Waging the war on disinformation
This past year saw South Africa experience a series of shocking revelations around state capture, mounting political divisions and the rapid growth and spread of corruption, within and outside of government. The media has had to come up with new and innovative ways to remain a part of the small but strong group holding the right people accountable for their unjust actions, but continues to face adversity in sustaining our democracy and fighting back in the ‘war on truth’.
South Africa first heard utterings of ‘state capture’ back in 2015, when opposition parties began making claims that government had been 'captured', following allegations that a wealthy Indian-born family of businessmen, the Guptas, were offering Cabinet positions and influencing how the government — namely President Jacob Zuma — was running the country. Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of emails were leaked to the public, and revealed correspondence between the Guptas and their associates, implicating them in efforts to appoint ministers and heads of government-owned companies for their personal gain.
While all of this was unfolding, the South African- Russian nuclear deal, the Bell Pottinger ‘fake news’/propaganda scandal and multiple cabinet reshuffles were taking place. Let’s not forget the rest of the world: the outcome of the 2016 U.S Presidential Election was alleged to have been influenced by fake news and social media bots; Austria went through much the same thing, although to a publicly lesser degree; in the week surrounding Brazil’s latest impeachment vote, fake news spread like wildfire; China got hit with an overflow from the U.S elections; and Kenya fell victim to misinformation as the nation went to the polls just three months ago.
With the rise of technology, social media, robot, test tube and graphic journalism, collaboration, crowdsourcing and ‘virality’, the spreading and sharing of news has become faster, more easily accessible to everyone, and its accuracy, more important than ever. However, it has also made the spread of misinformation and disinformation easier than ever, and the media needs to work quickly to remain reputable, trustworthy and accurate.
A few months before the GEN Summit 2018 in Lisbon, on 21–22 November 2017, the Global Editors Network (GEN) and Code for Africa, with the support of the Google News Lab, brought together journalists and media innovators from South African, Ugandan and Kenyan newsrooms in Cape Town, South Africa for a two-day hackathon to develop innovative news prototypes on the theme of misinformation: the war on truth. The event formed part of the annual Media Indaba, which focused on the continental shift; the invention of the new.
Nine teams participated, consisting of journalists, designers and developers, representing different media outlets and organizations (Eyewitness News, IOL, SABC, Oxpeckers, Media Factory, The Conversation, SciBraai, amaBhungane, Sunday Times, Media Monitoring Africa and a number of freelance journalists).
Veteran Kenyan editor, Code for Kenya director, and International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) Knight fellow Catherine Gicheru asked some important questions ahead of the planning and preparing that participants were about to embark on: “What is a fact?” If we can determine that something is a fact, she reasoned, then we can check it, but if not, we must learn to eventually let it go. She, along with her colleague and the Managing Editor of PesaCheck, Eric Mugendi offered some useful tips when it came to answering that and other, similar questions: Check the data source and if you are unsure, then be honest with your reader about that; nothing is too small or insignificant to double check; develop an accuracy checklist that you can refer back to every time; ask the person making the claim for evidence (when it comes to fake news, you’ll likely stop them in their tracks); do a Google search, and then search again; and look for experts with different perspectives. Both Gicheru and Mugendi encouraged participants to nip these in the bud before the effect of misinformation and disinformation on policy becomes long-term and in the worst case, irreparable.
Code for Africa’s Chris Roper described the hackathon and whatever it is teams would eventually create as the “current and future battleground for democratic thinking across the world”. He and Adam Oxford, of Code for Africa’s StoryLab Academy emphasized the importance of focusing on the need to develop a new language in order to articulate what mis and disinformation could possibly mean, and to channel that into the invention of technology that can help solve these problems. Roper also advised that as journalists and innovators, they should be focusing on trying to find out what the truth is and less on the phenomenon of fake news. As part of his presentation to participants, Oxford presented numerous Google News Lab tools that are used to combat misinformation; reverse image search, advanced search and two-factor authentication, for example.
GEN’s Chief Content Officer, Evangéline de Bourgoing, who has organized dozens of hackathons around the world, described mis and disinformation as working so well because, ‘It’s simple, it’s forceful, it’s easy to understand.’ Debunking must be equally efficient. Like her colleagues, she emphasized speed when it comes to debunking information, and cited journalist and fake news expert Craig Silverman, who said, "False information becomes harder to dislodge the longer is goes unchallenged (…) When something is verified as false, be fast and aggressive in getting it out."
