FakeNewsFiles #1: Freak Weather

This post is the first in a series that will chew over the whole phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and try to set it in a broader context. The posts are as much about me trying to figure things out as to explain them, so forgive me if I don’t have any ta-daah! solutions at the end of it. Equally, if you want to pick me up on stuff, or suggest new ideas, please do.

When did ‘fake news’ jump the shark? Was it when President-elect Trump gave a press conference in January and refused to take questions from CNN, labelling the channel ‘fake news’? Or when Kellyanne Conway told Chuck Todd on NBC that the White House Press Secretary presented ‘alternative facts’ about the size of the inauguration crowd? Or perhaps when Trump began tweeting the term to describe almost anything the New York Times published about him? Or maybe way back when ‘fake news’ was first accused of swinging the US election?

Whenever the moment was, there is no doubt that, in the global moral panic that followed the identification of widespread sharing of ‘fake news’ on social media, it has come to mean almost anything that its user chooses it to mean. Donald Trump uses it to try and undermine the credibility of mainstream news organisations. Jeremy Corbyn uses it to scotch rumours that he has set his resignation date (link). Rupert Murdoch uses it to deny reports that he has ever asked a Prime Minister for anything (link). Even Bashar al Assad started to use the term to try and rubbish reports about the Syrian regime (link).

The misuse and abuse of the term ‘fake news’ was both inevitable and unfortunate. Inevitable because ‘fake news’ does not, and cannot, be defined clearly and consistently — and is therefore open to misuse. Unfortunate because there are very real and significant problems with our news and information environment that the debate about ‘fake news’ was starting to highlight.

When the writer and journalist Craig Silverman introduced the term ‘fake news’ just before the US election, he was using a narrow and pretty coherent definition. As he told Now Toronto in December 2016, Silverman saw ‘fake news’ as news wholly invented for the purpose of generating clicks and making money (link). He identified hundreds of people in Macedonia who were making money on Facebook by making stuff up (link). They had figured out that content earned money on social media not for being trustworthy or authoritative but for being engaging and share-able. So they created content that was engaging and share-able. In the lead up to the highly partisan US election this happened to be ‘news’ about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Yet even Silverman’s coherent definition gets fuzzy round the edges when you look at some of the ‘yellow journalism’ being done in the US before and after the 8th November (see the Post’s ‘For the ‘new yellow journalists’, opportunity comes in clicks and bucks’). And if you go beyond this narrow Silverman definition — as many people subsequently did — then you quickly fall into a subjective quagmire. Take a look at what happened to the teacher who tried to make a list of fake news sites (link).

Despite limited understanding of what fake news is, or what effect it is having, there has been lots of anxiety about its impact. Current and former world leaders and tech chiefs have opined about it. In November 2016 Barack Obama said that “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems” (link). Angela Merkel expressed similar anxiety then and since, saying in January that ‘we are facing a crisis of reasoning’ (link). In February 2017 Apple’s Tim Cook said fake news was ‘killing people’s minds’ (link). Even Mark Zuckerberg, having first dismissed the idea that fake news influenced the US election as ‘crazy’, wrote a 5,700 word manifesto, published on 16 February, acknowledging the role of social media in helping promote fake news, and proposing ways in which Facebook can help deal with it.

But, as with most moral panics, the heightened anxiety about fake news has not only led to the term’s misuse and abuse by political leaders but to hurried responses by corporations and governments. Responses that may do little to deal with the problem and could make the situation worse.

The German government is considering fining Facebook up to €500,000 if it does not remove ‘fake news’ within 24 hours. The Czech Ministry of Interior has formed a Centre Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats that will monitor threats to security, including disinformation campaigns. The European Commissioner has warned social media organisations that they have to deal with fake news or risk intervention by the Commission. [HT Emma Goodman]. The Indonesian government has also said it is considering fines for fake news (link). Donald Trump himself uses the term ‘fake news’ on an almost daily basis to disparage mainstream media.

