Fake news seems to be everywhere at the moment, with scarcely a week going by without reports of its pernicious impact upon society.  As the issue has grown in the public consciousness, so too have efforts to understand and respond to it.

The latest such effort comes from recent research from the University of Copenhagen, which used eye tracking software to understand how we respond to real news and fake news.

The researchers asked volunteers to read 108 news headlines, a third of which were fake.  They were asked to assess which of the headlines were most recent, with eye-tracking technology then monitoring how much time the volunteers spent reading each headline, and how often they fixated on the headline.

“We thought that it would be interesting to see if there’s a difference in the way people read news headlines, depending on whether the headlines are factual or false. This has never been studied. And, it turns out that there is indeed a statistically significant difference,” the researchers say.

Eyeing the news

The results suggest that people spend less time looking at false headlines than they do real ones, while they also appeared to fixate on them less too.  In all, they appear to give fake news headlines less of their visual attention, despite being unaware that the headlines were actually fake.

Why this difference emerged is harder to ascertain, but they used the findings to develop an algorithm that was capable of detecting whether a headline was fake purely based upon eye movements.

The researchers plan to further explore their hypothesis outside of a lab environment, potentially using webcams or mobile phone cameras (with permission obviously).  A possible end point would be to use their approach to help aid fact-checking services.

“Professional fact-checkers in the media and organizations need to read through lots of material just to find out what needs to be fact-checked. A tool to help them prioritize material could be of great help,” they conclude.