{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,2]],"date-time":"2026-07-02T22:51:17Z","timestamp":1783032677277,"version":"3.54.6"},"reference-count":58,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,9,29]],"date-time":"2022-09-29T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1664409600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Future Internet"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Misinformation posting and spreading in social media is ignited by personal decisions on the truthfulness of news that may cause wide and deep cascades at a large scale in a fraction of minutes. When individuals are exposed to information, they usually take a few seconds to decide if the content (or the source) is reliable and whether to share it. Although the opportunity to verify the rumour is often just one click away, many users fail to make a correct evaluation. We studied this phenomenon with a web-based questionnaire that was compiled by 7298 different volunteers, where the participants were asked to mark 20 news items as true or false. Interestingly, false news is correctly identified more frequently than true news, but showing the full article instead of just the title, surprisingly, does not increase general accuracy. Additionally, displaying the original source of the news may contribute to misleading the user in some cases, while the genuine wisdom of the crowd can positively assist individuals\u2019 ability to classify news correctly. Finally, participants whose browsing activity suggests a parallel fact-checking activity show better performance and declare themselves as young adults. This work highlights a series of pitfalls that can influence human annotators when building false news datasets, which in turn can fuel the research on the automated fake news detection; furthermore, these findings challenge the common rationale of AI that suggest users read the full article before re-sharing.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/fi14100283","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,9,29]],"date-time":"2022-09-29T21:03:10Z","timestamp":1664485390000},"page":"283","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["FakeNewsLab: Experimental Study on Biases and Pitfalls Preventing Us from Distinguishing True from False News"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"14","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3407-9234","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Giancarlo","family":"Ruffo","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Torino, 10149 Torino, Italy"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7073-8567","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Alfonso","family":"Semeraro","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Torino, 10149 Torino, Italy"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,9,29]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Council of Europe (2020, October 13). Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making. Available online: https:\/\/rm.coe.int\/information-disorder-report-november-2017\/1680764666."},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"Unesco (2020, October 13). Journalism. \u2019Fake News\u2019 and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training. Available online: https:\/\/en.unesco.org\/sites\/default\/files\/f._jfnd_handbook_module_2.pdf."},{"key":"ref_3","unstructured":"(2021, August 06). Speech of Vice President Vera Jourova on Countering Disinformation amid COVID-19 \u201cFrom Pandemic to Infodemic\u201d. Available online: https:\/\/ec.europa.eu\/commission\/presscorner\/detail\/it\/speech_20_1000."},{"key":"ref_4","unstructured":"Shearer, E. (2021, June 08). More Than Eight-in-Ten Americans Get News from Digital Devices. Available online: https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/fact-tank\/2021\/01\/12\/more-than-eight-in-ten-americans-get-news-from-digital-devices\/."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1094","DOI":"10.1126\/science.aao2998","article-title":"The science of fake news","volume":"359","author":"Lazer","year":"2018","journal-title":"Science"},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"211","DOI":"10.1257\/jep.31.2.211","article-title":"Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election","volume":"31","author":"Allcott","year":"2017","journal-title":"J. Econ. Perspect."},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1146","DOI":"10.1126\/science.aap9559","article-title":"The spread of true and false news online","volume":"359","author":"Vosoughi","year":"2018","journal-title":"Science"},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"374","DOI":"10.1126\/science.aau2706","article-title":"Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election","volume":"363","author":"Grinberg","year":"2019","journal-title":"Science"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"298","DOI":"10.1093\/poq\/nfw006","article-title":"Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption","volume":"80","author":"Flaxman","year":"2016","journal-title":"Public Opin. Q."