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Introduction
This conceptual work[1] offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the current state of disinformation and misinformation in the digital news, or what is cumulatively called the “fake news problem.” The two essential questions I ask are: what are the roots of the problem, and what is to be done about it? The insights offered here draw on years of investigations in deception research at the intersection of several disciplines – library and information science, media studies, journalism, interpersonal psychology and communication – with the purpose of informing the natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) applications to find appropriate interventions for disinformation in the news. Prior evidence-based research increases our grasp of the socio-cultural technology-enabled phenomena beyond computational tasks. Much research is still needed to better understand the phenomenon (Tucker et al., 2018), but key findings from previous research from disparate fields require wider dissemination for greater public awareness, and the adoption of a unified mental model of key contributing factors.
As many scholars and practitioners in the field of library and information science and technology (LIS&T) would agree, the discipline incorporates several relevant sub-disciplines such as information organization, information retrieval (IR), human-computer interaction (HCI) and data sciences including NLP and ML (The Association for Library and Information Science Education, 2016). The LIS&T literature should not be overlooked in finding solutions to disrupting disinformation and misinformation epidemic, since much of the conceptual work in our inherently interdisciplinary field pre-dates the general public’s greater awareness of the issue of disinformation and misinformation. For instance, in his 1983 pre-internet explosion work, Fox (1983) distinguished information from misinformation. Such distinction was of both theoretical and practical concern to libraries and librarians who are traditionally tasked with collecting, organizing and selecting credible information from trustworthy sources to enable their patrons’ efficient access to information. (For instance, The Library of Parliament, Canada (2018) refers to “delivering authoritative, reliable and relevant information and knowledge” as one of its missions.) While some respected authorities, such as a Harvard Librarian Matthew Connor Sullivan (2018), in his provocatively titled, “Why Librarians Can’t Fight Fake News,” argue that librarians do not adequately grasp the deeper psychological conditions of the disinformation and misinformation problem, LIS&T is not strictly limited to naïve practices of librarians...