Fake News in Slovakia

So far on this blog, fake news and disinformation have been given a rather specific attention by focusing either on particular cases or particular studies; however, in this entry I will try to discuss fake news in the context of Slovakia in a more theoretical and conceptual manner. The aim is to evaluate the current situation and offer suggestions how to improve it in the future. To begin with, I would like to address the question why are fake news and disinformation even relevant, or in a more extreme case, why are they dangerous? To me the most serious issue is that the existence of fake news in its principle authorizes the nonprofessional public to create, publish and share claims, whose final impact outweighs the impact of claims of the  professional public, no matter if the claims are true or not. Even more importantly, fake news authorizes nonprofessionals to cast judgments about authenticity of standard information produced by professionals. Moreover, fake news pose a d...

In order to better understand the nature of fake news in Slovakia and to distinguish them from real news, I will now suggest three websites that people can use to check accuracy of information. Firstly, I would like to introduce a tool called Lovíme hoaxy (Transl. We’re hunting hoaxes), which is project developed by SME (a traditional newscast medium) with the aim of fighting disinformation (Hoťka, 2017). On the website hoax.sme.sk there is a list of articles analyzing various types of fake news that influence the public opinion. This is a tool that people can use to verify if certain information that they stumbled upon is true or fake. In case people wish to find out about the source of their information, there is a website called konspiratori.sk, which is “a public database of websites that provide dubious, deceptive, fraudulent, conspiratorial, or propaganda content” (Konšpirátori.sk, n.d.). Besides listing dubious websites, the database also ranks and rates these website...

Who Is Prone to Fake News? This year Science Advances published a study about fake news in the US presidential elections 2016. The authors collected data about Facebook users of different age groups and ideologies and looked for patterns regarding fake news on their Facebook profiles. As a result, it has been concluded that age seems to play a more important role than ideology in determining who will be more likely affected by disinformation (Guess, Nagler & Tucker, 2019) . Regarding numerical findings of the study, citizens aged over 65 were observed to have shared almost seven times as many fake news articles as those in the youngest group, which consisted of people having between 18 and 29 years. Guess et al. also assert that the relationship remained even after factors like, education, party affiliation, ideological self-placement, and overall posting activity, were held equal. Another observation, although not as robust as the age factor, was connected with ideol...

Media Literacy In this entry I will summarize the findings of the report “ Sense Wanted: Resilience to ‘Post-Truth’and its Predictors in the New Media Literacy Index 2018” (Lessenski, 2018), which analyzed 35 European countries in terms of their media literacy and potential to withstand fake news. At the end it will be discussed how this report relates to Slovakia in particular. First of all, author of the report, Marin Lessenski, identified highest media literacy in the Northwestern European countries like Finland, Denmark or the Netherlands, while the lowest scores were in Southeast Europe in countries like Macedonia, Turkey and Albania. Moreover, the trend was that countries with the highest levels of media literacy had the best education performance and the highest degree of media freedom. Secondly, Lessenski argued that there is a number of reasons why fake news has a potential of being powerful. The reasons reside in the nature of fake news - spreading faster when e...

Slovak Presidential Elections 2019 This year Slovakia held presidential elections. The goal of this entry is to analyze the elections through the lens of fake news, conspiracies, disinformation and propaganda. In case these phenomena did intervene in the elections, the main questions are, who were the candidates that were the main subjects of disinformation, what was the nature of the disinformation, and who distributed it? An analysis of 649 Facebook entries regarding presidential elections posted by 14 most relevant fake news channels has been published in a combined study by STRATPOL, MEMO98, SSPI and GLOBSEC ( Kandrík, Kužel, Masariková, & Sawiris, 2019). According to Kandrík et al. most influential of these channels were Hlavné správy, Hrica Lubos, InfoVojna, ĽUBOŠ BLAHA and Sila Pravdy. The analysis suggests that 208 of the disinformation posts had a positive tone and 84% of them were specifically associated with presidential candidate Štefan Harabin. On the other h...

The Vaccination Debate While it is true that fake news and disinformation tend to touch upon a number of different topics, very few of them (if not none of them) bear more importance than human health. One of the most prominent health-related issues subject to disinformation is vaccination. In fact, the issue has been so significant that the World Health Organization ranked it among ten threats to global health in 2019. Additionally, in Slovakia it can be observed that the public opinions on vaccination have been ambiguous and quite vocal even though they did not always correspond with the position of health professionals. In the recent years, a number of anti-vaccination initiatives immerged in Slovakia. One of such movements would be for example “ Iniciatíva pre uvedomenie si rizík očkovania ” (transl. Initiative for awareness of vaccination risks). At first sight, the website of the organization appears to be genuinely credible and veracious. The website cites different sour...