Fake News and Propaganda

There are lots of claims that circulation of fake news tilted the scales in favour of Trump. How exactly, you wonder:

1)      Most people don’t bother reading/watching any news; and their sole source of news is whatever their Facebook feed shows them.

2)     Facebook didn’t (couldn’t?) filter out the fake news; and (as always) just kept pumping whatever users tended to click on.

3)     Thus the fake news barrage hit those who were inclined to believe in it; and the volume eventually convinced them it must be true.

Nick Carr points out that how quickly things have changed:

“Once upon a time — not so long ago, really — there was something called the mainstream media, and it employed lots of journalists and editors and fact-checkers to filter the news. We came to resent these “gatekeepers,” as we took to calling them, because they restricted what we read and saw. They were self-interested elites who… imposed their own values on the flow of information.”

Soon we got what we wanted, thanks to the arrival of the Internet in general and social media in particular. And now we see problems with that too.

So yes, while this situation spawned an entire pro-Trump fake news mini-industry in Macedonia (yes, it did!), is there really any easy fix for this problem, wonders Ben Thompson:

“How do you decide what is fake and what isn’t? Where is the line? And, perhaps most critically, who decides?”

Gilad Lotan brings up another related issue we are still not facing up to:

“By focusing solely on that issue (fake news), we are missing the larger, more harmful phenomenon of misleading, biased propaganda… how do we identify information that is tinted — information that is incomplete, that may help affirm our existing beliefs or support someone’s agenda, or that may be manipulative—effectively driving a form of propaganda?”

This is a very tough nut to crack because:

“Fact checking doesn’t help, especially when the choir is being preached to… A consistent theme I’m seeing not only in the US, but around the world is a decrease in trust in media institutions.”

And what about the cases where a journalist at an established media house writes wrong new news (knowingly or unknowingly), asks Thompson. Doesn’t their very credibility influence people to change their mind? He then cites a concrete example: Judith Miller at the New York Times wrote repeatedly that Iraq had WMD’s: didn’t that influence the public and Senators to vote in favour of the disaster called the Iraq War, with consequences that ripple even today?

There are no easy answers to the twin problems of fake news and propaganda…