![\"Marten](\"https:\/\/clemson.world\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Marten-Risius-Main-e1516109638700.jpg\")
<\/a>Marten Risius\u00a0is an assistant management professor who has done interesting research on how to tell the difference between fake news from real news on social media channels.<\/p><\/div>
\nIf you\u2019re having difficulty discerning real from fake news on social media, you aren\u2019t alone. Surveys suggest it\u2019s a struggle for 75 percent of American adults.
\nResearch by Christian Janze, a Ph.D. student from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and Marten Risius, an associate professor of management at Clemson, may be of help. \u201cA lot has been written and said about fake news since the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign,\u201d Risius said. \u201cOur explorative study investigates how to automatically identify fake news using information immediately apparent on social media platforms.\u201d
\nThe study examined more than 2,000 news article posts on Facebook from left, right and mainstream media outlets during the 2016 election campaign, as well as responses from the user community. Articles were fact-checked to determine fake from real. Researchers then used 230 samples of fake news and 230 of real news and applied variables to predict those that were fake, with an 80 percent success rate. They then trained the algorithm so it could correctly detect 90 percent of the 230 fake stories.
\n[pullquote]Risius said the word count, or using all caps, exclamation marks or question marks in a post, are strong predictors of a story being fake.[\/pullquote] A person being quoted is a pretty good indicator the story is real, while if a story is shared more often with strong emotional responses, the likelihood of it being fake increases.
\nAccording to Risius, the process they used to determine authenticity is fairly simple, and he wonders why a social media outlet with a multitude of data capabilities wouldn\u2019t flag stories they know to be fake for their users.
\n\u201cThough they have many resources to determine what is real and isn\u2019t, they may be more inclined to prefer the community engagement and public attention rather than solve an issue over what is real or fake news on their platforms,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you\u2019re having difficulty discerning real from fake news on social media, you aren\u2019t alone. Surveys suggest it\u2019s a struggle for 75 percent of American adults. Research by Christian Janze, a Ph.D. student from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and Marten Risius, an associate professor of management at Clemson, may be of help. \u201cA lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":18700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[1153,2384,3317,3324],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-18406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-these-hills","tag-fake-news","tag-research","tag-winter-2018","tag-winter-2018-in-these-hills"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/01\/Marten-Risius-Main-e1516109638700.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18406"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}