Comparing features of fabricated and legitimate political news in digital environments (2016‐2017)

ABSTRACT With the problem of ‘fake news’ in the digital media, there are efforts at creation of awareness, automation of ‘fake news’ detection and news literacy. This research is descriptive as it pulls evidence from the content of online fabricated news for the features that distinguish fabrications from the legitimate political news around the time of the U.S. Presidential Elections (276 articles in total, from November 2016 ‐ June 2017). Certain stylistic and psycho‐linguistic features of fabrications may be apparent to the news readers: fewer words and paragraphs but longer paragraphs, more slangs, swear words and affective words in the stories. Such features could be used for educational information literacy campaigns for spotting so‐called ‘fake news’. Other informative features may require specialized analytical tools (or further training) to notice the presence of more words, punctuation marks, demonstratives and emotiveness in fabrications but fewer verifiable facts (or named entities) in their headlines.