Regressive Saccadic Eye Movements on Fake News

Abstract

With the increasing use of the Internet, people encounter a variety of news in online media and social media every day. For digital content without fact-checking mechanisms, it is likely that people perceive fake news as real when they do not have extensive knowledge about the news topic. In this paper, we study human eye movements when reading fake news and real news. Our results suggest that people regress more with their eyes when reading fake news, while the time until the first fixation in the text area of interest is not a distinguishing factor between real and fake content. Our results show that although the truthfulness of the content is not known to people in advance, their visual behavior differs when reading such content, indicating a higher level of confusion when reading fake content.