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User Engagement with Digital Deception

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Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

Digital deception in online social networks, particularly the viral spread of misinformation and disinformation, is a critical concern at present. Online social networks are used as a means to spread digital deception within local, national, and global communities which has led to a renewed focus on the means of detection and defense. The audience (i.e., social media users) form the first line of defense in this process and it is of utmost importance to understand the who, how, and what of audience engagement. This will shed light on how to effectively use this wisdom-of-the-audience to provide an initial defense. In this chapter, we present the key findings of the recent studies in this area to explore user engagement with trustworthy information, misinformation, and disinformation framed around three key research questions (1) Who engages with mis- and dis-information?, (2) How quickly does the audience engage with mis- and dis-information?, and (3) What feedback do users provide? These patterns and insights can be leveraged to develop better strategies to improve media literacy and informed engagement with crowd-sourced information like social news.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    News sources collected from EUvsDisinfor.eu were identified as spreaders of disinformation by the European Union’s East Strategic Communications Task Force.

  2. 2.

    Example resources used by Volkova et al [43] to compile deceptive news sources: http://www.fakenewswatch.com/, http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html.

  3. 3.

    The area under the ROC curve (AUC) for 10-fold cross-validation experiments were 0.89 for gender, 0.72 for age, 0.72 for income, and 0.76 for education.

  4. 4.

    https://verifi.herokuapp.com/

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a multiprogram national laboratory operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy. This research was also supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), contract W911NF-17-C-0094. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of DARPA or the U.S. Government. This work has also been supported in part by Adobe Faculty Research Award , Microsoft, IDEaS, and Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Data and Analytics Group, National Security Directorate, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Maria Glenski & Svitlana Volkova

  2. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Srijan Kumar

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  1. Maria Glenski
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  2. Svitlana Volkova
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  3. Srijan Kumar
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science & Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Kai Shu

  2. College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Suhang Wang

  3. College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Dongwon Lee

  4. Computer Science & Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Huan Liu

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Glenski, M., Volkova, S., Kumar, S. (2020). User Engagement with Digital Deception. In: Shu, K., Wang, S., Lee, D., Liu, H. (eds) Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42699-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42699-6_3

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