Fakes, News and the Election: A New Taxonomy for the Study of Misleading Information within the Hybrid Media System

The widely unexpected outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election prompted a broad debate on the role played by “fake-news” circulating on social media during political campaigns. Despite a relatively vast amount of existing literature on the topic, a general lack of conceptual coherence and a rapidly changing news eco-system hinder the development of effective strategies to tackle the issue. Leveraging on four strands of research in the existing scholarship, the paper introduces a radically new model aimed at describing the process through which misleading information spreads within the hybrid media system in the post-truth era. The application of the model results in four different typologies of propagations. These typologies are used to describe real cases of misleading information from the 2016 US Presidential election. The paper discusses the contribution and implication of the model in tackling the issue of misleading information on a theoretical, empirical, and practical level.

[1]  Lucinda L. Austin,et al.  How Audiences Seek Out Crisis Information: Exploring the Social-Mediated Crisis Communication Model , 2012 .

[2]  Gordon Meyer,et al.  Social Information Processing and Social Networks: A Test of Social Influence Mechanisms , 1994 .

[3]  Brian E. Weeks.  Emotions, Partisanship, and Misperceptions: How Anger and Anxiety Moderate the Effect of Partisan Bias on Susceptibility to Political Misinformation , 2015 .

[4]  P. Golding,et al.  Making the News , 1980 .

[5]  A. Chadwick.  The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power , 2013 .

[6]  Ullrich K. H. Ecker,et al.  Misinformation and Its Correction , 2012, Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society.

[7]  C. Anderson.  Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms , 2011 .

[8]  Whitney Phillips.  This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture , 2015 .

[9]  J. N. Blom,et al.  Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines , 2015 .

[10]  G. Bateson,et al.  STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND COLLECTED ESSAYS IN ANTHROPOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY, EVOLUTION, AND EPISTEMOLOGY , 2006 .

[11]  Lincoln Dahlberg.  The Internet and Democratic Discourse: Exploring The Prospects of Online Deliberative Forums Extending the Public Sphere , 2001 .

[12]  Philip S. Yu,et al.  Identifying the influential bloggers in a community , 2008, WSDM '08.

[13]  Augusto Valeriani,et al.  Follow the leader! Direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 Italian general election campaign , 2015, New Media Soc..

[14]  B. Nyhan,et al.  When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions , 2010 .

[15]  N. Luhmann,et al.  Introduction to Systems Theory , 2012 .

[16]  T. Carson.  Frankfurt and Cohen on bullshit, bullshiting, deception, lying, and concern with the truth of what one says , 2016 .

[17]  Nick Couldry,et al.  Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling , 2008, New Media Soc..

[18]  Diana C. Mutz.  Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes , 1998 .

[19]  R. Law,et al.  Helpful Reviewers in TripAdvisor, an Online Travel Community , 2011 .

[20]  N. Newman,et al.  Identifying and Verifying News through Social Media , 2014 .

[21]  Dietram A. Scheufele,et al.  Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models , 2007 .

[22]  Emily K. Vraga,et al.  In Related News, That Was Wrong: The Correction of Misinformation Through Related Stories Functionality in Social Media , 2015 .

[23]  N. Lee,et al.  Word of mouth communication within online communities: Conceptualizing the online social network , 2007 .

[24]  danah boyd,et al.  Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media , 2010 .

[25]  M. Castells.  The rise of the network society , 1996 .

[26]  John L. Keane.  Democracy and Media Decadence , 2013 .

[27]  G. Mazzoleni,et al.  "Mediatization" of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy? , 1999 .

[28]  M. Broersma,et al.  Rethinking Journalism: Trust and participation in a transformed news landscape , 2013 .

[29]  Andrew Rojecki,et al.  Rumors and factitious informational blends: The role of the web in speculative politics , 2016, New Media Soc..

[30]  Natalie Jomini Stroud,et al.  Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure , 2008 .

[31]  B. Zelizer.  Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy , 2004 .

[32]  Kathleen Higgins,et al.  Post-truth: a guide for the perplexed , 2016, Nature.

[33]  Claude E. Shannon,et al.  A mathematical theory of communication , 1948, MOCO.

[34]  R. L. Rosnow.  Inside rumor: A personal journey. , 1991 .

[35]  G. Caldarelli,et al.  The spreading of misinformation online , 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[36]  L. Festinger,et al.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance , 2017 .

[37]  Edson C. Tandoc.  Journalism is twerking? How web analytics is changing the process of gatekeeping , 2014, New Media Soc..

[38]  A. Chadwick.  Britain's First Live Televised Party Leaders’ Debate: From the News Cycle to the Political Information Cycle , 2011 .

[39]  Arkaitz Zubiaga,et al.  Analysing How People Orient to and Spread Rumours in Social Media by Looking at Conversational Threads , 2015, PloS one.