Fake news ‘satire’betrays our freedoms
Hoax sites are a money-making racket that can have a serious effect if tensions are running high
In April 2010, the closest thing the country ever had to a white supremacist icon was murdered by a black worker. The followers of Eugene Terre’Blanche were incandescent with hatred. Their descriptions of the reprisals they planned against black people in general, and not just the murderer, were the stuff of nightmares. One man detailed a fantasy involving disembowelling, only to be interrupted midway by a compatriot. Such an approach was far too selfindulgently inefficient when mass slaughter was called for, he was told.
In retrospect, it is easy to dismiss their ultimately empty posturing. But the Boeremag treason trial was unfolding even then — just eight years before, a small group of white extremists had actively worked to trigger an apocalypse of sorts. Beneath the in-the-moment thirst to avenge the death of Terre’Blanche was a well-developed dogma that held that racial war was both inevitable and desirable.
As it turned out, Terre’Blanche was buried without some hothead racist taking a pot shot at a passing black person, and so triggering the kind of contagion of madness that South Africa had proved itself eminently capable of with the xenophobic attacks of 2008.
But what if we have been living in a world of rampant misinformation? What if the men waving the Nazistyle flag at Terre’Blanche’s funeral had suddenly received reports that his death had been the first of a wave of targeted killings of white supremacists? What if, the day after Nelson Mandela died, the people of Soweto (where the Boeremag had set off a bomb not all that long before) read that white extremists were on their way to pre-empt the prophesied black-on-white genocide?
In 2015, fake news websites started to make big money in the United States. Local versions of them first came to our notice this year. By next year, they will be well on the way to reaching their goal, which is to create frenzies regularly.
This is how fake news works. You register a domain name using a foreign service that hides your identity — and you get extra points for using a name that can easily be confused with a real news source, such as the current t1imeslive.co.za. Spot the “one” in that name?
Using one of many simple, free templates, you throw up something that appears to be a news website. You populate it with things that look like news, only better: reports of celebrity deaths, outrageous political events, major disasters. Extra points if, somewhere on the site, you post a disclaimer about how it is satire and urge your readers to laugh it off.
Importantly, you also populate it with adverts, usually the kind not welcome elsewhere and that consequently pay more to those who display them: scams, pornography, fake degrees.
Next, you go to Facebook and buy advertising space of your own. This gets your fake stories on the radar screens of unsuspecting people, who — whether out of outrage, shock or even a sense of civic duty — share them, spreading them even further.
People come to your site, and you get paid for the ads they see and click on. The difference between what you pay Facebook and what you earn is almost pure profit. One US operator who shared recent statistics was clearing about $30 000 a month.
But your profit depends entirely on the extent to which you trigger indignation, fury or any other powerful emotion among readers and convince them what they are reading is real, so that they spread the word.
Creating a hand grenade to throw into tense situations may not be the goal, but it is an inevitable byproduct.
It is easy to be a free-speech fundamentalist. I have been one as long as I can remember. It requires belief in only two basic tenets, the one more feel-good than the other: that people are essentially decent and smart, and that truth always wins over lies in the long run. The internet has proved both to be wrong. Social media shows that people are essentially a mob of thoughtless arseholes, and the “post-truth” political era shows that the dark side is, in fact, the more powerful one.
Traditional recourse is meaningless — between cross-border transactions and easy anonymity, the proprietors of fake news sites cannot be held to account for their actions.
On a technical level, the problem is trivial. Phishing and online rackets have seen the creation of a robust system to identify malicious content and, if nothing else, warn users against it. Dismantling the financial incentive is entirely feasible. Though the likes of Facebook profit from fake news advertising revenue in the short run, they are at the forefront of combating the pollution of the infosphere — because that is their bread and butter.
Legally, the basics are in place. There is no freedom from the consequences of speech in South Africa, not even for MPs. There are even provisions for criminal prosecution and long jail terms for publishing misinformation, albeit limited to misinformation about elections. And criminal investigations can often pierce the veil of anonymity when money is changing hands, thanks to systems to combat money laundering and terrorism funding.
The impediment is one of perception. Satire is holy. Through both apartheid and democracy, we have seen how important satire is in humbling the mighty, in giving voice to anger. So, as a society, we react with horror at the thought of limiting it.
Satire is in the eye of the beholder, and there is none in “Two arrested with over 80 000 ballot papers already marked as ANC votes” or in “Government flavoured condoms are full of tiny holes”. But there is potential for harm. Not the harm of hurt feelings or impinged-on dignity, but the harm of electoral violence and HIV transmission.
There are ways to hold satire to an objective standard without impinging on the real thing, just as there are ways to combat profit from misinformation without restricting the free flow of information. We need to start exploring them, fast.