Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.lang.basic.visual.misc > #3807

Fake

Show all headers | View raw

To lure consumers to these fake websites, fraudsters send spam text messages and emails purporting to be from an SWA and containing a link. The fake websites are designed to trick consumers into thinking they are applying for unemployment benefits and disclosing personally identifiable information and other sensitive data. That information can then be used by fraudsters to commit identity theft.



fake

Download Zip https://t.co/nv4lpBEJHh 






So-called "fake news" has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents' sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.


Recent statistics show that almost 1/4 of a million people have died and four million people are affected either with mild or serious health problems caused by coronavirus (COVID-19). These numbers are rapidly increasing (World Health Organization, May 3, 2020c). There is much concern during this pandemic about the spread of misleading or inaccurate information. This article reports on a small study which attempted to identify the types and sources of COVID-19 misinformation. The authors identified and analysed 1225 pieces of COVID-19 fake news stories taken from fact-checkers, myth-busters and COVID-19 dashboards. The study is significant given the concern raised by the WHO Director-General that 'we are not just fighting the pandemic, we are also fighting infodemic'. The study concludes that the COVID-19 infodemic is full of false claims, half backed conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific therapies, regarding the diagnosis, treatment, prevention, origin and spread of the virus. Fake news is pervasive in social media, putting public health at risk. The scale of the crisis and ubiquity of the misleading information require that scientists, health information professionals and journalists exercise their professional responsibility to help the general public identify fake news stories. They should ensure that accurate information is published and disseminated.J.M.


Real debt collectors will often try to get payment quickly, but if your collector is being very pushy, you should be suspicious. Scammers survive by getting people to pay fake debts before they have a chance to realize they're being scammed. So if a debt collector pushes you to pay immediately, be very cautious.


Finally, contact a major credit reporting agency. Tell them you've been targeted by fake debt collectors. Ask them to place a fraud alert on your credit report. They are required to tell the other two agencies about your fraud alert.:


The concerns over fake news are plentiful, and of necessity, this article is limited to describing research on fake news from a media perspective. Different types of media manipulation exist, and are studied within psychology, political communication, warfare, marketing, and information technology, to mention a few areas. For practical reasons, it has not been possible to cover them all here. Along the same lines, fake news addresses several specific issues within media and journalism studies, such as objectivity, bias, and journalistic authority, but this article will not engage extensively in these important and widespread debates here.






Previous research has identified different frameworks for studying fake news, some of which will be addressed in the following sections. These include categories such as types, elements and phases (Wardle & Hossein, 2017); process, product, and public (Westlund, 2017); and six types of fake news (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2018). Building on the aforementioned frameworks, this article will examine four core terms in relation to fake news: How fake news has been characterized, created, circulated and countered.


These accounts give an indication of how the historic evolution of fake news is also related to the development of journalism as a profession, such as methods of verification and codes of ethics. They also indicate that fake news is not a new thing, neither as a term nor as a phenomenon. But the surge in the use of the term worldwide has created epistemological discussions of how digital disinformation dressed as news should be understood.


Identifying the creators of disinformation and fake news, as well as their motivation, has been a major concern in recent media reports and academic articles about the phenomenon. Often it can be unclear who has produced the disinformation, but actors ranging from governments, organizations, companies, and individuals have been identified as creators of fake news. Some push fake news to make money, others do it to spread their world views, while trolls do it for the fun of it. It has been suggested that understanding the motivation behind fake news is crucial to combat it. Identifying the motivation or intention behind the fake news production is thus of crucial importance. Typically, three main motivations have been identified: Political, financial, and social (Wardle & Hossein, 2017, p. 26; Warwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 27). In the following section, creators of fake news and different actors and their motivations will be characterized.


One of the most infamous recent examples of fake news produced for financial gain involves the teenagers from a town in Veles, Macedonia, who churned out sensationalist stories about the American presidential candidates in 2016 to earn cash from advertising (Kirby, 2016; Subramanian, 2017). They were seeking money rather than political influence, and figured out that publishing pro-Trump content generated more advertising revenue than pro-Clinton content (Warwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 31). This observation was confirmed in a study of the most shared news stories during the same election campaign, which showed that false stories, outperformed real news stories on Facebook, indeed three of the most shared false election stories were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton (Silverman, 2016). Creators of fake news motivated by financial opportunities have diverse backgrounds and are ranging from the teenagers in Macedonia, start-ups in the Philippines, a 38-year man old from Arizona, and Russian troll armies, to mention a few (Caron, 2017; Hern, Duncan, & Bengtsson, 2017).


Social media have proved effective distribution channels for false information (Warwick & Lewis, 2017). Studies have shown that fake news stories were more shared on social media than articles from edited news media (Silverman, 2016). The power of fake news and disinformation lies in how well it can penetrate social spheres. Two aspects are crucial to comprehend the circulation of false information: Technology and trust. In the following section, we will look into how technology and trust (or rather distrust) impact how disinformation spreads.


The biggest online platforms have deployed several attempts to combat the spread of false information on their platforms. Facebook has attempted to reduce financial incentives to create fake news websites, to flag fake news circulating in the newsfeed by cooperating with professional fact checkers, and to mark trusted news sources (Solon, 2016; Mosseri, 2018). On Twitter, more than 13,000 Russian-based bot accounts have been identified in 2017, and more than 670,000 users in the United States interacted with one of these accounts during the election season (Martineau, 2018). Twitter has since emailed nearly 678,000 users that may have inadvertently interacted with now-suspended accounts believed to have been linked to a Russian propaganda outfit called the Internet Research Agency (Vanian, 2018). Google argues that they have implemented structural changes in search algorithms to surface more high-quality content from the web while preventing the spread of offensive or clearly misleading content (Gomes, 2017). The company is also blocking websites from showing up in search results on Google News when they mask their country of origin or misrepresent their purpose.


Trust in information and news media is of paramount importance. Fake news is thus problematic for several reasons. Foremost, because it makes people confused about which information to trust or not. Two surveys, one from the United States (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016) and another from Sweden (Ahlin & Benzler, 2017), showed that respectively 88% and 76% of the respondents replied that fake news made them very or somehow confused about basic facts (Ahlin & Benzler, 2017; Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016). If people are unable to differentiate between what is verified or false, whether one can trust news or not, it makes people confused about the state of affairs, particularly during an election when voters need reliable information to make an important political decision. But low trust in information and news media can also make it more likely for people to spread fake news and disinformation. As argued by some researchers, the declining trust in mainstream media could be both a cause and a consequence of fake news gaining more traction (Allcot & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 215).


The legal measures put forward in Europe are not unproblematic. The German law has been controversial, as it has already created problems by confusing satire with hate speech. The concern regarding the approaches in Germany, Italy, France, and Ireland are that legal solutions to combat fake news and disinformation could lead to inadvertent censorship or curtail free speech.

 35fe9a5643

Back to comp.lang.basic.visual.misc | Previous | Next | Find similar

Thread

Fake Kristina Caulley <kristinacaulley231@gmail.com> - 2024-01-09 07:24 -0800

csiph-web