Fake News in Slovakia

In this last entry I would like to shift your attention to other issues in media and society that I came across visiting other people's blogs. One of the major issues in media seem to be portrayals of women. Although there have been an undenyable improvements of women's position in the society, it appears that the modern age keeps coming up with new ways of pressurizing women. You can learn more about the problems with portrayals of women in the media in the blog by Katerina Raimbault (2019). Special focus to the problem of body portrayals  has been given by Ruha Patil (2019), who believes it is almost as serious of an issue as hunger, poverty, and unemployment. In case you are not a keen social media user like me, I advice that you visit Amarlan Amgalan's (2019) blog, which analyzes the role of influencers namely on Instagram. An interesting fact is that the blog makes connections to Mongolia, which is not something you can readily learn about. Another interesting is

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 direc

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