During the last decades, the digital revolution that we have all experienced through the widespread deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has multilaterally influenced individual's perception about significant aspects of everyday life. Among others, the massive adoption of internet technologies and the transition to the Web 2.0/3.0 paradigms (and beyond) have shaped a dynamically changing media environment. As a result, new forms of journalism and mass communication have been launched and are currently available, promoting the so-called citizen and participatory journalism models, where user generated content (UGC) is dominant. The arising issue is that part of the propagated information may be subjective, manipulated, and/or unreliable, which is further deteriorated by the lack of confidence of many average users within the new digital environment. The present chapter attempts to enlighten the correlations between the rapidly transforming media landscape and its unwanted effect on news and content tampering.
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Historically, technological advances have always affected human life and especially the professional and social activities that were /are related to the associated evolution. We have witnessed such an intensive impact in our everyday habits due to the digital revolution that took place during the last decades. This transformation was dominated by the remarkable progress, achieved in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), resulting in the introduction and extensive use of novel mediated communication tools (Kalliris & Dimoulas, 2009; Siapera & Veglis, 2012). In particular, the widespread adoption of Internet technologies and the transition from the primitive Web 1.0 initiative to Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 eras (and beyond), drastically altered (and continues to alter) the “user’s access to information” scenarios (Aghaei, Nematbakhsh, & Farsani, 2012; Dimoulas, Veglis, & Kalliris, 2014, 2015, 2018; Matsiola, Dimoulas, Kalliris, & Veglis, 2015). The proliferation of manageable multimedia capturing, processing and sharing tools engaged people to be actively involved in the news production and consumption processes. As a result, new forms of Digital Journalism and Mass Communications are continuously launched and elaborated, advancing contemporary media services. Among others, easier information exchange is favored by the efficient collaboration between remotely-located users, groups, professionals and experts of various kinds, therefore promoting pluralism and diversity with timely- and geographically-boundless news coverage (i.e. without time and/or location restrictions). Along with the contemporary journalism technologies (i.e. robot-, drone-, immersive-journalism, etc.), new digital storytelling potentials also appear, aiming at offering enhanced capabilities of content capturing, processing automation and augmented user interaction (Chamberlain, 2017; Coddington, 2015; Dimoulas, 2015; Dimoulas et al., 2014a, 2015, 2018; Gynnild, 2014; Ntalakas, Dimoulas, Kalliris, & Veglis, 2017; Tremayne & Clark, 2014; Veglis, Dimoulas, & Kalliris, 2016).