Find the truth

A sharpshooter was told not to fire on the suspect in the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Immigrants are eating our pets. COVID-19 vaccines are just a money-making scheme and a way to track you with 5G networks.

These are some prime examples of fake news in recent times.

Fake news is difficult to control as it is prevalent on social media, news websites and in online documents. However, it is important for it to be monitored, as it can be used for propaganda, manipulation and advertising (such as click bait). With the announcement in January this year that Meta is ending its fact-checking programme on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, the challenge has escalated.

A team from the Department of Informatics at the University of Pretoria (UP) has investigated eye-tracking, more specifically heat maps, to explore perceived visual indicators of online fake news. Professor Machdel Matthee explains that in this study, 20 participants (10 UP students and 10 UP alumni) were asked to read three separate articles with the following headlines on a 24-inch computer screen:

• Article 1 (fake news): “Breaking: There is no FDA-approved COVID vaccine in the US and here’s the proof”
• Article 2 (fake news): “SPECIAL REPORT: AB de Villiers, from fastest ODI century to fastest growing billionaire”
• Article 3 (legitimate news): “Spectacular natural choreography: How the ocean put on a show of blue bioluminescence around False Bay and Hermanus”

“In the first round of eye-tracking, participants were given 60 seconds to browse through each of the three articles,” Prof Matthee says. “Then they completed a short questionnaire to determine the visual appeal of each article and how that influenced their interest. Afterwards, they were informed that some of these articles were fake news; they then revisited the three articles. This time, their eyes were only monitored for the first 15 seconds to determine which visual cues they sought to determine credible information. In another short questionnaire, they were asked to indicate which of the articles they thought were fake and why.”

“In their attempt to identify fake news, the participants focused on the source of the news, images, corroboration, existing scientific evidence, plausibility, page layout and visual appeal,” Prof Marié Hattingh says. “Prior beliefs and experience of a publication or news source also played a role in their decision.”

In summary, 80% of the participants believed Article 3 to be legitimate because of the organised layout of the page, information on the source (the date, the author, references to links, contact details and a secure website) as well as the scientific evidence provided. This was also the article that the students found most visually appealing (65%) because of its organised layout.

More than half (60%) of the students believed Article 2 to be fake news because the URL did not match that of the publisher’s (Forbes); no sources and date were provided; and they said it felt more like a sales pitch and that it was “too good to be true”.

Just over half (55%) of the participants felt that Article 1 was fake news, due to the large number of advertisements, the “conspiracy” style of the article and the poor layout of the webpage. The participants also found this article to have the least visual appeal (60%), with too many advertisements and irrelevant content.

Even readers with a high level of critical-thinking skills, such as the study’s university-educated participants, found it difficult to identify fake news articles that were good imitations of real news.

“Participants in this study intuitively focused on images to judge the authenticity of online news, yet the recent surge in deepfake content – where artificial intelligence is used to create fake videos – raises serious concerns about the use of images or videos to determine the veracity of information,” Prof Hattingh says.

It’s clear that a new level of awareness, vigilance and critical thinking will be required of consumers of online news in the future.

This article was originally featured in the Re.Search Magazine. Check out issue 11 of the magazine here.