A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific topics. These false information campaigns can have dire consequences to the public: mutating their opinions and actions, especially with respect to critical world events like major elections. Evidently, the problem of false information on the Web is a crucial one, and needs increased public awareness, as well as immediate attention from law enforcement agencies, public institutions, and in particular, the research community. In this paper, we make a step in this direction by providing a taxonomy of the Web's false information ecosystem, comprising various types of false information, actors, and their motives. We report a comprehensive overview of existing research on the false information ecosystem by identifying several lines of work: 1) how the public perceives false information; 2) understanding the propagation of false information; 3) detecting and containing false information on the Web; and 4) false information on the political stage. Finally, for each of these lines of work, we report several future research directions that can help us better understand and mitigate the emerging problem of false information dissemination on the Web.
Biased. @cite_214 note that biased information is profoundly disseminated in OSNs. To alleviate this problem, they propose NewsCube: a service that aims to provide end-users with all the different aspects of a particular story. In this way, end-users can read and understand the stories from multiple perspectives hence assisting in the formulation of their own unbiased view for the story. To achieve this, they perform structure-based extraction of the different aspects that exist in news stories. These aspects are then clustered in order to be presented to the end-users. To evaluate the effectiveness of their system, they undertake several user studies that aim to demonstrate the effectiveness in terms of the ability of the users to construct balanced views when using the platform. Their results indicate that 16 out of 33 participants stated that the platform helped them formulate a balanced view of the story, 2 out of 33 were negative, whereas the rest were neutral.
@cite_214
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The bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news production process. The resulting bias often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as Iraq war. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for readers to have penetrating views on realities against such bias. This paper presents NewsCube, a novel Internet news service aiming at mitigating the effect of media bias. NewsCube automatically creates and promptly provides readers with multiple classified viewpoints on a news event of interest. As such, it effectively helps readers understand a fact from a plural of viewpoints and formulate their own, more balanced viewpoints. While media bias problem has been studied extensively in communications and social sciences, our work is the first to develop a news service as a solution and study its effect. We discuss the effect of the service through various user studies.