Abstract
The importance of dealing with fake news has increased in both political and social contexts: While existing studies mainly focus on how to detect and label fake news, approaches to help users make their own assessments are largely lacking. This article presents existing black-box and white-box approaches and compares advantages and disadvantages. In particular, white-box approaches show promise in counteracting reactance, while black-box approaches detect fake news with much greater accuracy. We also present the browser plugin TrustyTweet, which we developed to help users evaluate tweets on Twitter by displaying politically neutral and intuitive warnings without generating reactance.
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Acknowledgements
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – SFB 1119 – 236615297 (CROSSING) as well as by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts (HMWK) in the context of their joint funding for the National Research Center for Applied Cyber Security ATHENE.
This article is partly based on the article “Fake News Perception in Germany: A Representative Study of People’s Attitudes and Approaches to Counteract Disinformation” (Reuter et al. 2019) and “TrustyTweet: An Indicator-based Browser Plugin to Assist Users in Dealing with Fake News on Twitter” (Hartwig and Reuter 2019). Moreover, it is partly based on the conference paper “Countering Fake News: A Comparison of Possible Solutions Regarding User Acceptance and Effectiveness” (Kirchner and Reuter 2020). We thank Jan Kirchner for his support.
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Hartwig, K., Reuter, C. (2023). Countering Fake News Technically – Detection and Countermeasure Approaches to Support Users. In: Klimczak, P., Zoglauer, T. (eds) Truth and Fake in the Post-Factual Digital Age. Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40406-2_7
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