Assignment

Social media is a great tool that allows the coverage of personal, regional and global updates and news. Social media provides quick updates for important and critical events. For example, in 2010 people used Twitter to update the public in real time of the disaster recovery efforts of the Haiti Quake. However, there is also a negative side to this quick reporting of information which is the increase in the spread of misinformation and fake news.

In November 2016, Stanford University released the results of a study that they conducted over 18 months with 7,804 American students who were asked evaluatethe credibility of information from a variety of Web sources.The results were not good. Here is the link to the executive summary of the study and some early findings: https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf

While fake news or digital misinformation has always been a concern, the increased use of social media to spread both real and 'fake' news, the results of this new study, and the recent American Presidential election showcase the seriousness of this issue.

In this assignment, you will explore and report on three areas:

1. You will need to research what constitutes different types of fake news and misinformation on the Internet and how it is spread through social media.

2. You need to report on why it is difficult for some people to distinguish between real news and fake news or misinformation today.

3. While education is importantto help people identify real and fake news, technology also plays an important role. You need to investigate three different techniques or approaches that researchers are proposing or have developed to help social media sites automatically detect fake news or misinformation. The ACM library and the IEEE library will be great sources for the entire paper but in particular for finding out about these techniques.

For this assignment, you need to use peer reviewed sources to research this topic (such as papers from the ACM Library and IEEE library). Note, you can find papers published by IEEE on Dal's library website. The IEEE has a database that you can search just like the ACM library. You should have 5-6peer reviewed references for this assignment.

You will use the ACM SIGCHI paper format available as a Word template (attached). This is the same one you used for Assignment 1.

You will use the IEEE citation format (links to the citation format are below). Your paper is to be 2.5-3 pages, properly formatted, including references

IEEE Reference/Citation Format Links:
https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecitationref.pdf
http://www.ijssst.info/info/IEEE-Citation-StyleGuide.pdf