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To provide human judgment input for computer algorithm development, this study examines the relative importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting the truthfulness ratings of two common types of online health information: news stories and institutional news releases.

This study employed a multi-method approach using (1) a manual content analysis of 400 randomly selected online health news stories and news releases from HealthNewsReview.org and (2) an online experiment comparing truthfulness ratings between news stories and news releases.

Using content analysis, the authors found significant differences in the importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting truthfulness ratings of news stories and news releases: source and style cues predicted truthfulness ratings better than content cues. In the experiment, source credibility was the most important predictor of truthfulness ratings, controlling for individual differences. Experts have higher ratings for news media stories than news releases and lay people have no differences in rating the two news formats.

It is important for health educators to curb consumer trust in misinformation and increase health information literacy. Rather than solely reporting scientific evidence, educators should focus on addressing cues people use to judge the truthfulness of health information.

This is the first study that directly compares human judgments of health news stories and news releases. Using both the breadth of content analysis and experimental causality testing, the authors evaluate the relative importance of source, content, and style cues in predicting truthfulness ratings.

This study aims to understand how fake news can cause an impact on consumer behavioral intentions in today’s era when fake news is prevalent and common. Brands have not only faced reputational losses but also got a dip in their share prices and sales, which affected their financial standing. Hence, it is significant for brands to understand the impact of fake news on behavioral intentions and to strategize to manage the impact.

This study uses several branding and marketing concepts such as brand experience, brand trust, brand credibility, consumer behavioral intentions along with variables suggested by Elaboration Likelihood Model and Heuristic Systematic Model such as personal relevance/involvement. For fake news, news truthfulness, news credibility and source credibility are used.

The results of this study shows that positive brand experience, brand trust, brand credibility help in creating positive behavioral intentions for brands. This study shows that brands focusing on providing positive brand experience have a stronger brand trust and credibility and are affected less by fake news than those brands which do not emphasize on these factors.

This paper can assist brand managers in understanding the impact fake news can have on behavioral intentions of consumers. The managers can strategize such that the fake news affects their brands the least.

The authors in this paper attempt to fill in the gap in literature, which is to study how the fake news impacts the brands considering the credibility, trust and experience they establish with their customers. The existing literature discusses the generation and dissemination of fake news on social media and its impact on political scenarios and personalities. Also, studies explain the impact of fake news on the financial position of brands, but marketing facets are not tested empirically.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a multi-agent-based simulation model for the online opinion dissemination during hazardous chemical leakage emergencies into rivers in China, to explore an appropriate crisis information release policy of China’s government for controlling public panic.

In the proposed model, two fundamental attributes of crisis information, i.e., truthfulness (for true or false news) and attitude (for positive, neutral or negative opinion), are considered. Four major agents in the online community system, i.e., citizens, the government, media and opinion leaders, are included. Using four typical accidents of hazardous chemical leakage into rivers in China as case studies, insightful policy implications can be obtained for crisis management and panic control.

The news about the terrible potential damages from such a type of accidents will instantly arise wide-ranging public panic; therefore, the corresponding crisis information release policy should be carefully designed. It is strongly advised against publishing false news to temporarily conceal the accidents, which will seriously hurt the government’s reputation and agitate much larger-scale public panic in terms of degree and duration. To mitigate public panic, the true news especially about treatment measurements should be published immediately. If the government does nothing and releases no crisis information, the public panic will go out of control.

This paper only focuses on the crisis information release policies from the perspectives of the government. Furthermore, this study especially focuses on the cases in China, and extending the proposed model study for general contexts is an important direction to improve this study. Finally, the proposed model should be extended to other types of emergencies to further justify its generalization and universality, especially various natural catastrophes like storms, floods, tsunamis, etc.

This paper develops a multi-agent-based model for online public opinion dissemination in emergency to explore an appropriate crisis information release policy for controlling public panic stemming from hazardous chemicals leakage accidents into rivers. The proposed model makes major contributions to the literature from two perspectives. First, the crisis information about emergency accidents are divided into true and false news based on the truthfulness attribute, and into neutral, positive and negative emotions based on the attitude attribute. Second, the proposed model covers the main agents in the online virtual community.

Brand value is increasingly threatened by fake news stories; the purpose of this paper is to explain how narrative response can be used to mitigate this threat, especially in situations where the crisis is severe and consumers are highly involved.

This conceptual paper derives recommendations and guidance for the use of narrative response based on storytelling and brand management literature.

This paper highlights authenticity and emotional engagement as keys to effective storytelling.

Current managerial approaches to dealing with misinformation are insufficient, as they presuppose an audience that can be convinced based on facts; this paper can be used to help brand managers respond to fake news stories when rational appeals fail.

This paper provides insight into brand management strategies in the era of fake news.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of blogging in the news sphere. If blogs represent a genuinely new breed of news provision, then they should adhere to some of the founding principles of mainstream news and journalism. A key principle in this respect is news credibitility.

