The Role of Cognitive Bias and Emotional Drive in the Dissemination of Fake News: A Review and Prospectus

Ying Luo — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0700

The rapid proliferation of fake news in digital societies poses significant challenges to information integrity, social trust, and democratic governance. This review examines the role of cognitive bias and emotional drive in shaping the dissemination of fake news across political, health, economic, and cultural domains. Drawing on insights from psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and communication studies, the paper highlights how biases such as confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, and the illusory truth effect interact with emotional triggers including fear, anger, and hope to amplify the virality of false information. The review also analyzes the enabling role of social media platforms and algorithmic systems in reinforcing echo chambers and accelerating misinformation spread, illustrated through case studies in elections, public health crises, and environmental debates.

Empirical evidence underscores that misinformation persists due to both cognitive vulnerabilities and structural features of digital ecosystems. The implications are far-reaching: strengthening media literacy and education, crafting balanced public policies, and redesigning platform architectures are essential but complex tasks. Future research must integrate cognitive science, communication, political science, and data science, leveraging machine learning and big data for detection while also addressing the psychological and emotional drivers of misinformation.

This paper argues that reducing the harmful impact of fake news requires a multi-stakeholder approach, where media users, researchers, policymakers, and technology developers work collectively to foster resilient and trustworthy information environments.

Communication mechanism, mobilization network and narrative construction of digital media in women's rights protection movement in Iran

Liang Shasha — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0700

In recent years, the role of digital media in social movements has become increasingly prominent, especially in countries with strict government censorship, where their information dissemination, mobilization mechanism and narrative shaping capabilities are particularly critical. The women's rights movement in Iran has long been limited by legal and social structure, but the rise of social media has broken the traditional mode of communication and provided a new mobilization channel for women's rights struggle. This study takes the Iranian women's activist movement as a case to explore digital media such as How to shape the path of information dissemination, enhance the social mobilization ability, and construct the protest narrative on a global scale.

This study uses a multi-level data analysis method, combined with the theory of online social movement, Theory of resource mobilization, and Frame Theory, Focusing on the "White Wednesday" Movement and # MahsaAmini Protest cases, tracking the communication characteristics of social media transmission at different stages. Through the user interaction data of Twitter, TikTok and other platforms, the diffusion mode of topic tags, information flow path and the scale of protest are analyzed. The results show that digital media plays three core roles in the women's rights movement in Iran: First, social media breaks through the government information blockade and realizes decentralized communication, and the # MahsaAmini hashtag exceeds 200 million page views in a week, became the hot topic of global public opinion; second, the digital platform reduced the cost of protest groups, Telegram and Instagram became the main mobilization tools, the protest action expanded from Iran to more than 150 cities, and the Berlin rally was more than 80,000 people, Set one of the largest protests in Germany in recent years; third, social media shapes global protest narrative, visual symbols such as hair cutting and burning headscarf become the focus of international communication," Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (women, life, freedom) "slogan strengthens the global resonance of women's rights protection.

This study innovatively proposed the framework of "triple mechanism of digital protest", combines quantitative data and qualitative analysis, and reveals the specific mode of role of digital media in information dissemination, social mobilization and narrative shaping. At the same time, the research reveals the dynamic game of the government's digital repression and protesters' technology, providing a new perspective for the future research on the interaction mode of government censorship and social media struggle. The results not only enrich the theoretical research of digital media in social movements, but also provide practical inspiration for the struggle against women's rights on a global scale.

International Journal Fine Arts and Creative Innovation

The Role of Cognitive Bias and Emotional Drive in the Dissemination of Fake News: A Review and Prospectus

Communication mechanism, mobilization network and narrative construction of digital media in women's rights protection movement in Iran