A fake tweet recently went viral following an attack in London.
For the seriously trained journalists the advent of fake news was received with a degree of curiosity, credulity and then anguish.
The idea of publishing and broadcasting unfactual and misleading news was anathema to them. The rise of social media and messaging apps has challenged journalism’s code of ethics and well-crafted practices.
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Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and others have permanently disrupted traditional media and business models. They can instantly post and share news items that often are not fact-checked and contain misleading or inaccurate information.
True reality set in when the Collins Dictionary made “fake news” its word of the year in 2017. The global internet has made countless sources of information readily available with varying levels of credibility.
Fake news has had devastating consequences. Recently a video was spread through WhatsApp in India showing two helmeted men on a motorcycle circling a group of children playing cricket in the street and the man in the backseat grabbed one boy and the driver sped off.
The video was part of an anti-kidnapping public service ad produced next door in Pakistan. With the ending edited out to make it appear like a real kidnapping, the video went viral. Users claimed the child traffickers were running loose in Indian cities, which led to mob attacks and some two dozen people killed.
WhatsApp cut down on potentially harmful content going viral in India by allowing users to forward a message to a maximum of five chats at once. Forwarded content dropped by more than 25 per cent and the limit has been implemented worldwide.
In other incidents, an advertisement claiming presidential candidate Joe Biden coerced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor targeting his son Hunter was distributed on Facebook and Twitter but was refused by other news outlets because of inaccuracy. The social media giants refused to remove the ad on their networks.
Facebook’s head of global elections policy told the Biden campaign in a letter that claims made by politicians are “considered direct speech and ineligible for our third-party fact checking programme.”
A false Twitter rumour claimed a mass shooter displayed a bumper sticker supporting Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, and there was a call to boycott a restaurant chain based on an incorrect report that it was supporting President Trump.
When pollsters asked Americans whether they trusted the news they read, listen to and watch, their answer was increasingly negative. This sentiment has spread throughout the world.
According to research by the European Research Council, one in four Americans visited at least one fake news article during the 2016 presidential campaign. Fake news poses a serious threat to the values of honesty, truth and accountability — something the messengers of false information don’t hold too closely. Social media has enabled news enthusiasts and propagandists to compete with professional journalists on an equal footing.
The traditional news services, and even some governments, are now fighting back to ensure news is accurate, balanced and credible.
The BBC has launched an industry-wide campaign to get media organisations and technology companies to work together to fight disinformation, particularly around elections and other sensitive events. Tony Hall, BBC director-general, likened the rise of false and misleading news to “a poison on the bloodstream of societies. Disinformation and so-called fake news is a threat to all of us. At its worst, it can present a serious threat to democracy and even to people’s lives.”
BBC convened a summit that included the Financial Times, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Agence France-Presse, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the European Broadcasting Union, Google, Facebook and Twitter. The group plans to develop an early warning system so news companies and tech platforms can alert each other when they “discover disinformation that threatens human life or disrupts democracy during elections.”
The system would rely on a combination of technology and journalists to identify problematic content quickly and remove or minimise its reach.
Tech companies such as Facebook and YouTube are hiring thousands of content moderators and developing algorithms and filters to help identify problematic posts. But given the masses of data being posted to social media networks and the challenges posed by encrypted chat apps, the effect has been minimal.
Through the disruption, traditional news organisations have emerged leaner, stronger and stealthier, having learned to battle, and partner, with digital rivals. The Future of News Europe conference in Amsterdam last month debated how to secure growth, safeguard transparency and promote quality journalism for the next generation. Mishal Husain, a leading broadcaster at the BBC, said, “One thing that is positive is the fact that I, and I suspect all of us journalists, have a renewed sense of mission and purpose.”
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark donated US$1.5 million to non-profit organisation First Draft, which is conducting a campaign against disinformation and is hoping to send out alerts about stories to stay away from. First Draft is making free training available to newsrooms and will conduct 14 simulations of news events to show how reporters can recognise and stop the flow of false or misleading information.
Some governments are having a crack at containing fake news themselves. France and China have passed laws that define illegal misinformation and allow for its removal. Up to seven East Asian countries have recently enacted or are considering laws to limit or gain access to information about internet reports that officials claim are false, speculative, exaggerated or truthful yet hurtful.
Singapore has passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act and already has one “prosecution'. A politician placed a correction, with a link to the government statement, on Facebook after questioning the independence of state investors Temasek Holdings and GIC.
Thailand is planning to establish a centre to fight the spread of fake news, and Nigeria is proposing the Social Media Bill, which cracks down on posts thought to threaten national security, sway elections or diminish public confidence. People making the posts could be arrested.
An Oxford University internet Institute study found misleading and confusing content was widespread in British politics, despite 125 reforms by social media platforms over the past three years. Professor Philip Howard of the institute said self-regulation had failed. It suggested political parties that spread fake news online should be punished with bigger fines and restrictions on their use of data. It also recommended that the Electoral Commission keep a database of political campaigners' social media accounts.
The problem of tracking online fake news has been exacerbated by automatic text generators. Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) software is being used for auto-completion, writing assistance, summarisation and producing large amounts of false information fast.
Now AI researchers are busy developing automatic detectors that can identify this machine-generated tact.
But what about the social media users? Can they change their attitude? Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, said articles and videos that are most popular online are those that attract the most immediate and emotional reactions, even if they contain factual errors. He said transparency is the bedrock of restoring public trust in the media — eliciting greater involvement among consumers will lead to an increased demand for media transparency in sources of funding, involvement of advertisers and political pressure.
“Beyond a supervisory role, an important step would be to regard the online community as an active participant in producing news. Given the chance, internet users can carve out a crucial role in assembling and curating accurate information,” Wales said. “The key is to view social media users as a community of fact-checkers and news producers, instead of passive recipients of unreliable news”.
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