New Research Explores News Values in Perceived Misinformation Across 24 Countries
Sami Nenno, Postdoc in the Junior Research Group Computational Social Science at SynoSys, Center Synergy of Systems, has co-authored an insightful new paper, All the (Fake) News That’s Fit to Share? News Values in Perceived Misinformation Across Twenty-Four Countries. Co-written with Cornelius Puschmann, the study has been published in The International Journal of Press/Politics and investigates the relationship between journalistic news values and perceived misinformation in diverse national contexts.
The research addresses a notable gap in the understanding of how misinformation is shaped and perceived globally. While much of the previous scholarship has focused on misinformation within WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries, this study expands the scope by including both WEIRD and non-WEIRD regions. Using a dataset of over 770,000 Facebook-shared URLs flagged as misinformation by users, the study analyzes the prevalence of five key news values: conflict, negativity, proximity, individualization, and informativeness. Through computational analysis, the authors explore how these news values appear in flagged and unflagged content and assess their variation across 24 countries.
The research reveals that flagged content, often perceived as misinformation, tends to emphasize conflict and negativity more strongly than unflagged content. Other news values, such as proximity and individualization, also appear more prominently in flagged items, though with varying intensity. Significant differences in the prevalence of news values were observed between WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries. For instance, proximity and negativity were found to be more pronounced in WEIRD countries, whereas individualization was more prevalent in non-WEIRD contexts. The study also highlights unique patterns in countries such as the United States and Brazil, where conflict and negativity were particularly dominant in flagged content.
The findings challenge existing frameworks of news values, which were primarily developed within Western contexts, by showing that these models may not fully account for the diversity of global media landscapes. This emphasizes the need for more inclusive theoretical models that better reflect regional and cultural differences.
This study contributes to the growing field of misinformation research by providing a global perspective on how news values intersect with perceived misinformation. It highlights the influence of journalistic styles and national media systems on the characteristics of flagged content, offering valuable insights for academics, journalists, and policymakers seeking to address the challenges posed by misinformation.
This publication was part of Sami Nenno’s PhD project and was written during his time at the University of Bremen and at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. He recently joined Synosys to continue his work. The paper is accessible online at this link.