This paper presents a review of recent literature about news blogging and assesses whether news blogs manifest many of the core attributes of mainstream news and journalism. The review considers the attributes that have previously been identified as defining good quality news and competent journalism and then applies some of these principles to “news” blogging.

There is no doubt that blogs have emerged as news sources of increasing significance and there have been occasions when they can be influential in setting news agendas. The essential qualities of credibitiltiy and capturing public trust in the news sphere, however, often depends upon the established reputation of known news “brands”. Although some blogs have emerged as reliable information sources in some specialist areas, they have yet generally to assume the key characteristics of mainstream news that drive public trust.

This paper provides an up‐to‐date review of a topic that is rapidly developing and attempts to set out some foundations on which further analysis of news blogging can be constructed.

The purpose of this paper is to present a theory of how corporations and brands can address the prevalence of fake news. A matrix is proposed to examine how the transparency of the motivation of the communicator disseminating fake news interacts with how well the content of the fake news coincides with a consumer’s previously held bias.

A dichotomy is presented examining the role of “Schemer’s Schema” transparency by confirmatory bias.

Consumers will react differently to fake news depending on their “schemer schema” and the source of the information, as well as the believability of the story based on already existing beliefs.

This paper provides readers with a strategy to address the prevalence and reality of fake news. The purpose of this paper is theoretical in nature. While this manuscript lays the foundation for future empirical studies, said studies have not been conducted. Further, given the ever-changing nature of fake news dissemination this manuscript provides a picture at a specific time and place.

This manuscript provides insights for brand managers who are forced to address fake news.

This manuscript provides marketers with a strategy to better address fake news for organizations and brand.

Given the rapid growth in efforts on misinformation correction, the study aims to test how evidence type and veracity interact with news agreement on the effectiveness of fact-checking on how well a corrective message discount a false news information.

Experimental participants (N = 511) in Hong Kong were exposed to the same news article and then to a piece of corrective information debunking the news article with variation in the types of evidence (numerical vs narrative) and veracity (no verdict vs half false vs entirely false) in 2019.

Among the participants who disagreed with the news article, numerical fact-checking was more effective than narrative fact-checking in discounting the news article. Some evidence of the backfire effect was found among participants for whom the article was attitude incongruent.

When debunking false information with people exposed to attitude-incongruent news, a milder verdict presented in the form of a half-false scale can prompt a more positive perception of the issue at stake than an entirely false scale, implying that a less certain verdict can help in mitigating the backfire effect compared to a certain verdict.

The MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region is in a critical moment in its information and news ecology, exhibiting signs of pretruth and posttruth syndromes. Between the “pretruth” and “posttruth” there is a gap that circumvented “truth.” The state of information in the MENA region brings back the dystopian Orwellian notion of the “Ministry of Truth.” A poetic term in anticipation of this moment of the crisis of truth. Sharing the latter with the rest of the world, the pretruth moment is engraved in the region's history of precarious political and religious authoritarian control and manipulation of information and news and low press freedom. In the region, truth is told, hidden, distorted, and manufactured by a blend of humans and bots, where both artificial intelligence and social humans are involved in this process of multipolarized disinformation operations with multifarious sponsors, actors, and beneficiaries that have distinct and often clashing agendas and interests. To understand the ecology of truth, facts, news, and information in the Middle East, studies ought to be situated within the ecosystem of information and media technologies in the globalized national and transnational societies of the region and consider both the role of the regionally oriented neoauthoritarian regimes and that of interested rising and established global powers. Central to this ecosystem is the dynamic interaction among three actors: communication technologies (the focus here is on the Internet); media, public, and activists' use of these technologies to mobilize, inform, and present alternative narratives, and to resist or confirm state narratives; and the authoritarian political regimes and their containment strategies for legacy media (particularly television) and the Internet.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse George Orwell's diaries through an information literacy lens. Orwell is well known for his dedication to freedom of speech and objective truth, and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is often used as a lens through which to view the fake news phenomenon. This paper will examine Orwell's diaries in relation to UNESCO's Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy to examine how information literacy concepts can be traced in historical documents.

This paper will use a content analysis method to explore Orwell's relationship to information literacy. Two of Orwell's political diaries from the period 1940–42 were coded for key themes related to the ways in which Orwell discusses and evaluates information and news. These themes were then compared to UNESCO Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy. Textual analysis software NVivo 12 was used to perform keyword searches and word frequency queries in the digitised diaries.

The findings show that while Orwell's diaries and the Five Laws did not share terminology, they did share ideas on bias and access to information. They also extend the history of information literacy research and practice by illustrating how concerns about the need to evaluate information sources are represented within historical literature.

This paper combines historical research with textual analysis to bring a unique historical perspective to information literacy, demonstrating that “fake news” is not a recent phenomenon, and that the tools to fight it may also lie in historical research.