ONE of the big negative trends of 2016 was the preponderance of fake news on the Internet, so much so that many political pundits claim that it had an impact on the US presidential election.
Fake news wouldn’t be much of a problem if people were more discerning about the news they read but recent surveys show that people generally aren’t so. A Stanford Graduate School of Education study released in November revealed a widespread inability among middle school, high school and college students to verify the information they read. The report shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said.
“Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media, they’re equally perceptive about what they find there,” said Professor Sam Wineburg, lead author of the report. “Our work shows the opposite to be true.”
The assessments reflected key understandings the students should possess, such as being able to find out who wrote a story and whether that source is credible. “In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation,” the authors wrote.
But it’s not just students who are easily duped. Working adults fare quite badly too when it comes to discerning fake news from real news.
A survey from YouGov and The Economist released in December found that 17 per cent of Hillary Clinton voters and 46 per cent of Donald Trump voters believed elements of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory to be true. (That conspiracy falsely claims a connection between Clinton, a New York pizza restaurant and a paedophile ring).
Sometimes fake news is created as a prank, such as the one last month where a man claimed he was kicked off a Delta Air Lines flight for speaking Arabic. That story quickly went viral on social media and was even picked up by some news organisations. Delta investigated and denied his claims. It was later discovered that the person involved was a YouTube prankster who’d pulled similar stunts in the past.
Other times fake news is the result of rushed or inaccurate reporting such as when the Washington Post ran a story with the explosive headline: “Russian hackers penetrated US electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, US officials say.”
The story claimed that a code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration had been detected within the system of a Vermont utility. “While the Russians didn’t actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability,” the story said.
This wasn’t exactly what happened, and the utility company found it necessary to issue a clarification: “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organisation’s grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding.”
So the story went from Russian hackers gaining access into the US electrical grid to a single non-grid laptop being infected with malware. If this isn’t a case of fake news, it’s certainly a case of exaggerated or inaccurate news.
PUTTING THE SPIN
So, why is fake news so commonplace these days?
There’s a confluence of reasons involving newsroom competition, short attention spans and social media’s viral nature.
First, let’s look at the source of fake news. Pranksters obviously do it for the kick they get from getting their fake news spread around the world. But the frequency of inaccurate or fake news spread by mainstream media is a function of today’s hyper-competitive news environment where news outlets compete for ever-fickle clicks.
Media companies are supposed to do proper fact checking but doing so takes time and holding on to explosive news means getting scooped by other outlets. So there’s tremendous pressure to release the news as soon as possible. To make things worse, once a single mainstream publication runs with a story, other mainstream publishers will usually go with the story too, often putting their own spin on it without doing their own reporting or even fact-checking. After all, if the Washington Post runs a story, it must be true, right?
Second, let’s look at the disseminators of false news: Us.
Of course few of us knowingly spread false news but our Internet-induced short attention spans have led us to share hot news very quickly without verifying it — or in some cases, without even properly reading the stories — first.
A study published last year by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute found that 59 per cent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked. In other words, people are actually sharing news stories based on article headlines alone, without having read the articles themselves.
“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”
How does this lead to fake news being spread? Well, if people bother to read past the headlines, they might actually notice if there’s something fishy about a story. But if they just browse the headlines, it’s really hard to make that kind of determination.
To test how widespread this phenomenon is, a satirical news site called the Science Post last June published a nonsensical article consisting of “lorem ipsum” text with the attention-grabbing headline: “Study: 70 per cent of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”
Nearly 46,000 people actually shared that post! Talk about irony.
Third, the nature of social media networks is such that any piece of information can quickly be shared around the world in a matter of hours. Fake news can worm its way into millions of social media accounts before any rebuttal or correction is made. And even when a piece of news is exposed to be fake, there will be those who never receive such information or might simply choose to ignore it.
These days many people get their news from Facebook and Google and fittingly, both these tech giants have announced efforts to combat fake news. Both have announced that they won’t allow advertising to appear on sites peddling fake news. Google has said it’ll continue to tweak its algorithm to demote non-authoritative information in favour of high quality, credible sources. Facebook, meanwhile, says it’ll start flagging questionable stories with an alert that says: “Disputed by third party fact-checkers”.
We, the readers, can also do our part to help weed out fake news. You might not want to spend too much time fact-checking so here are three things you can do very quickly if you come across eye-catching news that might or might not be true.
1. READ BEYOND THE HEADLINE
Yes, admit it, at one point or another we’ve all been part of that 60 per cent of people described in that Columbia University study who passed on hot news just based on headlines. Instead, we should take the time to actually read a news story before passing it on.
2. CHECK WITH GOOGLE NEWS
...to see if there are multiple sources for that story. If it’s real news, multiple mainstream media sources would surely report on it. All you have to do is type in the keywords into Google News and see if there are many results.
3. CONSULT FAKE NEWS-BUSTING SITES
Yes, fact-checking takes too much time and effort. Fortunately, there are several sites that exist to bust fake news for you. These include FactCheck.org, Snopes.com and PolitiFact.com. Refer to them when you come across a story that you aren’t sure about.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com