Communications of the ACM
Want to Squelch Fake News? Let Readers Take Charge
The results of two online surveys appear to indicate that crowdsourcing could help marginalize fake news and other online misinformation.
Credit: prattlibrary.org
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers demonstrated that crowdsourced judgments about the quality of news sources can marginalize online misinformation.
The researchers used two public opinion surveys to evaluate 60 news sources, and found Democrats trusted mainstream media outlets more than Republicans, with the exception of Fox News.
The researchers conducted two online surveys of about 1,000 participants each; respondents were asked to rate their trust in 60 news outlets, about 33% of which were high-profile, mainstream sources.
Since the respondents generally distrusted more marginal websites, there was significant agreement among the general audience and the professional fact-checkers.
This led to the conclusion that the crowdsourcing approach could work especially well in marginalizing false news stories, possibly by building audience judgments into an algorithm ranking stories by quality.
From MIT News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
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