},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"203","DOI":"10.1177\/019251219301400204","article-title":"New Evidence About the Existence of a Bandwagon Effect in the Opinion Formation Process","volume":"14","author":"Nadeau","year":"1993","journal-title":"Int. Political Sci. Rev."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"175","DOI":"10.1037\/1089-2680.2.2.175","article-title":"Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises","volume":"2","author":"Nickerson","year":"1998","journal-title":"Rev. Gen. Psychol."},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1238","DOI":"10.3758\/s13423-011-0173-y","article-title":"The hypercorrection effect persists over a week, but high-confidence errors return","volume":"18","author":"Butler","year":"2011","journal-title":"Psychon. Bull. Rev."},{"key":"ref_13","unstructured":"Yuan, C., Ma, Q., Zhou, W., Han, J., and Hu, S. Early Detection of Fake News by Utilizing the Credibility of News, Publishers, and Users based on Weakly Supervised Learning. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics."},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Shu, K., Wang, S., Lee, D., and Liu, H. (2020). Credibility-Based Fake News Detection. Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media: Emerging Research Challenges and Opportunities, Springer International Publishing.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-42699-6"},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"258","DOI":"10.1609\/icwsm.v9i1.14625","article-title":"CREDBANK: A Large-Scale Social Media Corpus With Associated Credibility Annotations","volume":"9","author":"Mitra","year":"2021","journal-title":"Proc. Int. Aaai Conf. Web Soc. Media"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Hutter, F., Kersting, K., Lijffijt, J., and Valera, I. (2021). Early Detection of Fake News with Multi-source Weak Social Supervision. Proceedings of the Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases-European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Ghent, Belgium, 14\u201318 September 2020, Proceedings, Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-67661-2"},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tschiatschek, S., Singla, A., Gomez Rodriguez, M., Merchant, A., and Krause, A. (2018). Fake News Detection in Social Networks via Crowd Signals. Proceedings of the Companion The Web Conference 2018, Lyon, France, 25\u201329 April 2018, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.","DOI":"10.1145\/3184558.3188722"},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"0132","DOI":"10.1038\/s41562-017-0132","article-title":"Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information","volume":"1","author":"Qiu","year":"2017","journal-title":"Nat. Hum. Behav."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"42","DOI":"10.1016\/j.chb.2017.06.041","article-title":"From incidental news exposure to news engagement. How perceptions of the news post and news usage patterns influence engagement with news articles encountered on Facebook","volume":"76","author":"Karnowski","year":"2017","journal-title":"Comput. Hum. Behav."},{"key":"ref_20","first-page":"783","article-title":"Who Shared It?: Deciding What News to Trust on Social Media","volume":"7","author":"Sterrett","year":"2019","journal-title":"Digit. J."},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2521","DOI":"10.1073\/pnas.1806781116","article-title":"Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality","volume":"116","author":"Pennycook","year":"2019","journal-title":"Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2028","DOI":"10.1177\/1461444817712086","article-title":"The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016","volume":"20","author":"Vargo","year":"2018","journal-title":"New Media Soc."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"205316801984855","DOI":"10.1177\/2053168019848554","article-title":"Trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media","volume":"6","author":"Allcott","year":"2019","journal-title":"Res. Politics"},{"key":"ref_24","first-page":"4","article-title":"Selective exposure to misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 US presidential campaign","volume":"9","author":"Guess","year":"2018","journal-title":"Eur. Res. Counc."},{"key":"ref_25","unstructured":"Tacchini, E., Ballarin, G., Vedova, M.L.D., Moret, S., and de Alfaro, L. (2022, August 29). Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social Networks. CoRR 2017. Available online: https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1704.07506."},{"key":"ref_26","first-page":"452","article-title":"Cynics and Skeptics: Evaluating the Credibility of Mainstream and Citizen Journalism","volume":"91","author":"Carr","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. Mass Commun. Q."