Fake News, Disinformation, Misinformation and Digital Media

LAU Beirut Campus - Adnan Kassab School of Business - Room 903

The Department of Communication, Arts and Languages cordially invites you to the following Erasmus Public Lecture

Fake News, Disinformation, Misinformation and Digital Media

About the Speaker

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Dr. Mateja Rek

School of Advanced Social Studies, Slovenia

Dr. Mateja Rek works as a full professor at the Faculty of Information Studies and the Faculty of Advanced Social Studies. She is the head of the Infrastructure Program – collection, management and archiving of data on media literacy in Slovenia, which is financed by the Slovenian Research Agency. She is also head of the Jean Monnet Module – Media Literacy for Active Citizenship, funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Commission. Currently, she is especially active in researching and promoting the importance of media literacy and the need for media education in Slovenia and EU. She published several highly ranked scientific works on in the field of the media literacy and education, media construction of reality, strategic communication, intercultural communication, social change and development, active citizenship and civil society in the EU.

The term ‘fake news’ usually refers to false, fabricated or misleading information that mimics news content and thus misleads media users. With fake content, such information is created to influence the opinion of the audience. They are made to be seen as credible and supported by facts, but the facts are not accurate. This kind of fake news can be revealed by fact-checking or checking the credibility of the sources of these fake stories. In addition to fake news, the manipulative forms of digital media communication can also include sensationalist practices of gaining people’s attention and, above all, clicks with the aim of generating profit, which mass attention brings for marketing purposes or deliberate filtering and targeting of media messages to promote specific ideas or beliefs. Such practices can lead to information confusion, mistrust creation, polarization or even hatred. The purpose of this lecture is to present, think about and discuss a range of possible measures to deal with the spread and influence of online disinformation and present certain solutions on how to build resistance to such a phenomenon.