Seeing Through Misinformation: A Framework for Identifying Fake Online News

Abstract

The fake news epidemic makes it imperative to develop a diagnostic framework that is both parsimonious and valid to guide present and future efforts in fake news detection. This paper represents one of the very first attempts to fill a void in the research on this topic. The LeSiE (Lexical Structure, Simplicity, Emotion) framework we created and validated allows lay people to identify potential fake news without the use of calculators or complex statistics by looking out for three simple cues.