The press isn’t our enemy, but our own brains might be.
An opinion communicated with facts.
I have an opinion that might be a little controversial. And that opinion is that we don’t have a problem with fake news. We have a problem with people blindly believing everything they read online. Let’s discuss.
Since taking office, the US President has consistently and repeatedly attacked the press for doing its job. A job that keeps citizens informed of events happening in their towns, cities and capital. A job that includes acting as a watchdog and exposing wrongdoing. A job that puts pressure on governments, businesses and religious institutions to conduct themselves in ways that are good for the people they serve.
On 16 August, more than 300 US news organisations published a coordinated response to Trump’s repeated statement that the press is an “enemy of the people”. As I read those editorials and thought about Trump’s own motivations for making these claims, I began to wonder, where did it all go wrong? How have we found ourselves in a situation where fake news dominates the political agenda? Who’s allowed junk news to flourish and corrupt our news cycle? And what can we do to fix it? I couldn’t help but wonder, are we in this situation because too few people question what they read and hear online? Looking for answers I turned to research on fake news, analytical thinking, and the role of the press. I wanted to see what I, the producer and consumer of online content, can do to help reduce the spread of misinformation on the internet.
Free press and democracy.
“Journalists are friends of democracy, not the enemy”.
Tampa Bay Times. 16 August 2018.
In a stable democracy, the media is considered to be the principal institution from which we, the public, can better understand the society we live in (McConnell and Becker, 2002). Acting as a watchdog and forum for discussion, the media is supposed to be an outsider from the government, legislation, executive, religion and commerce that it reports on (Rusbridger, 2011).
Responsible journalists are taught to show the story, not tell the story, by reporting facts that are checked and verified before publication (Baker, 2018). Yes, a publication may express a political bias and be selective in what they report, but the independent scrutiny they provide allows us to hold our governments to account (Boston Globe, 2018).
Press freedom is one of the indicators the World Bank uses to measure the quality of governance worldwide. Any effort to limit the free exchange of information and communication has important consequences on political and human development (Norris, 2016). Therefore when a President, Prime Minister or any other Head of State begins to berate and discredit the press, warning bells should be ringing in our heads.
Since Trump took office, the USA’s ranking on the World Press Freedom Index has dropped two places, from 43 to 45 on a list of 180 countries, due to Trump’s verbal attacks on news organisations and the White House’s attempts to block access for certain media outlets (RSF, 2018). For comparison, the UK and Spain are ranked at 40 and 31 respectively, making the UK one of the worst-ranked countries in Western Europe.
“Criticising the news media is entirely right.”…“But insisting that truths you don’t like are ‘fake news’ is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy.”
New York Times editorial, 16 August 2018.
And here we arrive at the crux of the matter. Both fake news and accusations of fake news erode our trust that the press is providing independent scrutiny. And when this trust is eroded, it’s so much easier for a government to dismiss unfavourable coverage as ‘fake news’ that should be ignored. So, if we have two sides, each claiming to be speaking the truth, the consumers of news need to learn how to identify what’s truthful and what isn’t. And unfortunately, it seems that we humans aren’t very good at critically analysing what we see and hear online.
The problem with fake news lies in our brains.
“Lazy, not biased,” was the conclusion of a study by Pennycook and Rand at Yale University. Prompted by the observation that Facebook engagement was higher for fake news stories than real stories during the 2016 US Presidential election, Pennycook and Rand wanted to investigate the cognitive mechanisms that explain why blatantly false news stories gain traction on social media. They tested if political bias or critical reasoning best explained a person’s ability to identify false headlines and found that “more analytic individuals rated fake news as less accurate regardless of whether it was consistent or inconsistent with their political ideology.” Basically, “people are falling for fake news because they fail to think.”
Another study, this time by researchers at Stanford, tested the ability of American high-school and university students to distinguish an advert from a news article, and question who’s behind a piece of content that only presents one side of a contentious issue. The results were “bleak”, according to the study’s authors. Despite their intimate familiarity with digital technology, it appeared that young Americans don’t have the skills they need to evaluate the reliability of what they’re reading online. Furthermore, a study by the Pew Research Center found many Americans are unable to distinguish between a factual statement and an opinion. Of 5,035 adults surveyed, almost a quarter couldn’t correctly identify a factual statement. This means people are reading comment pieces and mistaking them for fact-based reporting.