},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"358","DOI":"10.1016\/j.chb.2014.05.044","article-title":"The effects of source cues on online news perception","volume":"38","author":"Go","year":"2014","journal-title":"Comput. Hum. Behav."},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"79","DOI":"10.1177\/1931243111407618","article-title":"Influence of User Comments on Perceptions of Media Bias and Third-Person Effect in Online News","volume":"5","author":"Houston","year":"2011","journal-title":"Electron. News"},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"343","DOI":"10.1093\/ijpor\/edq018","article-title":"\u201cCorrective\u201d Actions in the Public Sphere: How Perceptions of Media and Media Effects Shape Political Behaviors","volume":"22","author":"Rojas","year":"2010","journal-title":"Int. J. Public Opin. Res."},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"825","DOI":"10.1177\/0093650210376189","article-title":"What Do Others\u2019 Reactions to News on Internet Portal Sites Tell Us? Effects of Presentation Format and Readers\u2019 Need for Cognition on Reality Perception","volume":"37","author":"Lee","year":"2010","journal-title":"Commun. Res."},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"202","DOI":"10.1016\/j.chb.2019.03.032","article-title":"\u201cThis is fake news\u201d: Investigating the role of conformity to other users\u2019 views when commenting on and spreading disinformation in social media","volume":"97","author":"Colliander","year":"2019","journal-title":"Comput. Hum. Behav."},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"431","DOI":"10.1089\/cyber.2015.0005","article-title":"They Came, They Liked, They Commented: Social Influence on Facebook News Channels","volume":"18","author":"Winter","year":"2015","journal-title":"Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw."},{"key":"ref_33","unstructured":"Ruffo, G., Semeraro, A., Giachanou, A., and Rosso, P. (2021). Surveying the Research on Fake News in Social Media: A Tale of Networks and Language. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"185","DOI":"10.1111\/jopy.12476","article-title":"Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking","volume":"88","author":"Pennycook","year":"2019","journal-title":"J. Personal."},{"key":"ref_35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/3449080","article-title":"Fakey: A Game Intervention to Improve News Literacy on Social Media","volume":"5","author":"Micallef","year":"2021","journal-title":"Proc. ACM-Hum.-Comput. Interact."},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1865","DOI":"10.1037\/xge0000465","article-title":"Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news","volume":"147","author":"Pennycook","year":"2018","journal-title":"J. Exp. Psychol. Gen."},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"854","DOI":"10.1126\/science.1121066","article-title":"Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market","volume":"311","author":"Salganik","year":"2006","journal-title":"Science"},{"key":"ref_38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Hassan, N., Arslan, F., Li, C., and Tremayne, M. (2017, January 13). Toward Automated Fact-Checking: Detecting Check-Worthy Factual Claims by ClaimBuster. Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/3097983.3098131"},{"key":"ref_39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"217","DOI":"10.1177\/1940161219898055","article-title":"Who Uses Fact-Checking Sites? The Impact of Demographics, Political Antecedents, and Media Use on Fact-Checking Site Awareness, Attitudes, and Behavior","volume":"25","author":"Robertson","year":"2020","journal-title":"Int. J. Press."},{"key":"ref_40","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"341","DOI":"10.1111\/j.1559-1816.1977.tb00758.x","article-title":"Attitude Comparison: Is There Ever a Bandwagon Effect?","volume":"7","author":"Myers","year":"1977","journal-title":"J. Appl. Soc. Psychol."},{"key":"ref_41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"591","DOI":"10.1146\/annurev.psych.55.090902.142015","article-title":"Social influence: Compliance and conformity","volume":"55","author":"Cialdini","year":"2004","journal-title":"Annu. Rev. Psychol."},{"key":"ref_42","unstructured":"Aronson, E., Wilson, T.D., and Akert, R.M. (2005). Social Psychology, Prentice Hall."},{"key":"ref_43","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"988","DOI":"10.1086\/676597","article-title":"Implementing the \u201cWisdom of the Crowd\u201d","volume":"122","author":"Kremer","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. Political Econ."},{"key":"ref_44","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Kumar, S., West, R., and Leskovec, J. (2016). Disinformation on the Web: Impact, Characteristics, and Detection of Wikipedia Hoaxes. