City Research Online

Abstract

Misinformation constitutes one of the main challenges to counter the infodemic: misleading news, even if not blatantly false, can cause harm especially in crisis scenarios such as the pandemic. Due to the fast proliferation of information across digital media, human fact-checkers struggle to keep up with fake news, while automatic factcheckers are not able to identify the grey area of misinformation. We, thus, propose to reverse engineer the manipulation of information offering citizens the means to become their own fact-checkers through digital literacy and critical thinking. Through a corpus analysis of fact-checked news about COVID-19, we identify 10 fallacies – arguments which seem valid but are not – that systematically trigger misinformation and offer a systematic procedure to identify them. Next to fallacies, we observe the types of sources associated to (mis-/dis-)information in our dataset as well as the type of claims making up the headlines. The observation of these three levels of analysis reveals a misinformation ecosystem where developing the audience’s digital literacy is necessary to guarantee fake news immunity.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2022 by authors; licensee OJCMT by Bastas, CY. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Publisher Keywords:	misinformation, fallacy theory, digital literacy, fact checking, multi-level annotation
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Z665 Library Science. Information Science
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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