THE FACTS ABOUT FAKE NEWS:

The very real dangers of misinformation

You might think that fake news is nothing more than amusing, far-fetched conspiracy theories, or Donald Trump’s go-to catchphrase when someone reports on his wrongdoings. But fake news can actually cause real harm, whether it is used to manipulate public opinion or to break down our trust in credible sources and deligitimise real news.

Mark Twain said it best: ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.’ The only problem with that statement is that Mark Twain never uttered those words – it’s actually one of the most oft-misattributed quotes out there. Benham’s Book of Quotations credits the line to the Victorian-era preacherman Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and his version is a little more idiomatic: ‘A lie travels round the world while Truth is putting on her boots.’ But if we’re going to be completely truthful,

the original sentiment likely came from Jonathan Swift, who wrote in 1710 that ‘Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.’

Regardless of who said it first, the notion has never been more relevant than now. In our ‘post-truth’ era, ‘alternative facts’ have become the new normal. Fake news, defined as ‘fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organisational process or intent’, is so ingrained in our daily lives that we can often no longer tell the difference between what is legitimate and what isn’t.

In a 2018 paper published in the journal Science and written by a team of experts including political scientists, legal experts, journalists, fact checkers and psychologists, the results were clear: ‘It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1 500 people.’ And that’s not the only problem.

‘Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,’ they wrote, ‘and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information.’

And before you blame the bots, take note of this little tidbit: the team found that automated accounts had little influence on the spread of false information – yes, they sped up the process, but didn’t discriminate between what was true and what was false.

‘This suggests that false news spreads farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’

Why are we so keen to spread the lies?

‘False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information,’ says Professor Sinan Aral of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. ‘On social networks, people can gain attention by being the first to share previously unknown – but possibly false – information. People who share novel information are seen as being in the know.’

POPE FRANCIS & PIZZAGATE

If you were to believe everything you read online, you’d think the world had gone completely mad. ‘Did Pope Francis Cancel the Bible and Propose a New Holy Book?’ read one recent headline. If another article is to be believed, Miami introduced new ‘texting-friendly’ lanes on the freeway, complete with ‘safety bumpers’ along the sides. (They even had pictures.) Also, Buzz Aldrin revealed the truth about aliens in a lie-detector test (they are real!); the Zika virus is being spread by genetically modified mosquitoes; John McCain organised the London terror attack; and the Dalai Lama announced that he was going to be the star of an upcoming sitcom. (For the record, we would watch that.)

And before you roll your eyes and say, ‘Who is going to buy any of that?’ here’s the scary part: people struggle to distinguish between real news and fake news. All of the aforementioned stories are fake, but they were widely circulated online – so much so that myth-busting website Snopes.com had to examine and debunk a few.

Another issue: sometimes the repercussions of a fake news story are very real.

‘Solar panels were draining the sun of its energy’ warned one fake news article, prompting a town in the US to block the construction of a solar farm.

On 9 January this year, more than a month before it happened, a website mimicking a real news site reported that former President Jacob Zuma had resigned, causing the rand to spike, then drop again.

And in a truly alarming story out of the US dubbed ‘Pizzagate’, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch rushed to the aid of a fictional group of kids after seeing fake news content about a Democrat-run child sex-trafficking ring that was being run out of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place in Washington DC. He came armed with an AR-15 military-style rifle and revolver, firing three shots during the Sunday rush while looking for a basement that didn’t exist. Luckily no one was hurt, but the pizza place’s business has suffered as a result, and Edgar was sentenced to four years in prison.

‘Beyond Pizzagate, the internet is full of wild conspiracy theories where people urge members of the public… to take action,’ wrote assistant US attorneys Demian Ahn and Sonali Patel.

‘A significant sentence is required to deter other people from pursuing vigilante justice based only on their YouTube feed,’ prosecutors wrote. ‘The fact that no one was shot was entirely the product of good luck.’

CROOKED HILLARY

Probably the best real-life example of fake news having actual repercussions is the last US election. In the run-up to voting day, Hillary Clinton in particular was the subject of endless fake news

posts on Facebook, ranging from fairly innocuous to completely absurd. A website called Conservative-State reported that in 2013 she had said, ‘I would like to see people like Donald Trump run for office; they’re honest and can’t be bought.’ Despite the obvious clue in the source’s name, the post racked up more than 480 000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook in less than a week. Meanwhile, The New York

Times’s legitimate report revealing that Trump had declared a $916 million loss on his income tax returns back in 1995 prompted only a meagre 175 000 Facebook interactions over the course of an entire month.

The Denver Guardian, meanwhile, reported that an FBI agent suspected in Hillary’s email leak scandal was ‘found dead in an apparent murder-suicide’. This story was shared tens of thousands of times, despite that fact that both the story and the Denver Guardian were complete fabrications. It gets worse. Times.com.mx claimed that Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo donated millions to her 2016 presidential campaign and Your News Wire fake news site reported that 25 million fraudulent votes were cast for her. Neither of those claims is true, but they got so much traction that Snopes.com felt obliged to debunk them.

Even if US voters didn’t believe any of those stories, that doesn’t mean they weren’t taken in by a fake news scam – the campaign against Hillary went even further than fraudulent articles. Using the same fonts and imagery as the real Clinton campaign materials, fake Twitter ads told voters that they could ‘save time’ and ‘vote from home’, by texting her name to a five-digit number. Handy, right?