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web, Montreal, QC, Canada, 11\u201315 April 2016, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.","DOI":"10.1145\/2872427.2883085"},{"key":"ref_45","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/3381750","article-title":"An Emotional Analysis of False Information in Social Media and News Articles","volume":"20","author":"Ghanem","year":"2020","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Internet Technol."},{"key":"ref_46","first-page":"171","article-title":"Exploring Online News Credibility: The Relative Influence of Traditional and Technological Factors","volume":"17","author":"Chung","year":"2012","journal-title":"J. Comp.-Med. Commun."},{"key":"ref_47","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wineburg, S., and McGrew, S. (2017). Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information. Soc. Sci. Res. Netw., Available online: https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3048994.","DOI":"10.2139\/ssrn.3048994"},{"key":"ref_48","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"316","DOI":"10.1177\/0963721420915872","article-title":"Aging in an Era of Fake News","volume":"29","author":"Brashier","year":"2020","journal-title":"Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci."},{"key":"ref_49","unstructured":"Bhagat, S., and Kim, D.J. (2022). Examining users\u2019 news sharing behaviour on social media: Role of perception of online civic engagement and dual social influences. Behav. Inf. Technol., 1\u201322. Available online: https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1080\/0144929X.2022.2066019?journalCode=tbit20."},{"key":"ref_50","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"931","DOI":"10.1080\/07421222.2021.1990614","article-title":"Biased credibility and sharing of fake news on social media: Considering peer context and self-objectivity state","volume":"38","author":"Turel","year":"2021","journal-title":"J. Manag. Inf. Syst."},{"key":"ref_51","first-page":"896","article-title":"Trust in Congruent Sources, Absolutely: The Moderating Effects of Ideological and Epistemological Beliefs on the Relationship between Perceived Source Congruency and News Credibility","volume":"22","author":"Robertson","year":"2021","journal-title":"J. Stud."},{"key":"ref_52","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"51","DOI":"10.1080\/13614568.2021.1889690","article-title":"The Goldilocks zone: Young adults\u2019 credibility perceptions of online news articles based on visual appearance","volume":"27","author":"Wobbrock","year":"2021","journal-title":"N. Rev. Hypermedia Multimed."},{"key":"ref_53","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3068","DOI":"10.1177\/1461444817742905","article-title":"What does the crowd think? How online comments and popularity metrics affect news credibility and issue importance","volume":"20","author":"Waddell","year":"2018","journal-title":"New Media Soc."},{"key":"ref_54","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"407","DOI":"10.1177\/10755470211009887","article-title":"Can we stop the spread of false information on vaccination? How online comments on vaccination news affect readers\u2019 credibility assessments and sharing behaviors","volume":"43","author":"Petit","year":"2021","journal-title":"Sci. Commun."},{"key":"ref_55","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Connors, P., Ortega, T., Kerr, D., and Wineburg, S. (2021). Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course. Harv. Kennedy Sch. Misinformation Rev., Available online: https:\/\/dash.harvard.edu\/handle\/1\/37367209.","DOI":"10.37016\/mr-2020-56"},{"key":"ref_56","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"23328584211038937","DOI":"10.1177\/23328584211038937","article-title":"Associations between online instruction in lateral reading strategies and fact-checking COVID-19 News Among College Students","volume":"7","author":"Brodsky","year":"2021","journal-title":"AERA Open"},{"key":"ref_57","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"eaau4586","DOI":"10.1126\/sciadv.aau4586","article-title":"Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook","volume":"5","author":"Guess","year":"2019","journal-title":"Sci. Adv."},{"key":"ref_58","unstructured":"Helmer-Hirschberg, O. (1967). Analysis of the Future: The Delphi Method, RAND Corporation."}],"container-title":["Future Internet"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-5903\/14\/10\/283\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T00:42:07Z","timestamp":1760143327000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-5903\/14\/10\/283"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2022,9,29]]},"references-count":58,"journal-issue":{"issue":"10","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,10]]}},"alternative-id":["fi14100283"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/fi14100283","relation":{},"ISSN":["1999-5903"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1999-5903","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2022,9,29]]}}}