Is if fake news or real news? Clemson research helps you determine

Is it real news or fake news?

Research at Clemson University in South Carolina may help you tell the difference.

An article on the Clemson website, http://www.clemson.edu/, by Rick Uhlmann says research by Marten Risius, a Clemson associate professor in the college of business, along with Christian Janze, a Ph.D student from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, provides some clues.

Surveys suggest 75 percent of American adults struggle with distinguishing real news from hoaxes on social media posts.

Uhlmann says the researchers’ information was presented in a paper “Automatic Detection of Fake News on Social Media Platforms” which was recognized as the best paper among 350 submitted at this summer’s Pacific Asia Conference of Information Systems.

The report says the study examined cognitive, affective and behavioral cues in more than 2,000 news article posts on Facebook from left, right and mainstream media outlets during the 2016 election campaign, as well, as responses from the user community.

Those articles were fact checked to determine fake from real. Researchers then used 230 samples of fake news and 230 of real news and applied variables to predict those that were fake. Using their process, researchers were able to determine fakr from real with 80 percent accuracy when all 460 were examined.

The researchers looked at different cues.

The report says they found an article using all caps, exclamation marks or question marks in a story are strong predicators of a story being fake.

They found that if a person is quoted than that is a good indicator a story being real.

Risius says in the article, “Other indicators of an article being fake are its loudness, number of shares and the responses to those shares. If it’s shared more often and there is a strong emotionality on how others respond, the likelihood of a story being fake increases.”

This story was originally published September 25, 2017 at 1:42 PM with the headline "Is if fake news or real news? Clemson research helps you determine."