FakeNews: Political news on Russia and its neighbors on social media: major content features, factors of trust and news truthfulness detection by users of different countries (2019-2021) (RSF)

The project has started in 2019. It consists of two interrelated parts: FakeNewsProject and MediaCoverage. The project is supported by the grant of Russian Scientific Foundation No 19-18- 00206.

FakeNewsProject

This is a network project and is run by an informal international team of researchers from different countries.

Participants from SCILA: Maxim Terpilovsky, Yadviga Sinyavskaya, Alexander Porshnev, Sergey Pashakhin, Victoria Vzyatysheva

International partners: Alex Miltsov (Nazarbayev university, Kazakhstan), Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University, Ireland) 

Project goal: this research seeks to understand how news consumers orient themselves in the growing ocean of virtually unverifiable information, in particular how they perceive news disseminated through social media – currently the main channel of news consumption in many countries. The project focuses on social media users from three countries: Ukraine, Russian and Kazakhstan and on the news from the media of each country devoted to the others. The goal is to understand to which extent users of these countries are susceptible to fake news, what influences their trust in news and their ability to detect fakes.

The main method of this project is online experiment. Social media users are offered to take a quiz in which they are presented both fake and true news about one of the neighboring countries. The news are randomly drawn from our database their important parameters being controlled. After that users are offered to answer a number of questions, and VK users are additionally asked to grant access to some of their account data (not required for taking the quiz). This research design is subject to approval by an ethical committee of one of the involved universities.

Project website for online experiment: https://fakenewsproject.org

MediaCoverage

Participants: Sergey Pashakhin, Maxim Terpilovsky, Anastasia Kazun, Sergei Koltsov, Darja Judina, Alina Kolycheva

Research goal is to establish how the media of three countries – Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia – cover the politics of each other, what the main topics and frames are, which frames dominate and which play the role of alternatives. A specific goal is to compare mutual representation of countries that are currently in conflict with the mutual representations of the countries that are not in conflict. Another important goal is to understand how these frames are represented in media accounts on social networking sites. The frames revealed in this project are then used in the experiments of FakeNewsProject.

Methodology of this research includes automated analysis of large corpora of media texts from all three countries, selective hand coding of news with hypothesis testing and qualitative text analysis.