The Fake News Epidemic, And How You’re Possibly Propagating It.
Cause and Effect may not be two different entities any more
You may not actually have realized it, but in the light of the recent “Demonetization”, everyone’s newsfeed seems to be delivering a different worldview.
While some get news of the various supposed raids that are happening, how the community is coming together — from chai vendors getting themselves PayTM accounts, to people distributing chai and biscuits to those waiting in bank and ATM queues — and of course the massive cash flow that the banks are raking in. On the other hand, some are getting news of the miles and miles of queues, of protests, and violence, and of the supposed deaths that have occurred.
These two kinds of newsfeeds project two entirely different realities leaving you either proud or angry. I don’t know if you’ve realized this, or even wondered about how that happens.
The fact of the matter is that it is not the newsfeed that is affecting your temperament, it is your temperament that is bringing to you the newsfeed!
Now, I know, I sound like a self-help guru saying that you are inviting problems for yourself and you can just choose to walk away, but that’s far from what I intend to imply. What I intend to do is to highlight the epidemic that Fake News has become in our lives — primarily fed through social media, and thence promoted by each of us — physically and ephemerally.
I use the word ‘newsfeed’ with due consideration — as it is your Facebook newsfeed I am talking about.
Facebook, and Twitter, have long been the world’s most convenient platforms to share and read news, opinions, and reports. In fact, history is replete with instances where one of these platforms has reported news before any of the mainstream news sources have.
And, you obviously realise that your forwarding, sharing and even reading of articles makes it jump up (or down) in ephemeral Popularity Charts, that fund Trends and thereupon end up showing up in even more of your related networks’ newsfeeds.
Seeing this opportunity certain agencies have, over the last year, been feeding you stuff, and thus invisibly making Facebook and Twitter the hubs of Fake News, propagating very believable lies, that have a lot of power.
Case in point: the recent US Presidential Elections — addressing the demonetization right now would not be wise perhaps as we are still in the news cycle (though we might just get back to it sometime in the future).
What Is Fake News And How Is It Propagated?
The results of the US Presidential Election came as quite a surprise to most of the world. Till the h-hour, most of the globe was sure that there was no way that Trump could ever win; that Hilary had the elections almost bow-tied, with a card and all.
Yet, that didn’t happen. Consternation aside, most of the world reeled in absolute shock and disbelief.
Now, what went wrong with that is probably going to be studied by scholars worldwide, for years to come. However, one of the key assumptions that we are free to make is that the extremely rampant Fake News floating around on the internet (largely fed by social media) definitely had a lot to do with it (the sway of the US elections).
Jim Rutenberg at The New York Times, did a nice round-up of all the major stories that made the rounds this election, that quite possibly swayed it for Trump:
“In the last couple of weeks, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets exposed millions of Americans to false stories asserting that Clinton campaign’s pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote a secret memo detailing plans to “salvage” Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by launching a radiological attack to halt voting (merrily shared on Twitter by Roger Stone, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign); the Clinton campaign senior strategist John Podesta practiced an occult ritual involving various bodily fluids; Mrs. Clinton is paying public pollsters to skew results (shared on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr.); there is a trail of supposedly suspicious deaths of myriad Clinton foes (which The Times’s Frank Bruniheard repeated in a hotel lobby in Ohio)”.
What was unprecedented in this instance was the sheer spread of fly-by-night websites, that were erected solely for the purpose of propagating real looking Fake News.
Another was widely sharing political videos, some of them styled like newscasts, and all of them containing various degrees of falsehood.
There were also fake quotes — one remarkable one was of Donald Trump talking about how if he ever ran for office, he would run as a Republican, since they are stupid, and winning would be easy that way — and memes that made a lot of rounds. They were shared not in hundreds, not in thousands, but in millions.
Sometimes, people heavily invested in the campaigns made such errors. One case in point of Donald Trump Jr., the son of the President-elect, who shared an email claiming that Clinton was paying off pollsters to fudge poll results. This email was supposedly between Clinton and Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling, and stated $760,000 as the price of the deal, with Hilary angry about they don’t seem to be doing well enough with a five-point lead.
Another case in point was a story that surfaced on November 5th, gaining about 100 shares a minute on Facebook. It stated “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide,” and was hosted at denverguardian.com.
