Truth vs untruth in the age of easy access to information

Paris: False information is saturating political debate worldwide and undermining an already weak level of trust in the media and institutions, spreading further than ever on powerful social networks.

US President Donald Trump popularised the term “fake news”, using it mainly as an accusation levelled at the media, and it is increasingly used by politicians from Spain to China, Myanmar or Russia.

“Fake news” has been generalised to mean anything from a mistake to a parody or a deliberate misinterpretation of facts.

At the same time, the proliferation of false online information is increasingly visible in attempts to manipulate elections, notoriously surrounding Trump’s 2016 victory.

Nearly two years after Trump’s shock win, debate is still raging on the impact of “fake news” on the presidential campaign.

The build-up saw examples of hoaxes and false news stories – one about Hillary Clinton’s alleged links to a child sex ring, another about the Pope purportedly endorsing Trump – which were shared massively and, some believe, could have swung votes to tip Trump to victory.

Misinformation had “a significant impact” on voting decisions, according to Ohio State University researchers, who questioned voters about whether they believed certain false stories.

The researchers said it was impossible to prove that false information had changed the course of the election, but noted that it would have required a change in just 0.6% of voters, or 77,744 people, in three key states to alter the electoral college outcome.

Since the election, Trump has denounced as “fake news” any information that displeases him while his aides have offered a mixture of truth and distortions, sometimes described as “alternative facts”.

This has hurt the credibility of the US news media and led some to describe the current period as a “post-truth era” – an age without a shared reality.

“The truth is no longer seen as important,” said John Huxford of Illinois State University, whose work focuses on false information.

Some studies suggest that more people are willing to believe falsehoods as partisanship has risen. A 2017 survey, for example, showed that 51% of Republicans believed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, despite the hoax being debunked dozens of times.

This year, the average level of trust in the news, across 37 countries, has remained relatively stable at 44%, according to a poll by YouGov for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

But Reuters Institute research associate Nic Newman warned: “Our data show that consumer trust in news remains worryingly low in most countries, linked to high levels of media polarisation and the perception of undue political influence.”

Despite the creation of dozens of fact-checking initiatives in recent years and first steps to tackle the problem from Internet giants, efforts to stem the proliferation of false information remain weak.

Techniques to create false information are growing more sophisticated with the development of deep fakes – manipulated videos that appear genuine but depict events or speech that never happened.

The truth is no longer seen as important. John Huxford