Measuring Falseness in News Articles based on Concealment and Overstatement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new measurement tool based on concealment and overstatement metrics to quantify misinformation in news articles, revealing that false news tends to be more concealed and overstated, especially in longer, complex stories.

Contribution

The study proposes a novel method to assess misinformation by quantifying concealment and overstatement, aiding in distinguishing partly true news from fully fabricated content.

Findings

False news exhibits higher concealment and overstatement.

Longer, complex stories are more prone to misinformation.

Partially false articles lack crucial details and contain redundant words.

Abstract

This research investigates the extent of misinformation in certain journalistic articles by introducing a novel measurement tool to assess the degrees of falsity. It aims to measure misinformation using two metrics (concealment and overstatement) to explore how information is interpreted as false. This should help examine how articles containing partly true and partly false information can potentially harm readers, as they are more challenging to identify than completely fabricated information. In this study, the full story provided by the fact-checking website serves as a standardized source of information for comparing differences between fake and real news. The result suggests that false news has greater concealment and overstatement, due to longer and more complex new stories being shortened and ambiguously phrased. While there are no major distinctions among categories of politics science and civics, it demonstrates that misinformation lacks crucial details while simultaneously containing more redundant words. Hence, news articles containing partial falsity, categorized as misinformation, can deceive inattentive readers who lack background knowledge. Hopefully, this approach instigates future fact-checkers, journalists, and the readers to secure high quality articles for a resilient information environment.