While the internet has made it possible for anyone to access and share information, it’s also opened up the gates for those with little regard for journalistic codes of conduct. These people are free to produce content that is unverified, unchecked and motivated by money, clicks or internet fame (Silverman, 2016 and Tynan, 2016). These writers should not be confused with trained and experienced journalists but that’s hard to do when we’re not using our brains to assess what we’re reading.
To counteract the problem of fake news spreading on their platform, Facebook tried to fix the situation by adding warning labels to articles that had been identified as fake news. However, the initiative was dropped once it became clear that a little red triangle wasn’t going to stop the spread of fake news. For example, one study found that even though the warnings were effective, people were more likely to believe fake news was real if it didn’t have a warning on it. (Pennycook and Rand, 2017)
One of the reasons it’s so important to stop the spread of fake news on platforms like Facebook is because our brains are more likely to believe something that seems familiar (Pennycook et al, 2018). Each time we see a fake story, we become more inclined to believe it, even if we knew it was fake the first time. The implication here is that social media platforms act as incubators of fake news. So, even if we think we’re doing a good thing by calling out fake news on social media, we really shouldn’t because it’ll cycle round and become familiar to those who see it.
Knowingly or not, Trump is playing off this quirk of the human brain to confuse familiarity with trustworthiness. The verbal grenades he lobs into the Twittersphere get sucked into the news cycle and spin around until they’re repeated so often that people accept them as facts — even if they aren’t. This is why his attacks on the press are so dangerous. If Trump keeps repeating his claims, people will — and do — believe him. Watch this clip from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight to see the cycle in action.
If Trump is genuinely concerned about fake news, he should encourage people to develop their critical thinking skills and scrutinise what they’re seeing and hearing.
Thwarting fake news.
So how can we develop our critical thinking skills to protect ourselves from misinformation and fake news? We can begin by asking ourselves the following questions when we read online content:
- Who wrote this?
- Who published it?
- What’s the motivation behind this article?
- Can the sources and data it quotes be verified?
- What are other people saying about the same topic?
When we’re viewing online resources we have to look beyond the design and look of what we’re seeing. Fake news sites can look just like real news sites. Compare and contrast the two screenshots below. One is The Onion, a satirical news website, the other is The Times (London), a generally trustworthy news publication that maintains a right-center bias. They look pretty similar, don’t they?
There’s a well-known design heuristic where the appearance of a website influences a users perception of how relevant, credible and usable it it (Fessenden, 2017). This means we cannot trust online content just by looking at it. A website may look professional but we should still scrutinise the content and question the motivations of its creators.
Online resources that can help us separate fact from fiction include fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact and Snopes, while the Media Bias/Fact Check website provides a comprehensive list of media sources, all classified by their political biases. If you aren’t sure the website you are on is a bona-fide source of reliable information, you can check if it’s on Media Bias’ list of ‘Questionable Sources’, or ‘Conspiracy-Pseudoscience’ websites.
I would genuinely love it if this article you are reading right now prompts you to question who I am and what my motivation is. Go on, I don’t mind if you take a moment to check. And if that leads you down into a rabbit hole of reference checking and additional research, please share what you find in the comments before.
Vizzuality’s code of conduct.
As sharers of data and information, Vizzuality is serious about our responsibility to share data openly, transparently, and honestly. We let data lead the design of our data visualisations and have a team of data scientists working closely with our designers and developers to make sure that happens. Almost all of our code is published on github for anyone to review and reuse. We also share our knowledge right here on Medium, so we can be as transparent as possible about what we do. Sure, we express opinions, but we also try to show how we came to those opinions and share our sources so others can read them too.
The press is our friend, not our foe.
Every single person that uses the internet has a duty to use it responsibly. That means we need to put on our thinking caps and stop the spread of fake news. A free press is the cornerstone of a democracy and something we should be defending with everything we’ve got. When people like Donald Trump start bad-mouthing the media, we have to ask ourselves why. And when the media criticizes people like Donald Trump, we should also ask ourselves why. It’s a system of checks and balances. By using our critical thinking skills to assess what we read and hear online, we can help stop the spread of misinformation and hold our governments, businesses and institutions to account.
