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)

Project leader: Olessia Koltsova

The project started in 2019. It consists of two interrelated parts: FakeNewsProject and MediaCoverage. The project is supported by the grant of Russian Scientific Foundation №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: Alexander Porshnev, Victoria Vzyatysheva, Yadviga Sinyavskaya, Kirill Bryanov, Sergey Pashakhin, Maxim Terpilovsky.

International partners: Alex Miltsov (Bishop university, Canada, formerly Nazarbayev university, Kazakhstan), Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University, Ireland), Reinhold Kliegl (University of Potsdam, Germany)

This project explored factors driving individuals’ perceptions of online news’ credibility, as well as their ability to discriminate between real and false news. The central factor of credibility judgements that we examined is the news item’s consistency with either a dominant way of framing news in the respondent’s national media system (dominant frame), or with an alternative frame. We tested our hypotheses in the context of foreign affairs news produced by media publications in Russia and two of its neighboring nations, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Other factors that we expected to affect news credibility judgements were individuals’ support of their own government and origin of the news source. Additionally, we explored the effects of individuals’ cognitive styles and structure of their friendship networks on their ability to differentiate between real and fake news.

We tested our hypotheses using a series of online experiments. During the main experimentof 2020 we collected a sample of 10830 Facebook and VK users from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Respondents were asked to take a quiz where they rated the credibility of both fake and true news about one of the neighboring countries that varied by frame and and other parameters. In the post-test, users answered a series of questions, and consenting VK users were additionally asked to grant access to some of their account data.

We found that users on average rated news items representing a dominant frame as more credible than those with an alternative frame. The presence of international conflict amplified the effect of frame, increasing the credibility of dominant-frame news compared to alternatively framed news. In Russia and Kazakhstan those supporting the government the most perceived dominantly framed news as more credible than alternatively framed news, while for the least supportive of their governments there was no frame effect. This effect was not observed among Ukrainian respondents. Tendency for conspiracy thinking was associated with lower accuracy of fake news recognition and higher overall news credibility. Analysis of VK users’ subsample revealed that users who had people from the country covered in the news on their friend lists were more accurate in recognizing fakes while reporting lower credibility of dominant-frame news.

• Project website for online experiment: https://fakenewsproject.org (contains project description, all stimuli materials and correct responses).
• Project page in VKontakte: https://vk.com/fakenewsproject (contains the link to the clickable research application).
• Project page on the website of Nazarbayev University: https://nu.edu.kz/faculty/alexandre-miltsov (no longer available due to the relocation of the partner).
• Project page on the website of Dublin City University: https://www.dcu.ie/communications/people/Tanya-Lokot.shtml.
• Full questionnaire: Download (PDF, 673 Kb).
• Full dataset: will be released after all publications are out. As of now, certain data fractions may be obtained upon request.
• Standalone web application for Facebook users: https://fakenewsproject.org/fb/ru/kz/ru/
• Integrated application for Vkontakte users: https://vk.com/app7044177_213468036

MediaCoverage

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

Publications

1. Bryanov K., Kliegl R., Koltsova O., Porshnev A., Lokot T., Miltsov A., Pashakhin S., Sinyavskaya Y., Terpilovskii M., & Vziatysheva V. (2021). What Drives Perceptions of Foreign News Coverage Credibility? A Cross-National Experiment Including Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Political Communication (submitted) Download (PDF, 898 Kb)
2. Кольцова О.Ю., Юдина Д.И., Пашахин С.В., Колычева А.В. (2022). Освещение выборов в Казахстане и Украине российскими СМИ. Полис (in print)
3. Porshnev, A., Miltsov, A., Lokot, T., & Koltsova, O. (2021, July). Effects of conspiracy thinking style, framing and political interest on accuracy of fake news recognition by social media users: evidence from Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 341-357). Springer, Cham.
4. Vziatysheva, V., Sinyavskaya, Y., Porshnev, A., Terpilovskii, M., Koltcov, S., & Bryanov, K. (2021, July). Testing users’ ability to recognize fake news in three countries. An experimental perspective. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 370-390). Springer, Cham.
5. Bryanov, K., & Vziatysheva, V. (2021). Determinants of individuals’ belief in fake news: A scoping review determinants of belief in fake news. PLoS one, 16(6), e0253717.
6. Koltsova, O., Sinyavskaya, Y., & Terpilovskii, M. (2020, July). Designing an Experiment on Recognition of Political Fake News by Social Media Users: Factors of Dropout. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 261-277). Springer, Cham.
7. Казун, А. Д., & Пашахин, С. В. (2021). «Чужие выборы»: новости соседнего государства о выборах президента РФ в 2018 г. Экономическая социология, 22(1), 71.
8. Казун А.Д. (2020) Так ли страшен фейк? Ложные новости и их роль в современном мире. Мониторинг общественного мнения, 4(158), 162-175.
9. Porshnev, A., & Miltsov, A. (2020, July). The effects of thinking styles and news domain on fake news recognition by social media users: Evidence from Russia. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 305-320). Springer, Cham.