Understanding the Impact of Contextual Clues in Misinformation Detection

Abstract

To further reduce the pervasiveness of fake news on social networking sites and increase content integrity, an important yet one of the most basic of defenses has be explored—content descriptors. This paper investigates the effects of content descriptors in aiding the human factor against disinformation attacks through its recognition. An explicit fake news test was employed to assess the users on how they use these descriptors as contextual clues in categorizing specific contents as either legitimate or misleading. The results of this study reveal the varying effect of contextual clues in a population to recognize fake news.