Everyday non-partisan fake news: Sharing behavior, platform specificity, and detection.

Concern over the impact of fake news on major socio-political events is growing. The use of deliberate misinformation is thought to have played a role in the outcome of the UK EU referendum, the 2016 US presidential election, and in the effectiveness of COVID-19 public health messaging. As a result, recent research has tended to focus on hyper-partisan (e.g., US politics; Democrat/Republican), person specific (e.g., Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump) content that incorporates emotive and hyperbolic language. However, in this study, we focus on an alternative form of fake news, across a variety of topics (e.g., Crime, Immigration, and Health), that avoids these characteristics, and which may therefore be more pervasive and difficult to detect. In a three-part study, we examined participants sharing intentions for fake news (including platform preference; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp), their ability to explicitly detect fake news, and whether individual differences on psychological measures of critical thinking ability, rational thinking, and emotional stability predict sharing behavior and detection ability. The results show that even our well-informed sample (political science students) were not immune to the effects of fake news, some issues (e.g., health and crime) were more likely to be shared than others (e.g., immigration), and on specific platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook). In addition, we show that individual differences in emotional stability appears to be a key factor in sharing behavior, while rational thinking aptitude was key to fake news detection. Taken together, this study provides novel data that can be used to support targeted fake news interventions, suggesting possible news topic, sharing behavior, and platform specific insights. Such interventions, and implications for government policy, education, and social media companies are discussed.

Correction: Detecting fake news on Facebook: The role of emotional intelligence.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246757.].

Detecting fake news on Facebook: The role of emotional intelligence.

The proliferation of fake news on social media is now a matter of considerable public and governmental concern. In 2016, the UK EU referendum and the US Presidential election were both marked by social media misinformation campaigns, which have subsequently reduced trust in democratic processes. More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the acceptance of fake news has been shown to pose a threat to public health. Research on how to combat the false acceptance of fake news is still in its infancy. However, recent studies have started to focus on the psychological factors which might make some individuals less likely to fall for fake news. Here, we adopt that approach to assess whether individuals who show high levels of 'emotional intelligence' (EQ) are less likely to fall for fake news items. That is, are individuals who are better able to disregard the emotionally charged content of such items, better equipped to assess the veracity of the information. Using a sample of UK participants, an established measure of EQ and a novel fake news detection task, we report a significant positive relationship between individual differences in emotional intelligence and fake news detection ability. We also report a similar effect for higher levels of educational attainment, and we report some exploratory qualitative fake news judgement data. Our findings are discussed in terms of their applicability to practical short term (i.e. current Facebook user data) and medium term (i.e. emotional intelligence training) interventions which could enhance fake news detection.

Social trust and grassroots governance in rural China.

The relationship between social trust and governance has been one of the focal points of the academic and policy-making communities. Empirical studies on this relationship, however, have focused mostly on democracies. The scarcity of such studies in authoritarian countries has left many important questions unanswered: Is social trust associated with effective governance only in democratic settings? Can social trust improve the quality of governance in non-democracies as well? Drawing on data from 2005 China General Social Survey-a representative survey conducted nationwide at both the individual- and village-level in rural China, this paper attempts to answer these questions empirically by examining the relationship between social trust and the quality of governance in rural China. The findings reveal that different types of social trust-particularized trust and generalized trust-correspond with different effects in rural governance: whereas villagers' trust in people whom they knew personally was positively and significantly associated with the provision of various public goods and services, their trust in strangers had virtually no impact on rural governance.