#Subliminal social media posts how to

Since it’s our attentionthat is being hacked, we are far better off doing several short checks in a day than only a few thorough ones every now and then.

In class, we talked through some of Mike Caulfield’s main points. The OER textbook ‘ Web-Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers’ is a tremendously helpful resource for people who care about facts. or U.K.Ī search in web of science reveals that fake news is an interdisciplinary research topic – garnering interest from communication, information and library science. The majority of publications in SCOPUS stems from the social sciences and computer sciences, and authors are predominantly from the U.S. Research interest in fake news is definitely on the rise: A search in the portal SCOPUS reveals that the number of research papers published on the topic of fake news jumped from 5 in 2016, to 247 in 2018. Researchers are trying to discern if these AI products played an influential role in the 2016 US election, in the Brexit referendum and in the Ukraine conflict. The website ‘ This person does not exist’ allows you to create fake profile images based on an AI algorithm.

Amit Agarwal describes on the ‘Digital Inspiration Blog’ how to build a Twitter bot in mere five minutes. They leverage AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms, and have the purpose to amplify information. They spread fake news in two ways: They keep “saying” or tweeting fake news items, and they use the same pieces of false information to reply to or comment on the postings of real social media users. How biased or diversified is your social media feed? I shared some examples from my Facebook wall that had been analyzed with the Google Chrome media bias extension.īots (artificial computer profiles) play a significant role in spreading fake news. Specifically, I wanted to understand how this tool can help to get a sense of how disinformation spreads through social networks, particularly Twitter. In preparation for the class, I looked at the tool hoax.ly. Vaccines: In the context of the class, we specifically looked at the claim ‘vaccines cause autism’, and how this message perpetuated through social media channels.Momo Challenge: A recent scare went through social media, particularly in parenting circles: Momo, an alleged social media meme, supposedly targeted children and adolescents to commit acts of violence or self-harm, either through gamified challenge or subliminal messages in youtube videos.Sharma, Yadav, Yadav, & Ferdinand (2017) found that the misleading posts were far more popular than the posts dispersing accurate, relevant public health information about the disease. ZIKA: The arrival of Zika virus in the United States has generated a lot of activity on social media focusing on the algorithmic increase in the spread of the disease and its concerning complications.While the problem is perceived as significant in both countries, Germans have a higher trust in traditional mass media, and consume overall less news via social media. Asked to describe their level of trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, 30% of US Americans stated ‘not very much’ and 21% stated ‘none at all’.65% of Germans describe the information in German media as generally credible.41% of US Americans use social media daily to consume news.74% of Germans strongly or partly agree with the statement that fake news is a real threat to society.71% of US Americans see it as a serious problem that ‘outside groups’ are planting fake news on social media.54% of US Americans see fake news as a significant problem.Contrasting the two countries helped us recognize fake news as a global phenomenon with regional differences.

Do we have a problem with fake news?įake news is a politicized and controversial term, used both to criticize mainstream media and to refer to problematic content online.Īs I live in the US, and am teaching this is class at a German university, we were specifically looking at the situation in these two countries. In this session, we talked about critical consumption, and how we can make good choices about what we give our attention to, about where and how we seek out expertise and perspective, about how we process what we read and view.

Websites containing hoaxes and misleading information pop up across the Internet and are often shared on social media to increase their reach – by both human users and artificial bots, deliberately or unintentionally spreading disinformation. The second session of my social media class dealt with the topic of fake news, one of the most hotly-debated socio-political topics of recent years. Just because you see it online, doesn’t mean it’s a fact… How to develop a spider-sense for fake news?

#Subliminal social media posts how to