How the Middle Media Played a Role in Generating Fake News

in the 2017 Lower House Election in Japan

Abstract

While so-called fake news has become a popular domain of research around the globe since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, few studies have been conducted in Japan. This paper focuses on “middle media” outlets, which play an important role in the Japanese online news ecosystem, to analyze the generation process of fake news. Results show that the middle media outlets contributed to producing fake news by combining news stories published by authentic news organizations and unverifiable, negative social media responses to these stories - a newly discovered role of the middle media. This study also revealed that such false content produced by the middle media was eventually picked up by an influential online news portal site through the path that I call the “fake news pipeline.”