Understanding Morality of Misinformation through Analysis of Fake News

Our moral values serve as a compass, delineating the difference between right and wrong. Interested in the moral expressions in news content, we measured and compared moral expressions in fake versus real news content in both political and celebrity news. Specifically, we utilized vector space modeling and bag-of-words methodology to quantify the expression of each moral dimension in the news content, and applied Mann-Whitney U test in the comparison of the moral expressions in two types of news content. Five morality dictionaries developed based on morality foundation theory were leveraged in our analysis, allowing us to assess the consistency and alignment of captured results across different corpora. Our analysis found that fake news often uses a positive tone when talking about loyalty and authority, but they focus on negative aspects when discussing sanctity, which includes topics seen as impure or repugnant. Political fake news mostly highlights vices, except for authority, which is a major focus. In contrast, entertainment fake news often talk about virtues.