Automatic and Manual Web Annotations in an Infrastructure to handle Fake News and other Online Media Phenomena

Automatic and Manual Web Annotations in an Infrastructure to handle Fake News and other Online Media Phenomena Georg Rehm, Julian Moreno-Schneider, Peter Bourgonje DFKI GmbH, Alt-Moabit 91c, 10559 Berlin, Germany {georg.rehm, julian.moreno_schneider, peter.bourgonje}@dfki.de Abstract Online media are ubiquitous and consumed by billions of people globally. Recently, however, several phenomena regarding online media have emerged that pose a severe threat to media consumption and reception as well as to the potential of manipulating opinions and, thus, (re)actions, on a large scale. Lumped together under the label “fake news”, these phenomena comprise, among others, maliciously manipulated content, bad journalism, parodies, satire, propaganda and several other types of false news; related phenomena are the often cited filter bubble (echo chamber) effect and the amount of abusive language used online. In an earlier paper we describe an architectural and technological approach to empower users to handle these online media phenomena. In this article we provide the first approach of a metadata scheme to enable, eventually, the standardised annotation of these phenomena in online media. We also show an initial version of a tool that enables the creation, visualisation and exploitation of such annotations. Keywords: Tools, Systems, Applications; Linked Data; Semantic Web 1. Introduction The amount of online news content is constantly growing. In addition to typical online news outlets, news are more and more consumed through social media channels. While about five or ten years ago only a fraction of the global population got their news online, nowadays online media and social networks are ubiquitous and used by a significant part of the population. By now we have an incredibly high amount of internet users who consume most or all of their news online. While there is still no clear consensus regarding the question whether the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017) has been manipulated through highly focused social media ads and large bot nets, we, nonetheless, now live in an age in which successful ma- nipulations of online content (news, advertisements, likes, clicks, viral campaigns etc.) can have significant conse- quences in the real world. It is, however, important to state that there are different types of “fake news” – false news is a more appropriate term – and they all come with their own specific intentions and purposes (Rehm, 2018). Often the impact of false news can be harmless (April Fools jokes) or maybe less harmless but still limited in scope (pupils spreading false rumours to bully their peers). Many online news outlets apply the same journalistic prin- ciples that have been in use for newspapers for decades, especially factchecking. However, there are also websites whose primary mission is not to provide high-quality jour- nalistic reporting but, basically, any type of content as long as it produces as many clicks as possible, generating rev- enue through online advertisements. At first glance, online articles of this second type look just like normal journal- istic content. In addition, there are other types of content whose design also mimicks news …

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