{"id":153,"date":"2024-05-06T16:50:05","date_gmt":"2024-05-06T16:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grants.ulbsibiu.ro\/corecon\/?p=153"},"modified":"2025-01-31T09:33:58","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T09:33:58","slug":"tracking-false-narratives-about-russian-ukrainian-conflict-a-workshop-with-students-on-addressing-fake-news-challenges-in-both-research-and-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grants.ulbsibiu.ro\/corecon\/tracking-false-narratives-about-russian-ukrainian-conflict-a-workshop-with-students-on-addressing-fake-news-challenges-in-both-research-and-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracking false narratives about Russian-Ukrainian conflict: A workshop with students on addressing fake news challenges in both research and practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 8th<\/sup> April 2024 Ecaterina Ilis (ULBS) delivered a guest lecture \u201cResearching fake news: Understanding the challenges\u201d and a workshop to University of Opole MA students majoring in Language and Communication in the English Philology study program.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Given her long-standing interest in critical discourse analysis of mediated fake news in the context of COVID-19 pandemic, which is the basis of her PhD project developed at Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, Ecaterina Ilis agreed to acquaint UO students with main approaches to <\/span>fake-news research<\/b> and the proposed ways of their identification and <\/span>elimination<\/b>. <\/span><\/p>\n

While the definitions of fake news<\/b> proliferate and overlap with those of \u201cdisinformation,\u201d \u201cmisinformation,\u201d and \u201cmalinformation,\u201d it is important to remember that all fake news items can be characterized by the following three traits<\/b>: (1) a reduced level of facticity; (2) a goal of deceiving people; and (3) formats and language specific to the journalistic style. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"
Examining how mis-, dis- and mal-information intersect around the concepts of falseness and harm. Figure adapted from Wardle and Derakhshan (2017, 20).<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ecaterina\u2019s lecture also explained how social media ecosystems<\/strong> have sparked an \u201cinfodemic\u201d of fake news because of their low entry barriers, lack of editorial oversight, attention-grabbing headlines and in-built capacity for polarization and confirmation bias. The students taking part in the lecture admitted to being most interested in Ecaterina\u2019s explanation of the psychological factors characterizing people who are susceptible to both replicating and producing fake news content. For example, people who experience the feelings of social alienation and skepticism<\/strong>, lack of agency and political marginalization and who distrust official media and institutions are likely to fall prey to fake narratives. Also, there is a budding, if still inconclusive, research on how personality traits and psychopathological inclinations<\/strong> make some people more likely to share and remember unconfirmed information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is of special importance is the role of cognitive factors<\/strong>, especially reliance on intuitive, less analytical reasoning, especially in cases of news items that coincide with preexisting beliefs and are congruent with generally held values, in making some individual prone to assimilating disinformation. This can be magnified in cases of repeated contact with the false information, as is the case with algorithmic echo-chambers on social platforms. After all, \u201ca lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth\u201d in accordance with the illusion of truth effect<\/a> created by repeated encounters with some ideas. This effect is likely to be induced for example by organized propaganda campaigns sometimes called a \u201cfirehose of falsehood\u201d<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the workshop part of the event, the students could play an online game \u201cBad News\u201d<\/a> in which they impersonated a malicious agent disseminating bad news and got to know about the tricks of the trade of being a manipulator. This allows the player to realize how often they may have fallen prey to engineered sensationalism<\/strong> around bad news, as well as hoaxes and trolling provocations<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students were then to work on identifying fake news in conflict zones based on a typology of propaganda (Wardle and Derkashan, 2017) and the ways the false narratives are used. Given 5 selected false news narratives identified by \u201cPropaganda Diary\u201d<\/a> project by VoxUkraine, students were asked to discuss the meaning, purpose and implications of each of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A slide from Ecaterina Ilis\u2019s workshop presentation on 8th<\/sup> April 2024<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Finally, students helped to produce a list of key discursive strategies<\/strong> that are employed by propagandists to more effectively propagate false narratives. These include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n