Effect of Fake News on Social Media: Definition and Prevention
One of the most common and yet most disruptive trends is the notion of ‘fake news’. With such an emphasis on spreading information, what if the news being consumed is either wrong or misleading? The aim of this effect of fake news on social media essay will therefore be, firstly to define ‘fake news’, to then be able to assess the consequences of fake news in our society, and ultimately see how the media can address these challenges.
The term ‘fake news’ isn’t something new. As shown by Burkhardt, ‘fake news’ has been present throughout all human history, with evidence dating as far back as the 6th century AD, long before the internet age. ‘Fake news’ isn’t a product of our modern media, although the internet allowed it to grow at a large scale. Even with it being a part of our society for centuries, the definition of fake news still seems rather confusing: “the term “fake news” is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we’re left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase.” . In this paper we shall therefore define fake news as: News that does mischief with the truth in that it exhibits both (a) a lack of truth and (b) a lack of truthfulness. It exhibits a lack of truth in the sense that it is either false or misleading. It exhibits a lack of truthfulness in the sense that it is propagated with the intention to deceive. While satire or parody can be considered by some as fake news, this paper will focus on fake news with an intention to deceive or do harm rather than to entertain or to fool.
Knowing what fake news is, we are now able to measure and see the consequences of spreading misleading or false information. For many, the term “fake news” automatically brings to mind the 2016 American presidential election. In fact, rather interestingly, by looking at google statistics from the past 15 years we see that fake news was almost inexistent in google searches until a sudden spike in October 2016. Similarly, the 3 most related searches to “fake news” are linked to Donald Trump. The election is what truly thrusted fake news in the spotlight and showed the possible impact they could have on politics. In fact, some even suggested that Donald trump would not have been elected if it wasn’t for the influence of fake news. A controversial, debatable statement, but still backed by facts. We see that that: 115 pro-Trump fake stories were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared a total of 7.6 million times. […] 38 million shares of fake news in our database translates into 760 million instances of a user clicking through and reading a fake news story, or about three stories read per American adult.
It isn’t hard to imagine that the fake news narrative used during the election impacted the votes, which in itself is a worrying thought. The capacity fake news has for spreading with social media is immense, and during high tension periods such as a presidential election for one the biggest economies of the planet the consequences can be dire, with and each side of the political spectrum holding increasingly negative feelings toward the other. Also known as polarization, it is one of the biggest challenge fake news poses. A polarized society finds it ability to deal with social problems gravely hindered, which in turn can lead to strong social tensions, as we’ve seen in the United States with the Black Lives Matter movement or the Make America Great Again controversy. This bipartisan way of thinking can be seen in popular culture “It's like we livin' in the same buildin' but split into two floors/ I'm not racist/ But there's two sides to every story, I wish that I knew yours”. If fake news can influence elections, it isn’t a stretch to see how it could threaten a democracy.
In the context of the presidential election, many citizens also reported losing the trust they have in mainstream media, but one group is particularly interesting to look at: teenagers. As the biggest media consumers, they are exposed more than anyone to ‘fake news’. News consumption habits are developed during the teenage years, and these habits cross over to adulthood, thus defining how an entire future generation experiences media and politics. What is worth noting however is, while teens “gravitate toward fake news”, “it has more to do with the discussions of the news and it’s implications”. Teenagers interviewed reported that:
They savored the ideological clashes found on social networking sites, blogs, fake news, and opinionated talk shows, which they considered more objective and informative forms of news gathering. As Actualizing Citizens, they mistrusted mainstream news but stayed informed about people and issues they cared about via alternative news consumption practices, relying heavily on communication networks facilitated by new technologies.
With young people more media savvy then ever, it seems that a certain category of people, teenagers, almost benefited from the ‘fake news’ phenomenon as it allowed them to acquire valuable tools to deal with the amount of misinformation they are subjected to, creating a real sense of media literacy.
While the teenager example illustrates how a certain age group can arm themselves against fake news, the question still stands as to what the media can do to address these challenges. For the BBC, the first step is educating our society on fake news and teaching that same media literacy that allows an informed citizen to tell the facts from the hoaxes. Up to 1000 schools have been offered mentoring classes by the BBC to “help them spot so-called fake news”. The director of the BBC, James Harding added: “This is an attempt to go into schools to speak to young people and give them the equipment they need to distinguish between what's true and what's false.” The program also offers multiple resources and live online lessons about fake news. However, most of their content is aimed towards children aged from 6 to 14, which limits the reach of the program and doesn’t offer a widespread solution to the issue.
What if a media company decides to deal with the problem at its roots? The true breeding ground for fake news: social media. Most of the fake news spread online is spread by social bots, in fact in 2017 it was estimated that nearly 48 million accounts on Twitter could be bots. A reoccurring suggestion to deal with fake news on social media is to develop software or algorithms capable of detecting bots or even analyzing an article and knowing if it’s real or not. These algorithms exist, but are still far from perfect and happen to be a slippery slope:
While platforms have the right to enforce their terms of service, which forbid impersonation and deception, algorithms do make mistakes. Even a single false-positive error leading to the suspension of a legitimate account may foster valid concerns about censorship.
Hence why Facebook, social media giant, set up a “war room” to combat the spread of misinformation after being heavily criticized. The company developed tactics with media experts, such as “making political advertising more transparent, targeting reduced distribution of false news, detecting and taking down coordinated campaigns by “bad actors”, preventing spam and fake accounts, and launching “rapid response” efforts when election misinformation escalates”. While Facebook has certainly put effort in stopping fake news some partner journalists still expressed frustration “over the seemingly minimal impact”. Unfortunately, no human detection methods can match the volume and speed by which software bots spread misinformation. It has also been proposed to use CAPTCHAs to combat bots. CAPTCHAs have certainly proven their efficiency against bots on the internet, and simply asking for a CAPTCHA before sharing a news story would curve the bot abuse but at the price of restricting the ability to express oneself on social media, as well as causing “undesirable friction to benign applications of automation by legitimate entities, such as news media and emergency response coordinators.”
Ultimately, the ‘post fact’ era we’ve entered is still new, and a lot more has yet to be learnt. We’ve seen in 2016 how social media could facilitate the spread of fake news to an almost unimaginable degree. This has the potential to alter an election or divide a nation at a frightening scale, almost to the point of threating a democracy. It also seriously impedes the core concept of journalism as society loses the faith and trust they had in mainstream media.
Overall, the media aren’t powerless however, teaching media literacy to all is a valuable skill that would, in my opinion, considerably help to combat fake news. Fake news detection software is also being developed and implementing algorithms such as these on a large scale would reduce the disinformation shared by social bots. In any case, fake news is a modern and complex societal issue aggravated by our dependence on social media that promotes division and partisanship. Regardless of one’s opinion on mainstream media, learning and combating fake news will be one of the great human challenges of the 21st century.
