“Fake news,” misinformation, and political bias: Teaching news literacy in the 21st century

Polarization and Fake News: Early Warning of Potential Misinformation Targets

Users polarization and confirmation bias play a key role in misinformation spreading on online social media. Our aim is to use this information to determine in advance potential targets for hoaxes and fake news. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for promptly identifying polarizing content on social media and, thus, “predicting” future fake news topics. We validate the performances...

Identifying Political Bias in News Articles

NEWS AND VIEWS Biological code breaking in the 21st century

Just as early molecular biologists made the conceptual leap from the unique structure of DNA—with its precise sequence of nucleotides and complementary strands—to a theoretical and empirical solution to the genetic coding problem, four decades later a new generation of biologists is tackling a similar scientific challenge, this time of even greater complexity. How do DNA sequences specify the c...

Alt-News and Post-Truths in the "Fake News" Era

Characterizing Political Fake News in Twitter by its Meta-Data

This article presents a preliminary approach towards characterizing political fake news on Twitter through the analysis of their meta-data. In particular, we focus on more than 1.5M tweets collected on the day of the election of Donald Trump as 45th president of the United States of America. We use the meta-data embedded within those tweets in order to look for differences between tweets contai...