Abstract
So-called ‘fake news’—deceptive online content that attempts to manipulate readers—is a growing problem. A tool of intelligence agencies, scammers and marketers alike, it has been blamed for election interference, public confusion and other issues in the United States and beyond. This problem is made particularly pronounced as younger generations choose social media sources over journalistic sources for their information. This paper considers the prospective solution of providing consumers with ‘nutrition facts’-style information for online content. To this end, it reviews prior work in product labeling and considers several possible approaches and the arguments for and against such labels. Based on this analysis, a case is made for the need for a nutrition facts-based labeling scheme for online content.
Highlights
The proposed content labeling system draws from prior work in several areas
This study demonstrated that improvements can be achieved for fine-grain automatic fake news detection using surface-level linguistic patterns [32]
Fuhr et al [34] proposed a list of label categories for this style of online content labeling including “emotion” and “technicality”
Summary
Commonly called ‘fake news’, has been blamed for election interference [1,2], confusing the public [3] and even causing an armed standoff [4]. Bakir and McStay [14] discuss several prospective solutions to the online content accuracy problems These include increasing the prevalence of accurate news articles in feeds, verifying facts in articles manually, automated detection of deceptive content, and warning labels. This paper considers one prospective solution: a form of digital ‘nutrition facts’ or ‘consumer facts’ for online content This type of approach could provide a politically agnostic overview of an article or post’s source and content, based on a set of metrics. This paper discusses prior work in consumer notification It considers the need for and the prospective efficacy of a content labeling system for online content. It concludes with a discussion of the societal benefits that such a system could prospectively have and identifies topics for future work
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