The goal of this project is to create a sand-box to play with building a models to classify a news as REAL or FAKE.
Fake news definition Fake news - False information that is broadcast or published as news for fraudulent or politically motivated purposes [2].
Fake news was named the word of the year in 2017 by the Collins Dictionary. In 2017, the usage of the term had increased by 365% since 2016 (Collins Dictionary, 2017) [3], fig.1.1.
Examples from Defining “Fake News” article [4]. On December 4, 2016, a man carrying an assault rifle walked into a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC. He was intent on “self-investigating” whether the restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was the headquarters of an underground child sex ring allegedly run by then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager, John Podesta (Lopez 2016). He was motivated by stories he had read on right-wing blogs and social media that had developed this line of thought. In the process of his “self-investigation,” he fired several shots into the ceiling of the restaurant. No one was injured, but it was just one of the several threats made to the pizzeria after the news report spread through social media sites, such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter (Lopez 2016). The viral news report, however, was a hoax. The District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department also officially declared it as a “fictitious conspiracy theory” (Ritchie 2016). Pizzagate, as the conspiracy theory was later called, is just one of the numerous fake news stories that flood social media (Ritchie 2016; Silverman 2016). From Pope Francis endorsing then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, to a woman arrested for defecating on her boss’ desk after she won the lottery, fake news stories have engaged—and fooled—millions of readers around the world (Silverman 2016). A 2016 survey commissioned by news and entertainment site BuzzFeed found that “fake news headlines fool American adults about 75% of the time” (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016, para. 1). In many cases, readers ignore the fake news stories they come across, but in some cases the consumption of fake news leads to concrete actions. For example, at the ministerial level, Pakistan’s defense minister tweeted on December 23, 2016 a menacing response to a false report that Israel had threatened Pakistan with nuclear weapons (Goldman 2016). World leaders, such as former US President Barack Obama and Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic church, have expressed concern over the spread of fake news (Gardiner and Eddy 2016; Pullella 2016). Studies have also started to look at the implications of fake news, not only in terms of confusing readers (Barthel, Mitchell, and Holcomb 2016) but even in potentially affecting election results (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). The term “fake news” is not new. Contemporary discourse, particularly media coverage, seems to define fake news as referring to viral posts based on fictitious accounts made to look like news reports. A recent study defined fake news “to be news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers” (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017, 213). Two main motivations underlie the production of fake news: financial and ideological. On one hand, outrageous and fake stories that go viral—precisely because they are outrageous—provide content producers with clicks that are convertible to advertising revenue. On the other hand, other fake news providers produce fake news to promote particular ideas or people that they favor, often by discrediting others (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). Fake news has now become a buzzword, but current references to it seem to define it differently from earlier definitions. Earlier studies have applied the term to define related but distinct types of content, such as news parodies, political satires, and news propaganda. While it is currently used to describe false stories spreading on social media, fake news has also been invoked to discredit some news organizations’ critical reporting, further muddying discourse around fake news.
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Fig. 1.1. Fake news in Google trends
References