Interview with the Creators of Hoaxy® from Indiana University

By Sandra Rogers for AACE Review, September 14th 2018

Interview with the Creators of Hoaxy® from Indiana University

Falsehoods are spread due to biases in the brain, society, and computer algorithms (Ciampaglia & Menczer, 2018). A combined problem is “information overload and limited attention contribute to a degradation of the market’s discriminative power” (Qiu, Oliveira, Shirazi, Flammini, & Menczer, 2017).  Falsehoods spread quickly in the US through social media because this has become Americans’ preferred way to read the news (59%) in the 21^st century (Mitchell, Gottfried, Barthel, & Sheer, 2016). While a mature critical reader may recognize a hoax disguised as news, there are those who share it intentionally. A 2016 US poll revealed that 23% of American adults had shared misinformation unwittingly or on purpose; this poll reported high to moderate confidence in one’s ability to identify fake news with only 15% not very confident (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016).

Hoaxy® takes it one step further and shows you who is spreading or debunking a hoax or disinformation on Twitter.

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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news