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Information manipulation and Eastern European topics

Democracy is under threat worldwide due to waning information integrity, but civil society can counter media manipulation without violating fundamental freedoms. The setbacks to global democracy over the past decade, identified by Freedom House’s annual  Freedom in the World   report , can be attributed in part to the fact that electorates are increasingly being misinformed by politically captured media or poor journalism. At the same time, the emerging threat of technology-driven disinformation is causing some societies to overcompensate by adopting legislation that contradicts press freedom principles. The challenge of the next decade will be to address media manipulation and disinformation without sacrificing freedom of expression. Moldova provides clear examples of this tradeoff, and the necessary solutions for that country—investment in media literacy and an independent press council—could also be applied worldwide. These two measures can be effective in counteractin...
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Fake news on Wikipedia

Fake news  (also known as  junk news ,  pseudo-news , or  hoax news ) [1] [2]  is a form of news consisting of deliberate  disinformation  or  hoaxes  spread via traditional  news media  (print and broadcast) or online  social media . [3] [4]  Digital news has brought back and increased the usage of fake news, or  yellow journalism . [5]  The news is then often reverberated as  misinformation  in social media but occasionally finds its way to the mainstream media as well. [6] Fake news is written and published usually with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, [7] [8] [9]  often using  sensationalist , dishonest, or outright fabricated  headlines  to increase readership. Similarly,  clickbait  stories and headlines earn advertising revenue from this activity. [7] The relevance of fake news has inc...
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Disinformation on the Web: Impact, Characteristics, and Detection of Wikipedia Hoaxes

Wikipedia is a major source of information for many people. However, false information on Wikipedia raises concerns about its credibility. One way in which false information may be presented on Wikipedia is in the form of hoax articles, i.e., articles containing fabricated facts about nonexistent entities or events. In this paper we study false information on Wikipedia by focusing on the hoax articles that have been created throughout its history. We make several contributions. First, we assess the real-world impact of hoax articles by measuring how long they survive before being debunked, how many pageviews they receive, and how heavily they are referred to by documents on the Web. We find that, while most hoaxes are detected quickly and have little impact on Wikipedia, a small number of hoaxes survive long and are well cited across the Web. Second, we characterize the nature of successful hoaxes by comparing them to legitimate articles and to failed hoaxes that were discovered shortl...
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