, and hypotheses underlying fake news, as well as to analyze detection methods and their weaknesses or countermeasures. Specifically, fake news is 70% more likely to be shared and believed than legitimate or truthful news (Vosoughi, S.; Roy, D.; Aral, S., 2018). This figure demonstrates that a high percentage of consumed news is false or inaccurate. To achieve this effect, short texts, sensational headlines, linguistic devices, exaggerations, hyperboles, and any other means appealing to the reader’s emotions and primal senses are employed. Fake news triggers dopamine release, a substance secreted by the hypothalamus in response to a rewarding stimulus. This implies that fake news induces addiction—the same addiction generated by social media notifications or smartphones. From this, it can be inferred that fake news is easily assimilated and can provoke dependence, making it highly useful for the manipulative purposes of various actors.
Economic Warfare and Fake News
However, fake news has an evident application in modern economic warfare. Specifically, news and information published on social media can help predict short-term stock market movements (Chen, R.; Lazer, M. 2013). This can be exploited by high-frequency investment bots, also known as HFT (High Frequency Trading), which base part of their decision-making algorithms on this type of information. In other words, automated investment decisions can vary depending on the content received by the software program. Consequently, fake news can alter market trends and cause significant losses. This is exemplified by stock market “Flash Crashes” that coincided with the period of the global financial crisis beginning in 2008. It was observed that the contamination of information ecosystems led to substantial losses in stock exchanges and markets (Lin, T. C. 2016). When combined with the fact that fake news can also affect electoral processes—such as those held in the United States in 2016 (Allcott, H.; Gentzkow, M., 2017)—it becomes clear that fake news has a broader reach and influence than originally thought.
Fake News and Its Influence on Behavior
The influence of fake news is largely due to the increased understanding of individuals and their behavior. This has been facilitated by the massive use of social media, which collects users’ personal information—such as their location, frequent destinations, ethnicity, gender, educational level, income, consumption habits, interests and hobbies, marital status, political affiliation, ideologies, information diet, and more. With this data, users can be segmented and classified to design tailored messages and speeches that will undoubtedly influence their opinions. There is also an effect of delegation of critical judgment or reliance on the opinion of the group. In other words, a news item disseminated on social media may be evaluated by other users, leading to shared reasoning within the group without any analysis or verification of the information. This also raises the issue of the credibility or trustworthiness of information sources.
- Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211-36.
- Chen, R., & Lazer, M. (2013). Sentiment analysis of twitter feeds for the prediction of stock market movement. stanford.edu. Retrieved January, 25, 2013.
- Lin, T. C. (2016). The new market manipulation. Emory LJ, 66, 1253.
- Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151.