Online information disorder: Fake news, bots and trolls

Abstract

Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in the propagation of different types of misinformation and disinformation, including among others fake news, rumours, clickbait and conspiracy theories. Misinformation involved in satire and clickbait, among others, has a different intention from disinformation. Despite many attempts by the research community, the development of technology to assist experts in detecting disinformation remains an open problem due to a number of challenges. For example, there are various biases such as confirmation bias and peer pressure that hinder users from recognizing non-credible information. In addition, fake news is intentionally written to confuse the readers, often containing a mixture of false and real information. To this end, in this editorial we present current challenges in the area of fake news identification and discuss contributions published in our special issue.