The Fear of "Fake News"

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
Americans now live in an age of intense political polarization. One result? Partisan political websites are feeding followers false or misleading information, according to an Oct. 20 analysis by BuzzFeed News.

Their review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyper-partisan Facebook pages selected from the right and from the left found that the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments -- far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison.

One purveyor of false news, Alex Jones, has nearly 1.4 million followers on Facebook. In a Nov. 17, 2013 interview in New York magazine, Jones claimed that being called a conspiracy theorist was just a way to discredit “someone who questions known liars in government and media.”

So are we really so gullible? According to several studies, the answer is yes: even the most obvious fake news starts to become believable if it’s shared enough times.

Is all of this really unprecedented?  Not really. First of all, there’s nothing new about it. We’ve had pamphleteers spreading scurrilous lies since the dawn of print. Has no one heard of the various conspiracy theories around John F. Kennedy’s assassination?

We have always been subjected to fabricated news, but it used to be called propaganda. As David Uberti pointed out on Dec. 15 in “The Real History of Fake News,” in the Columbia Journalism Review, “It’s worth remembering, in the middle of the great fake news panic of 2016, America’s very long tradition of news-related hoaxes.”

By the early 19th century, when modern newspapers came on the scene, many were printing fake stories to increase circulation.The only thing new is that virtually anyone with a computer can disseminate it now, via tweets, Facebook posts, their own websites, or other social media.

“Whatever its other cultural and social merits, our digital ecosystem seems to have evolved into a near-perfect environment for fake news to thrive,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Dec. 12.

In consequence, many internet destinations “have become unsafe spaces,” as Jennifer Howard observed in “Internet of Stings,” in the Times Literary Supplement of Dec. 2, “where fake news prevail.”

Fake news also proliferates because “real news” is sometimes suppressed. All kinds of stories are also subject to “self-censorship” by the mainstream press. Public trust of the media has been in decline for decades.

So people turn to samizdat (as I now call these various blogs), which may or may not be telling the truth.

So how can we protect ourselves from digital lies? Separating truth from fiction takes time and an open mind. And who should decide what is false and what isn’t?

After all, was it “fake news” to report on data models that showed Hillary Clinton with overwhelming odds of winning the presidency? Surely that, too, skewed the election.

Some believe the solution is enhanced fact-checking – but others see this, too, as a conspiracy designed to censor unpleasant news. Who will guard the guardians? It becomes a house of mirrors.

We should definitely not leave that task to governments, as Kenan Malik cautioned in “Gatekeepers and the Rise of Fake News,” a Dec. 5 New York Times oped. Such suggestions “promote cures worse than the disease.”

Here’s some advice from British journalist Simon Oxenham of the London-based New Scientist magazine: check who produced it. “Often it is clear from the URL that a website is pretending to be reputable by stealing the name and style of another publication.”

But the “big lie” unfortunately sometimes wins the day, with dire consequences.