Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with as little human assistance as possible. Automation can be used in any industry that involves repetitive tasks, but it is most common in the manufacturing, robotics, automotive and technology sectors, present in IT systems and business decision software. There are several types of automation. Basic automation is when simple and rudimentary tasks are automated. For example, digitizing work by using tools to streamline and centralize routine tasks, such as using a shared messaging system instead of having information in disconnected silos. Business process management (BPM) and robotic process automation (RPA) are types of basic automation. Another type is process automation, used to manage business processes for uniformity and transparency. It is typically handled by dedicated software and business apps. Using process automation can increase productivity and efficiency within a business. Process mining and workflow automation are types of process automation. In integration automation, machines mimic human tasks and repeat the actions once humans define the machine rules. The most complex form of automation is artificial intelligence (AI).

Automation has been present in our daily lives for a long time, but it is getting more and more sophisticated and complex. For example, home automation is a reality in so-called smart houses where hardware and software are combined to control and manage all kinds of home appliances and devices. Offices have also become more and more automated, with many tasks previously done by humans being passed on to machines. All professions have seen at least some degree of automation processes transform their practices, and journalism is not an exception.

According to the technology awareness platform Techslang, automated journalism refers to the production of news articles by machines or computer programs, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that allow applications to perform functions like scanning large quantities of data, selecting an article template or structure, and inserting key data points such as places, names, scores, and rankings. As a result of these automated tasks, a news article may be ready for publishing without human intervention, and much faster than a human could do it. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism, at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, has provided deep insight on this topic. The Guide to Automated Journalism, published by the Tow Center, states that the application of automated journalism ranges from simple code that extracts numbers from a database, which are then used to fill in the blanks in pre-written template stories, to more sophisticated approaches that analyse data to gain additional insight and create more compelling narratives.

Sport was one of the first areas where automated journalism was deployed. For example, in the U.S., Automated Insights and Narrative Science, both natural language generation technology providers, developed algorithms to automatically write articles about sporting events. Data visualization and data journalism are also areas where automated journalism has thrived. Reuters, the international news agency, uses robot journalism to create data graphics updated in real time. Reuters is also betting on the use of automated journalism to analyse data, and letting humans tell stories relying on this analysis. Due to the sheer quantity of data and diversity, fact-checking platforms are relying more and more on automated work. Fact-checkers like PolitiFact, Chequeando, Aos fatos, and others are using automated fact-checking to fight disinformation. We can also speak about geo-targeting news, news research, content production and chatbots that are already being deployed in some newsrooms, and all of them rely on automated processes.

The origin of the bot is robot. A bot is a software program that can execute commands or perform routine tasks, and one of its most common uses is to answer messages or carry out searches, either automatically or with minimal human intervention. This means that bots can run according to their instructions without a human user needing to manually start them up every time, often imitating or replacing a human user’s behaviour. Typically, they are used to perform repetitive tasks much faster than human users can.

According to Cloudflare, a major player in a Content Delivery Network (CDN), more than half of internet traffic involves bots scanning content, interacting with webpages, chatting with users, or looking for attack targets. Some bots are useful, such as search engine bots that index content for search or customer service bots that help users. Other bots are used in less positive ways, such as bots programmed to break into user accounts, scan the web for contact information for sending spam, or perform other malicious activities. But whether used for good or bad, there are several types of bots with unique goals and tasks. One of the best known is chatbots. But social bots are also very much used; these bots are considered, in a way, opinion bots, because they are developed to influence discussions with users on social media platforms. Spiders or crawlers, also known as web crawlers, are bots that access websites and gather content for indexes in search engines, such as Google and others. Similarly, web scraping crawlers are used for data harvesting and extracting relevant content from webpages. These are less known and less visible bots, but they are of great importance for the functioning of the internet as we know it.

News represents information about recent events, especially about events that influence people’s lives. Something interesting, intriguing or unique, something that holds a grain of conflict or controversy, something that is happening near a certain audience, something that raises the human interest – all these qualify as news. Dozens of events take place every day in each specific place and hundreds of events take place globally. But not all of these become news. Journalists are the ones who decide which of the information and events that flood the world every day are actually presented to the public. In order to choose what becomes news they have certain tools at hand. Thus, for an event or information to be judged newsworthy, it has to meet at least one or more criteria: impact, significance, prominence, proximity, timeliness, conflict, unusual/human interest, currency, or necessity. In a globalized world, news helps people stay informed and find out about things that influence their lives. For example, the ups and downs of the major stock exchanges influence the markets of the world, and people want to learn from news reports if the day’s changes will affect their savings or investments.

