Journal of Management Information Systems 2021
Special Issue: Fake News on the Internet
Abstract
The online generation and dissemination of false information (e.g., through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other Internet media), commonly referred to as “fake news”, has garnered immense public attention following the 2016 Brexit referendum, three US elections, the 2019 Indian lynchings, and the 2019 rise in polio cases in Pakistan. Fake news undermines public life across the globe, especially in countries where journalistic practices and institutions are weak [3]. Some fake news is created to spread ideological messages or to create mischief, whereas other fake news is created for profit, such as the Macedonian teenagers who created fake news sites during the 2016 US election to drive advertising [22]. Research shows that fake news spreads “significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly” than true news [24:1146] and has had major societal impacts [15]. All signs indicate that it will get worse as political activists, scammers, alternative news media, and hostile governments become more sophisticated in their production and targeting of fake news. Fake news and other types of false information are also a matter of concern for business and management research and practice [2,9,10,11,12,19]. Businesses have engaged in deceptive communications such as greenwashing, astroturfing, false advertising and other types of false messages [4,5,14], but false content presented as news presents a novel range of issues for individuals, organizations, and societies [1,18]. The widespread adoption and use of information and communication technologies, particularly social and digital media, play a key role in the current wave of fake news and false information sweeping the globe [1,7,13]. We believe that the IS discipline can contribute significantly to the discourse, as it already has in related areas such as cyberdeviance [23,24] and deception [e.g., 5]. Our field can draw on its intellectual core of theories and empirical findings on the design, use, and impacts of IT artifacts at different levels of analysis. A nascent body of IS research on this topic is emerging [6,8,16–18,20,21]. Related areas such as review manipulation [e.g., 11] and social behaviors in online social networks [e.g., 10,12,21] can provide valuable lessons to apply to online fake news and false information more generally. Yet there is a dearth of evidence about many aspects, and many issues remain open to debate. We received 80 submissions, which went through three rounds of review and revision. The papers spanned a diverse set of experimental, qualitative, econometric, and analytical methods, and focused on fake news around the globe. The set of accepted papers are also diverse in methods and focus. We would like to say that collectively the articles offer several viable solutions to the problem of fake news. However, this is not the case in all instances.
- DOI
- 10.1080/07421222.2021.1990609
- Sources
- semanticscholar openalex