As journalists, we expect our audiences to take our word for everything we say and in theory, they should be able to. We need to remain ethical in our reporting, but we also need to find ways to help with the analysis of information, and learn how to balance gatekeeping with giving access to the raw information. According to Code for Africa's Justin Arenstein, "We need to connect the audience to the thing behind the news." As every team recognized in their pitches, data, when used properly, makes great stories. One of the major problems, however, is that the numeracy for raw data does not yet exist in many newsrooms throughout the world. This makes taking something for granted rather easy to do and spreading falsities even easier.
Dropping truth marks on dark social
Speed, efficiency and accuracy are often an unbalanced trio, but getting them simultaneously right is essential to fighting misinformation. Stopping the spread of false news often requires a lot of data analysis, accompanied by research and quick fingers. This is difficult to get right, but various tools have been developed to help the media make sure that they do just that. The participants of the hackathon came up with a few prototypes to help journalists face this issue:
1. Botsleuth — built by Fiona Tipping, Kgothatso Ngako and Raymond Joseph: A tool that helps ordinary people and journalists to identify if they’re dealing with a bot account on Twitter, or other social media platforms.
2. Ukweli — built by Eyewitness News: A Chrome extension that detects suspect information and flags it in messenger apps, before the user decides whether to pass it in.
3. ReaList — built by Media Monitoring Africa: An open-source community-managed and centralized list of disinformation and legitimate news sites, respectively.
4. We stop fake news — built by IOL: A tool that allows users access to check a website or article against a database of known fake news sites.
Demystifying the truth through education
With the rise of fake news and misinformation, it’s becoming more difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t.
Having access to information that sheds light on the truth is essential to being able to spot the difference between wrong and right. Teams came up with a few educational and information-based prototypes to help journalists and their readers do this:
1. LOOKLive — built by Sunday Times and The Conversation: A pop-up card with pictures and conversational profiles of newsmakers that appears automatically on an article where the person is named.
2. Literacy on Lockdown — built by SABC News and SciBraai: Takes inaccessible data and produces impactful visualizations that can reach a broader audience and allow South Africans to get to grips with the problem of illiteracy leading to the spread of misinformation.
3. Dominion — built by Oxpeckers: An interactive data visualization tool that displays the relationships between individuals and the shell/actual companies who own land in Kenya.
4. Quote Me — built by Media Factory: A tool allows users to respond via USSD or an app to upload images, reactions and information regarding breaking news within a community that is often underrepresented in the media.
5. Cash, card or kidney? — built by Pound of Flesh: A demystifying tool that deals with financial information, allowing users to check if credit providers are registered and to decode contractual language.
Conclusion of the hackathon
The teams' prototypes were evaluated according to four different criteria: editorial innovation (how valuable is the prototype for a specific audience and is it solving a real problem?), user experience (how user-friendly is the interface and does it make news more accessible and compelling?), tech (how functional is the prototype?) and implementation (what is the potential scale of the project and how feasible is it?)
Being able to quickly spot when news is fake and stop it with the truth emerged as the predominant theme at the hackathon. This is in large part why the winning team, Eyewitness News won with their tool, Ukweli. Dropping bombs on dark social, this machine-learning AI allows the user to detect suspect information and flags it before being passed on as a message. It acts much like an antivirus software, for your messaging circle. It was developed as a Chrome extension as proof of concept, and is set to work on any text in a browser — with the plan to take it beyond desktop. The team reveled in the opportunity to interact and engage with colleagues based in different cities and fellow journalists, from other media organizations.
Jury members Eric Mugendi and Chris Orwa, of PesaCheck and Brave Venture Labs respectively, told us why they voted for this prototype:
Ukweli was closest to completion and implementation, and they can quickly move from the initial Chrome extension to the delivery of an SMS, but the winning point was the delivery mechanism. The fact that a lot of misinformation comes from dark social networks that aren’t really monitored like WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, and Telegram and other such things, means that there’s a real need to go into those networks where these messages are being shared so that before you forward something, you can actually check if it’s misinformation or fake news. The tool is really useful because it looks in a place that people on the outside of those groups can’t really see, but it compels you as an individual and gives you the tools to stop the spread of misinformation.
The team from Eyewitness News will get to compete in the Editors Lab Final at the GEN Summit 2018 in Lisbon, 30 May-1 June 2018, facing off with the winning teams from the sixth season of the programme.
Special mentions were awarded to the team from the Sunday Times, The Conversation and Business Day for LookLive, and to Media Monitoring Africa for ReaList.
Check out all the prototypes