News is not a literary genre, but a textual one. Its main goal is to inform the audience. That means that news is factual: it should present true facts about events, situations, or people. All news has a headline, a lead, and the text itself (the news body). The main features of the news are accuracy and objectivity. Also, news should be balanced (by presenting all the points of view involved in a situation/event), concise (because people want to gain as much information as possible in the shortest possible time), and current (the news must present the latest information, not old news that people have no interest in anymore). It is also important for the news to be clear and rather simple (so that all people can understand it no matter their degree of education), easily read, and attractive to everyone. News reports usually appear in newspapers, on television, radio or on the internet. Due to the rapid evolution of technology, social media has become an important tool for presenting and sharing news. The problem today is that many individuals rely entirely on social media to keep up with the news and the data presented there is sometimes fake, untrue, or biased.

Evidence based reporting in journalism is about collecting, weighing, and combining all available information on a given topic. In many cases, mainstream media is unwilling to follow the principle of showing their work. If the sources are solid and the evidence is strong, why can’t the public see them? Very often terms are used in a news story like: “experts claim”, “studies show”, or “top officials say”. These kinds of formulations should be avoided whenever possible. There are also exceptions. Anonymous sourcing is a valid technique when dealing with sources that need protection, but in some cases the source is not bona fide and just wants to see how the public reacts to information or a particular policy proposal. For example, a 30-minute interview may be recorded for a news story. And a section of that is used in the article. How can the public know whether any given quote was fairly reported, or taken out of context? By checking the source. Publishing the entire interview, transcript, or audio, for those who want to check it, is a sign of transparency. Sometimes journalists cannot determine what’s true, but they can find out where the bulk of evidence and expert thought lies on the truth continuum and then communicate that to audiences.

Post-truth refers to widespread documentation of and concern about disputes over public truth claims. It is about relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. People are more likely to accept an argument based on emotions and beliefs rather than facts. The term was used academically and publicly before 2016, but “post-truth” was named Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2016, after the term’s rapid growth in popularity during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the U.K. Post-truth has become associated with the phrase “post-truth politics”. Post-truth is specifically concerned with 21st century communication technologies and cultural practices, but some scientists claim that post-truth has similarities with past political debates about postmodernity and dishonesty in politics. But what are the differences between post-truth and a lie? The liar accepts that there is a truth, knows what the truth is, but decides to tell a different story. A lie refers to specific facts that have precise spatial-temporal coordinates. Post-truth doesn’t simply deny or question certain facts, but aims to undermine the theoretical infrastructure that makes it possible to have a conversation about the truth.

Information disorder is a complicated phenomenon that has emerged with the development of technology and social networks. It refers to chaos created by false, inaccurate and misleading information that is produced and spread everywhere, polluting the entire digital communication ecosystem and endangering societies and democracies. Information disorder also refers to gossip presented as news, manipulated videos, old photographs presented as current, or information that is true, or half true, but taken out of context.

Information disorder is a crisis that intensifies all other crises, states the Final Report of the Commission on Information Disorder from the Aspen Institute. When bad information becomes as common, convincing, and persistent as good information, it generates a toxic chain reaction.

In their initial studies, researchers mentioned that the conceptual framework of information disorder has three key elements and each of them is composed of another three different parts. Thus, there are three important types of information disorder: (1) Disinformation, which refers to false information that is purposefully spread to hurt a person, a social group, an organization, or even a country. Those who produce disinformation are usually motivated by political, economic, psychological, or social factors. (2) Misinformation, which refers also to false messages that aren’t shared with the goal of causing damage. For example, people who share something on social media without realizing that it is false and harmful. (3) Malinformation, which refers to true information (public or private) that is utilized with the intent to hurt a person, an organization, or a country. Each category has three phases: the false information is first conceived, then it is produced, and finally it is distributed. The main elements of information disorder are agent, message, and interpret. Later, researchers added some more categories of information disorder: a satire or parody shared out of its initial context, a false connection (clickbait-type headlines and articles), false context, and misleading, imposter, manipulated and/or fabricated content.

