The viral spread of hoaxes and misinformation ahead of the US presidential election and Brexit referendum two years ago was a wake-up call for many established news media, which have gone on the offensive to shore up their credibility and help filter out fake news.
Major media organizations, often in partnership with big technology and social media firms, have stepped up fact-checking and other steps to support fact-based journalism.
However, such efforts have been complicated by unrelenting attacks on the media by US President Donald Trump and others who tend to label any unfavorable coverage “fake news.”
Fake news is as old as journalism itself and reputable media organizations have often played a role of gatekeeper to reliable information. This role has been fundamentally challenged in the fast-moving Internet age when rumors and false information can become viral, sometimes with tragic results.
In one chilling example in India, a WhatsApp rumor warning that 300 people had descended on Gujarat State looking to abduct and sell children has triggered deadly mob attacks.
Social media “has made things much worse,” because it “offers an easy route for non-journalists to bypass journalism’s gatekeepers, so that anyone can ‘publish’ anything, however biased, inaccurate or fabricated,” Illinois State University journalism professor John Huxford said.
“Journalism’s role as the ‘gatekeeper’ of what is and isn’t news has always been controversial, of course, but we’re now seeing just how bad things can get when that function breaks down,” Huxford said.
Internet firms, after initial reluctance to define themselves as “media,” have stepped up efforts to identify false news and to “curate” stories from “trusted” news sources.
“Technology companies including Apple, Google, Snapchat, Twitter and, above all, Facebook have taken on most of the functions of news organizations, becoming key players in the news ecosystem, whether they wanted that role or not,” a report by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism said in March.
Numerous studies have shown that fake news — often more sensational than genuine information — spreads faster online because of how social media have prioritized “virality.”
“False political news traveled deeper and more broadly, reached more people, and was more viral than any other category of false information,” a report published this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said.
The MIT researchers examined 126,000 rumors spread by 3 million people and found that false news reached more people than the truth.
“Analysis found that it took the truth approximately six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people,” the researchers said.
Oxford Internet Institute researchers came to a similar conclusion, citing a study that showed that on many online platforms, news is “prioritized by complex algorithms that have been coded to sort, filter, and deliver content in a manner that is designed to maximize users’ engagement.”
“The speed and scale at which content ‘goes viral’ grows exponentially, regardless of whether or not the information it contains is true,” Oxford researchers Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard wrote.
Huxford said that many Internet users are not adept at telling fake news from the real thing, making the role of major news organizations critical.
“This is why Trump falsely labelling the mainstream media as ‘fake news’ is so toxic,” he said. “It means that, at a time when there is a lot of fabrication and falsehoods swirling through the system, the credibility of the most reliable sources of news is being undermined.”
There have been some hopeful signs for news media, such as increased digital subscriptions for the New York Times and Washington Post, but many legacy organizations, such as local newspapers, are struggling with a shift to digital platforms.
Journalists could face new dangers in the current environment as they in some cases become subject to attacks by political leaders even when trying to debunk false information.
In Brazil, the fact-checking organizations Lupa and Aos Fatos, which have partnered with Facebook to curb fake news, have faced threats and harassment, with some groups accusing them of ideological bias.
The Philippine government, meanwhile, revoked the license of Web site Rappler, which has also joined fact-checking efforts against Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
The US has broad constitutional protection for the press, but some have said that Trump’s attacks are having an impact.
As fake news has extended its global reach, so has fact-checking — with 149 initiatives now running in 53 countries, the Duke University Reporters Lab said.
Facebook has established fact-checking partnerships with 25 organizations, including Agence France-Presse, in 14 countries, to stem the spread of misinformation.
Yet even fact-checking has its limits and some people will remain committed to believing false information regardless of verification efforts, studies show.
In late 2016, an attacker fired shots in a Washington pizzeria based on the erroneous belief that it was the location of a child sex ring involving former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In a recent survey, 51 percent of Republican respondents said they believed that former president Barack Obama was born in Kenya — another widely shared fallacy.
In a Pew Research Center survey released last year, two-thirds of US adult respondents said that fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.
Of the respondents, 23 percent said that they had shared a fake news story, with nearly half of those saying that they knew it was false at the time.
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