Each of these, and other reactions by governments and public authorities, carry serious risks. The risk that governments start telling people what is and what is not true (take a bow Mr Trump). The risk that social media companies over-compensate and start taking down anything controversial. The risk that governments and digital platforms start collaborating with one another to determine what we should and should not see.

Facebook and Google have also both announced a series of measures to deal with fake news. They will deprive producers of fake news of advertising revenue. Facebook is downgrading the importance of stories shared in its platform that have not been read first. Google has been running a news initiative and a news lab for a number of years. Facebook has followed suit and set up the Facebook Journalism Project. These and other tech companies support First Draft News — ‘your guide to navigating the digital information ecosystem’.

The main reason that many of these responses are misplaced and could be counter-productive is because ‘fake news’ is not the problem. Fake news is a symptom of our current situation, not a cause. It is a by-product of our digital information ecology, a consequence of a range of structural factors that affect our whole digital information system.

Extreme weather — image from Wikipedia

To deal with fake news we have to acknowledge and understand the much broader and deeper problems in our digital news and information environment. Fake news is to our information system as freak weather is to climate change. The two are related, but to focus wholly on the former will neither explain nor address the latter. Until we recognise this, and until we focus on the structural and environmental factors that make fake news, black propaganda, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and all the other various political and social problems we now face online, then any ‘solutions’ will be temporary and, potentially, damaging.

Our digital news and information system is in trouble. How do we know this? Here are a few clues:

• It is dominated by a small number of tech behemoths (two in particular) whose economic models are based on the collection, re-use and monetisation of personal information — mainly through selling attention (see Tim Wu’s new book, The Attention Merchants)
• There is a political propaganda arms race online that is enabled by the digital platforms but which is — for the most part — opaque and almost entirely unaccountable
• We rely, for our digital information filtering mechanisms, on signals of authority that blur — and sometimes entirely obscure — the distinction between trustworthiness/authority and popularity/engagement
• The traditional news model has fallen apart and with it much of the reporting that used to provide the foundation for our civic knowledge and understanding
• Lots of false news is being shared and read by large numbers of people. It may not be as much as first feared (or it may be more), and may not be believed by as many but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem
• Certain national governments, notably Russia, appear to be using communication to deliberately interfere in the elections of other countries
• Extremist political groups are successfully colonising the news ecosystem (see Jonathan Albright’s work — https://medium.com/@d1gi)
• Private companies are boasting that they can swing elections through opaque, psy-ops digital campaigns (see Cambridge Analytica)
• Some people really are living in digital echo chambers and cementing their pre-existing political beliefs (see recent research we did in partnership with CASM at Demos)

Right now there seems to be little cost for political lying — indeed quite the opposite, it appears to be rewarded. Donald Trump began his campaign for president repeating the Obama birther lie, and has continued to lie regularly since. The Leave campaign knowingly and repeatedly lied during the lead up to the EU Referendum vote.

In Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney talks about ‘critical junctures’ in media and communication. ‘The decisions made during such a period’ McChesney writes, ‘establish institutions and rules that put society on a course that will be difficult to change for decades or generations’.

We are at a critical juncture now, and the way we respond — to fake news and the digital environment that enabled it — will set us on a course that will last the next few decades at least. So it probably makes sense to step back and figure out what the problem really is and where we want to end up, before hurrying off in a direction we may come to sorely regret.

In the next post I’ll outline a few of the things I’ve learnt when looking at questions of news, authority, and digital dominance over the last ten years or so. After that I’ll try and lay out some of the reasons I think our digital news and information ecosystem is such a mess, before suggesting a few ideas that might change the direction we’re going.

Spoiler alert: right now is not the moment to be introducing regressive regulation or legislation. My own view is that there is a role for government — as there is for the platforms themselves, for media, and for civil society — but that role should be progressive not regressive. I’ll explain what I mean by that when I get to the ideas bit.