SOME BASICS
- Where do you draw the lines: fake news vs. propaganda vs. plain lies vs. mere falsehood vs. satire (such as The ONION)? Should we give up any quest for clarity here? After all, although ‘fake news’ was named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2017, defined as “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting,” it has since become a meaningless and even greatly harmful word, with many people using it simply to discredit news they don’t like. Or should we worry that the felt confusion about the semantics of this term is exactly what some have intended with a “cynical gambit” to sow deep public mistrust in ALL professional newsmakers?
- Fake news as part of a big picture: a long history of truth decay in this country, as is detailed in the 300+-page report by Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Kavanagh & Michael Rich, “Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life.” The authors define “truth decay” as a set of four related trends:
- increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data;
- a blurring of the line between opinion and fact;
- an increase in the relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact;
- and declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.
Here is a very short overview of the report:
Here is a slightly longer, more detailed narrative video by the two authors:
Here is Michael Rich’s much longer and more in-depth talk on “fighting truth decay in America”:
- Here is another historical perspective, “Fake News: An Origin Story” (Hidden Brain, June 25, 2018), which traces fake news to earlier newspapers competing for middle to lower class readers by catering to what they want to hear, often in sensational ways:
- And here is New York Times’ three-part mini documentary, Operation Infektion, on how we got to this point starting with KGB’s disinformation campaign (referred to as “active measures”). Here are the titles and abstracts of the episodes.
Episode 1: MEET THE KGB SPIES WHO INVENTED FAKE NEWS
We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-internet era. Meet the KGB operatives who invented it and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.
Episode 2: THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS OF FAKE NEWS
The Pizzagate playbook: same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories.
Episode 3: THE WORLDWIDE WAR ON TRUTH
Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead. [You may fast forward to 17:25 and watch the last bit on the threat of post-truth politics to democracy, as aggravated by a President D/Mis-information.]
DISINFORMATION
Here is a BBC documentary on the “art of disinformation”:
Here is a report about how Twitter bots and Russian trolls launched disinformation campaigns about vaccination to sow discord in the run-up to the 2016 US election. Here is the peer-reviewed study in question, published in the American Journal of Public Health, October 2018, 108: 1378-84.
Here are a few related NPR segments:
a) on how “Russian Bots Are Spreading False Information After The Florida Shooting”
b) on how Russian troll farms have been using social media to increase tension in US, feeding debates on subjects including the athletes taking a knee during the national anthem.
c) on how they target every tribe—not just Trumpians but also progressives who feel strongly about, say, police brutality. (clue: emotional appeal is our Achilles’ Heel)
On a hopeful note, listen to this interview on 1A with “Two Friends Who Dropped Out Of College To Take On Bots And Fake News”:
- If many have recognized that fake news, as worsened by disinformation campaigns, threatens democracy in US and beyond (see here, here, here, and here), it’s particularly hard to counter if ours is never a rational democracy but rather, more realistically speaking, an “emotional democracy.”
WHY WE ARE SO SUSCEPTIBLE to fake news
We, as often gullible, impulsive, and uncritical consumers and spreaders of news, are all complicit. For a sobering picture, read this piece from the Time magazine: “How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News” (Katy Steinmetz, August 9, 2018). A couple of passages are worth quoting here, as they connect with a major theme of this class covered so far regarding how, to borrow from Jonathan Haidt, we can be all emotional dogs wagging our rational tails.
“We don’t fall for false news just because we’re dumb. Often it’s a matter of letting the wrong impulses take over. In an era when the average American spends 24 hours each week online–when we’re always juggling inboxes and feeds and alerts–it’s easy to feel like we don’t have time to read anything but headlines. We are social animals, and the desire for likes can supersede a latent feeling that a story seems dicey. Political convictions lead us to lazy thinking. But there’s an even more fundamental impulse at play: our innate desire for an easy answer. // Humans like to think of themselves as rational creatures, but much of the time we are guided by emotional and irrational thinking. Psychologists have shown this through the study of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics. It’s hard to imagine getting through so much as a trip to the grocery store without these helpful time-savers. … So we might instead rely on what is known as the familiarity heuristic, our tendency to assume that if something is familiar, it must be good and safe.”
COUNTER FAKE NEWS: a few things to keep in mind
1. Here is an actionable list of 10 tips about “How to do fact check like a pro,” recognizing that it’s our civic duty to do so in this world.
2. And here is a more detailed guide about how to assess and improve on our civic reasoning in a social media environment. Remember that it’s not just about a vague “them.” It’s about you and me: all of us are more or less susceptible to being fooled, regardless of how educated we think we are. (Years of school education don’t necessary make us wiser over time.)
3. Apply “click restraint” and don’t fall prey to clickbaits (most notoriously exemplified by the Macedonian click farm, with its American and possibly also Russian ties more recently investigated). Here is a helpful explanation of how we are all naturally and easily baited:
4. Understand the ecosystem in which fake news thrive—due to mechanisms of belief echoes as illustrated here, echo chambers worsened by online bubbles, partisan biases that can affect how we decide what is factual, etc. Overall, getting a clear-eyed view of “science of fake news ” is key to designing effective strategies for preventing its proliferation.
5. Fact check everything, but practice intellectual humility and be ready to admit ignorance. “Fact-checkers should have the same healthy dose of skepticism when consulting any primary source to verify a claim, whether it is the UNor a peer-reviewed journal. Some claims you will just not be able to fact check; other times you will have to make clear what can and can’t be fact-checked with available data.” (retrieved from Poynter Institute’s journalism & fact checking website)
6. Familiarize yourself with the relevant social-psychological studies, and learn about the most effective counters—definitely not by merely negating fake news. (Remember the mere exposure effect.) Here are some research findings from 2012, but they are perpetually relevant. People can change their minds through online discussions, but only if these are carried out in a good-faith and strategically dynamic way. (Remember Growth Mindset, which can be extended to your belief about your fellow citizens: no one is absolutely fixed in their worldview.
7. Learn from responsibly curated resources. For example, the non-partisan News Literacy Project, which provides a wealth of up-to-date resources for education and self-cultivation in terms of news literacy. There is also this newish Fighting Fake project, which contains a whole range of resources for countering half-truths, deceptions, & disinformation.
8. Take advantage of various experienced, professional fact-checking sites, for example:
- Politifact, which won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for “its fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.”[1]
- factcheck.org, a project of UPenn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.
- Snopes, which has been in the business since the 90’s.[2]
9. If you are an educator, the Newseum, in partnership with the American Association of University Women (AAUW), offers a set of online resources to address critical educational needs in media literacy. The Newseum pitched the resources this way: “The Media Literacy Booster Pack, … available for free on NewseumED, helps students navigate today’s complex media landscape. The resources, which include infographics, videos, historical sources and activities, offer students and teachers the tools to understand how news is made and how they can take a more active role in the information cycle.”
[1] According to a 2016 rating by mediabiasfactcheck.com, a self-branded “most comprehensive media bias resource on the internet,” Politifact ranks first as the 10 best fact-checking sites. Ironically, here is Politifact fact-checking that claim. You can learn quite a bit about the fact-checking from reading the latter.
[2] Here is a thoughtful Podcast interview with David Mikkelson, who co-founded and now runs Snopes.