Now, nothing called Denver Guardian exists, and it is certainly not the oldest news source in Denver. The address listed for the newsroom ends up at a tree in a parking lot, and the images used were off of Flickr, from a man who took pictures of his neighbor’s house on fire back in 2010!
How Did It Happen?
Now that we’ve established the baseline for Fake News, let us address how it happened.
Fake News became the effective delivery vehicle thanks to the ‘Trending’ topics that you see on the right corner on your Facebook newsfeed, which are in fact, calibrated by an algorithm, and were (at the time) selected without much of human intervention — allowing whatever you put into the cycle to make rounds, regardless of its credibility, quality, and importance.
Facebook basically just personalizes each user’s trending news feed based on “engagement, timelines, Pages you’ve liked and your location, gauging what engages you and feeding you more like the same.
In August, Facebook fired a major chunk of their human news editors, thus making the Newsfeed significantly more reliant on the algorithm.
With the human filters, Facebook used to have a way to deal with the Fake News. Media outlets such as the New York Times, Variety, and Time, and other reputed outlets were given preference, while on the other hand sites like The Blaze, The Baltimore Gazette, Breitbart, etc were looked with skepticism and new unknown websites were avoided completely.
The team at Facebook was let go around the speculation that they held back certain news, the conservative kind, which was not desired as news should ideally be impartial and any human’s intervention introduced bias; but with the human filter being eliminated, Facebook finds itself down a different, and far more poisonous rabbit hole — there is no one to judge the authenticity of the news anymore.
A case in point is that of Megyn Kelly, a Fox news anchor, who was reportedly fired for supporting Hilary Clinton. The story got millions of shares, but was entirely untrue, and completely fabricated.
Zuckerberg, the man behind Facebook, is clearly irked by the suggestion that Fake News shared on Facebook influenced the election.
“He claims that over 99% of content on the site is authentic. But despite his skepticism, the company has gone on record saying it would fight fake news — though it didn’t say how. Some aren’t waiting to find out, as reports indicate dozens of employees are privately investigating how the company deals with such matters”, Engadget reported.
The Makers Of Fake News?
Lets now talk about the makers of Fake News. They usually do it for the money, however, some say it is satire, and take it lightly, justifying that those who believe such news are the real concern.
The situation, either way, is quite dangerous. What happened with US Presidential Election is akin to a bunch of kids taking on fake newspaper route or e-trudging around the world, delivering “news” such as “Hillary’s illegal e-mail just killed its first American spy” for pocket money.
This is alarming when about 40–45% of the US population seems to get their news off of Facebook!!
“BuzzFeed and The Guardian reported that the Macedonian town of Veles, boasting a population of 45,000, is the cradle of at least 140 American-politics websites. Working overwhelmingly for click-earned ad money, not love of Donald Trump, the youth of Veles offered up thousands of invented, mostly anti-Hillary Clinton stories (there just wasn’t much of a market for anti-Trump stories, they found) under eye-catching headlines”, as reported The Globe and Mail.
Where Does The Buck Stop?
The blame game of Fake News is a long one and it has just started. No one can really be blamed entirely, not even the creators of the Fake News because their jobs aren’t much different from those of gun-makers, who provide what the market wants and make money off of it.
We can’t blame Facebook, or Twitter (which uses similar methods) — majorly because they are just responding to a supply chain dynamic, or those people sharing the news because it’s easy to be fooled in the light of all the legitimate-looking information being thrown at them/us.
Well, there can’t really be a final word, other than — beware.
Beware of what you’re reading, and where it is sourced out of.
You, as a reader, can’t obviously do anything about Facebook getting rid of the human editors, or what kind of news is fed into the cycle.
In a volatile environment that is prevailing in our own country in the light of demonetization, awareness, and judgment are very important.
Taking a page from the US citizens heeding to misinformation, and thus swaying something as paramount and (so far claimed as) incorruptible as the US Presidential Election, and take care in what you decide to believe it.
What you need to do is not let stuff you read on Facebook become your reality or your beliefs. Don’t let any ‘forwards’ be your source of action.
Do the fact check and believe news only from sources that have been around for longer than the internet boom, and that you know are credible. Easier said than done though… especially since a lot of people claim that one TV channel is in one political party’s corner and another in some others!
I don’t have a chicken soup remedy on this one. I doubt anyone has. But the only thing that I can possibly say is that you need to read more, soak in more, and find trustable sources, before you make up your mind.
And for sanity’s sake — read articles completely, not just the headlines!
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