According to Hillary herself, fake news stories had an unprecendented influence on her campaign.

‘Here’s what the other side was doing,’ she told tech news site

Recode. ‘Through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will – lies – the other side was using content that was just flat out false, and delivering it both above and below the radar screen.’ The ‘vast majority’ of the stories that were circulating about her on Facebook, says Hillary, were false – and she feels that Facebook needs to step in.

‘They’ve got to curate the news more effectively,’ she said. ‘They’ve got to help prevent fake news from creating a new reality.’

In a recent Senate hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly acknowledged the role his company played in the spread of fake news.

‘Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,’ he said. ‘For most of our existence, we focused on all of the good that connecting people can do … But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech as well as developers and data privacy.’ ‘As long as it’s on Facebook… people start believing it,’ said Barack Obama during a campaign stop in 2016. ‘It creates this dust cloud of nonsense.’

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

But even more alarming than the use of fake news to confuse people is the use of the term ‘fake news’ to deligitimise real facts and events.

The most obvious example of this is climate change. Even though an almost-unanimous 97% of climate experts agree that humans are causing climate change (according to a 2016 report by authors of seven previous climate consensus studies), it is still not accepted as fact in the US.

The Guardian reports that ‘while 85–90% of Democrats are worried about global warming, realise humans are causing it, and are aware that most scientists agree on this, independents and Republicans are a different story. Only 35% of Republicans and 62% of independents realise humans are causing global warming (down from 40% and 70% last year respectively), a similar number are worried about it and only 42% of Republicans and 65% of independents are aware of the scientific consensus’.

Why? Because their own president is a climate change denier. In 2012 he tweeted, ‘Global warming is from the same dolts who said there was going to be another ice age because of environmental pollution. Remember that farce. That was because of the ozone layer decreasing. These scientists must be arrested for fraud.’ He also called it a ‘hoax’, invented by China.

Meanwhile, data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed that 2017 was one of the hottest years on record and that the percentage of the Arctic Ocean that freezes over during winter hit a record low, and is declining faster than at any time in the past 1 500 years. And in 2016, Nasa reported that sea ice at the South Pole hit a record low due to melting.

Between pulling out of the Paris Agreement and rolling back Obamaera environmental regulations

designed to limit carbon emissions, fake news about climate change (perpetuated by Trump) is set to cause significant environmental damage in the long run.

It doesn’t end there. In her TED Talk entitled ‘How fake news does real harm,’ journalist Stephanie Busari tells the story of how, in 2014, when the terrorist organisation Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, Nigeria, government officials dismissed it as a hoax, delaying rescue efforts.

‘This story, quite rightly, caused ripples around the world. People like Michelle Obama, Malala [Yousafzai] and others lent their voices in protest,’ she says. But despite worldwide attention – you might remember the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls doing the rounds online – Stephanie heard a very different story when she arrived in Nigeria.

‘Influential Nigerians were telling us at the time that we were naïve… that the story of the Chibok girls was a hoax. Sadly, this hoax narrative has persisted, and there are still people in Nigeria today who believe that the Chibok girls were never kidnapped. Yet I was talking to people like these devastated parents, who told us that on the day Boko Haram kidnapped their daughters, they ran into the Sambisa Forest after the trucks carrying their daughters. They were armed with machetes, but they were forced to turn back because Boko Haram had guns.’

Only two years later, after obtaining a video filmed by Boko Haram, did negotiation talks begin in an effort to get the girls back.

‘A Nigerian senator told me that because of this video they entered into those talks, because they had long presumed that the Chibok girls were dead,’ says Stephanie. Although 21 girls were freed in 2016, nearly 200 were still missing.

‘I’m furious when I think about the wasted opportunities to rescue these girls,’ says Stephanie. ‘[The] hoax narrative, I firmly believe, caused a delay; it was part of the reason for the delay in their return.’

This, says Stephanie, illustrates the ‘deadly danger’ of fake news.

‘There are some very smart people, smart engineers at Google and Facebook, who are trying to use technology to stop the spread of fake news. But beyond that, I think everybody here – you and I – we have a role to play in that. We are the ones who share the content. We’re the ones who share the stories online. In this day and age we’re all publishers, and we have responsibility.’

Research has shown that many of us don’t bother to read beyond headlines before we share stories we find online.

‘Who here has done that?’ asks Stephanie. ‘I know I have. But what if we stopped taking information that we discover at face value? What if we stop to think about the consequence of the information that we pass on and its potential to incite violence or hatred? What if we stop to think about the real-life consequences of the information that we share?’

Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for CNN and Global Affairs Anchor of ABC News echoes that sentiment.

‘I’d say really be careful where you get your information from,’ she says. ‘Really take responsibility for what you read, listen to and watch; make sure that you go to the trusted brands to get your main information, no matter whether you have a wide, eclectic intake, really stick with the brand names that you know. Because in this world right now, at this moment right now, our crises, our challenges, our problems are so severe that unless we are all engaged as global citizens who appreciate the truth, who understand science, empirical evidence and facts, then we are just simply going to be wandering along to a potential catastrophe.’

Research has shown that many of us don’t bother to read beyond headlines before we share stories we find online.