Information disorder cannot be completely eradicated, but there are certain ways to mitigate its effects. The Aspen Institute commission suggests “high reach content disclosure” to urge social media platforms to share critical information about viral posts. The report also proposes “content moderation platform disclosure” to demand platforms present insights about the posts they take down.

When talking about fake news there are several important concepts that need to be brought up. One of them is misinformation. Misinformation refers to false content that is disseminated by people who believe the information they transmit to be true, and which is not intentionally misleading. (Disinformation refers to false content especially created and disseminated for financial profit or that is meant to deceive the public.)

Misinformation spreads very quickly, mainly due to the use of social media platforms and private messaging apps for news sharing. All types of misinformation are spread, but the most common deal with political and medical issues.

Several platforms have taken measures to fight misinformation and disinformation, pulling videos or blocking accounts because they violate the standards on misinformation. The high speed of dissemination makes it very difficult for the general public to distinguish between real and false information.

Even well-known news organizations spread misinformation when they publish or broadcast some piece of information without thoroughly checking it. However, misinformation is characteristic of low quality journalism which includes unbalanced reporting, publishing stories without proper verification, or the use of emotional and dramatic headlines in order to get more clicks and viewers. This type of journalism allows misinformation to be spread because people make no distinction between the two types of content. Good quality journalism needs to be a viable alternative to misinformation.

That is why the need for media literacy is now greater than ever. In order to be well informed, people need to learn how to recognize and distinguish between misinformation, disinformation and real news. It can be rather difficult to recognize misinformation. An important element is to develop a critical perspective regarding the information received and cross-referencing it with other reliable sources. It is also important to establish if a media outlet is trustworthy, if there are any sources identified in the article, or if there’s any solid proof presented.

Misinformation has many consequences and the phenomenon represents a peril both for the public’s health and safety, and also to democracy. Misinformation is also a risk for journalism because it is introduced as news and people start to lose faith in media and journalists when they are exposed to this type of false content. 

Disinformation is fake or inaccurate information that is intentionally spread to mislead and deceive. The term disinformation refers to false information that is created to harm a person, social group, organization, or country.

The English word disinformation first appeared in dictionaries in the late 1980s. The act of spreading disinformation is primarily carried out by government intelligence agencies, but also by non-governmental organizations. Recently, disinformation has been considered a synonym for fake news on social media and articles masked as legitimate news and created to deceive readers.

Historically, the word disinformation was coined by Joseph Stalin in 1923. The term originally used was desinformatsiya to describe KGB black propaganda. Disinformation was defined in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia as false information with the intention to deceive public opinion. During the period of the Cold War, the disinformation tactic was used by multiple intelligence agencies.

Nowadays, most activity in terms of active disinformation campaigns takes place on Facebook and Twitter. Techniques include the use of bots to amplify hate speech or paid trolls to harass and threaten.

The high degree of disinformation online increased in 2016 during the U.S. elections. The term fake news, which is considered synonymous with disinformation, became mainstream during the elections when hundreds of websites published falsified or heavily biased stories in the pursuit of advertising revenue.

Mal-information is deliberate publication of private information about a person or company for personal gain, or making a deliberate change to the context, date, or timing of genuine content. Mal-information is based on the truth but is used to harm a person, organization, or a country. Compared to disinformation and misinformation, mal-information is the use of genuine not false information to cause harm, by moving information intended to stay private in the public sphere. Leaks, harassment or hate speech are examples of mal-information. During the 2017 presidential campaign in France, the private e-mail of Emmanuel Macron was leaked on the Friday before the vote on 7 May. The information was real, and by releasing private information into the public sphere, the leak was designed to cause maximum harm to Macron. Individuals are often targeted because of their personal history, affiliations or religion, using photo leaks, mail-leaks etc. Harassment and hate speech often the modus operandi. But mal-information can also target a bigger group, or even a country. For example, someone might use a picture of a dead child refugee to ignite hatred of an ethnic group they are against.