The fingerprints of misinformation: how deceptive content differs from reliable sources in terms of cognitive effort and appeal to emotions

Abstract

Not all misinformation is created equal. It can adopt many different forms like conspiracy theories, fake news, junk science, or rumors among others. However, most of the existing research does not account for these differences. This paper explores the characteristics of misinformation content compared to factual news—the “fingerprints of misinformation”—using 92,112 news articles classified into several categories: clickbait, conspiracy theories, fake news, hate speech, junk science, and rumors. These misinformation categories are compared with factual news measuring the cognitive effort needed to process the content (grammar and lexical complexity) and its emotional evocation (sentiment analysis and appeal to morality). The results show that misinformation, on average, is easier to process in terms of cognitive effort (3% easier to read and 15% less lexically diverse) and more emotional (10 times more relying on negative sentiment and 37% more appealing to morality). This paper is a call for more fine-grained research since these results indicate that we should not treat all misinformation equally since there are significant differences among misinformation categories that are not considered in previous studies.