All of the posts were permitted to run as advertisements on Facebook despite Facebook’s efforts to limit the spread of fake news on their platform. The number of emotional responses posted by the pro-Brexit and pro-Trump groups was greater than those posted by the pro-remain and anti-Trump groups.
The results of the empirical study show that the articles had a higher reach amongst the older age groups, as well as that many people likely took the headlines at face value without clicking on the link.
User interaction with the fake content was tracked in order to analyze the number of users in the age groups 13–17, 18–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65+. In that empirical study, 14 political fake news articles (e.g., relating to Brexit and Donald Trump) were disseminated in the form of advertisements on Facebook. This paper explores the generational differences in the consumption of fake news, first by discussing previous empirical studies in this field and then on the basis of an empirical study carried out between the beginning of February 2018 and the end of June of 2018. The role played by age in the consumption of fake news on social media, however, is unclear. Social media are increasingly being used by young and old as a source of information. Our study demonstrates the added value of a linguistically sensitive analysis of both the discursive processes behind the scenes of the news production process as well as the news product itself, in revealing how innovative newsroom practices like collaboration between journalists and expert sources shape the (language of) news.
#Fox news newsbar template professional
In our study, we analyse how the act of collaborating blurs boundaries between the traditional professional identities for the three categories of actors involved and urges them to reflect on their own and each other’s discursive practices. We draw on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork behind the scenes of the collaborative project as well as a comparative multimodal discourse analysis of news items produced within the collaboration and similar news items produced a year earlier outside the collaboration. More particularly, we focus on a collaborative project on air pollution involving a newspaper, university, and environmental government agency and examine how journalists and professionals within the fields of science and policy-making interact within this collaboration. This paper sheds new light on collaborative journalism and investigates how this innovative newsroom practice affects the news production process and product. The developed categories are based on academic literature on fake news, typographies of uncertainty and on critical mathematics education. The categories are illustrated with examples from the media and from a classroom situation in teacher education to indicate how the tool can help raise critical questions.
The developed tool consists of a set of questions to help reflecting on the validity of numbers, which again is developed into categories reflecting degrees of validity and whether the mathematical representation has a deceptive role. Complex topics are associated with uncertainty, which implies that numbers may be questionable without hidden intentions, and that evaluating a number’s relevance may be quite challenging.
It may not be straight forward, or even possible, to judge the validity of presented numbers, or whether numbers are used with the intention to deceive. In this paper, I suggest a tool to facilitate students’ critical thinking related to numbers, or other mathematical representations, presented in the media. Sometimes, argumentation in deceptive information is built on numbers, which gives reason to include mathematics when working with fake news in education. The increased distribution of fake news on internet and social media raises concerns for democratic processes.