4.8: Fake News and Misinformation
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Too often what looks like news is not news. It has been faked, and we have been misinformed. Someone wants us to believe it even though they know it is not true. We critical thinkers, need to keep up our defenses and not be naïve.
but the original photo did not contain a flag.
In Chicago back in 2017, four black teenagers kidnapped and tortured a white teenager. Although the teenagers who committed this terrible act had no connection to the organization Black Lives Matter, an opponent of that organization quickly created a social network posting with the hashtag #BLMKidnapping about how the organization kidnapped and tortured a white person in Chicago. This led to a very large conversation about the topic, and the size of the conversation led other news organizations to repeat the claim that Black Lives Matter was thought to be involved. Repeating misinformation in new places made the misinformation more believable to many persons. The high interest in the story became news itself. Comments that BLM might not have been involved were little noticed among the noise in the tweetstorm. In fact, BLM was not involved.
Misinformation goes beyond the occasional hoax. It is a systematic attack on our brains. We critical thinkers seek the news, not the fake news. It is not always easy for us to tell the difference, but the more we know about fake news and how it is created, and the more pro-active we are, the easier it will be for us.
Here is a critical thinking question about the following newspaper report.
In May 2016, a Facebook page called Heart of Texas urged its nearly 254,000 followers to rise up against what it considered to be an urgent cultural menace. A mosque in Houston (Texas) had opened up a new library, and Heart of Texas planned to protest. "Stop Islamization of Texas," it warned.
Word of the protest spread quickly, but supporters of the mosque were also ready to mobilize. "Bigots are planning to intimidate through weaponized fear this Saturday at noon," one of them wrote on Reddit. The post linked to a Facebook page for United Muslims of America, a group that said it was planning a counter-protest for the same time and place.
…Heart of Texas wasn't a real group, as Business Insider later reported. United Muslims of America is a real organization, but the Facebook page promoting the counter-protest was not run by the actual group, as The Daily Beast found. Instead, according to documents made public last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee, both the pro- and anti-mosque protests had been planned and promoted by Russian trolls.
…A few dozen real Americans did protest that Saturday in Houston. videos of the protest show real emotion—people on opposite sides of the street screaming, swearing and truly angry to have to share the country with the bozos on the other side.
…In response to Heart of Texas' "Stop Islamization" post, a Facebook user upset with the Houston mosque posted a comment suggesting that it be blown up.
—By Farhad Manjoo, "The Drama of Reality TV, Brought to You by Russia," The New York Times, November 9, 2017, pp. B1 and B9. Photo by Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle.
Trolls are people paid to spread comments on social media platforms such as Facebook. Now for the question about all this: Were news reports of the feelings of the Houston demonstrators an example of fake news?
a. yes b. no
- Answer
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No, the protesters' actions and emotions were genuine. What was fake news were the postings by the Russian trolls who were engaged in an online disinformation campaign. It is a cost-effective strategy for Russia, says U.S. Senator Angus Stanley King, Jr. of Maine: "For the price of one F-35 airplane, the Russians can hire 5,000 hackers."
We learned today that the Jefferson County sheriff is part owner of a brothel in nearby South Chesterton, and he seems to be behind the training of high school girls to be prostitutes. Now he's running for Congress. No surprise that the Democratic Party is funding his campaign. Oh, I forgot to mention that a manager of Burger Queen in Florida admitted that her company has been using 20% Vietnam dog meat and 5% Kenya zebra meat in all its burgers. Not just this year, but for the last twenty years! Yuk!
Interesting? Yes. True? No. Tweets with false news spread faster and spread to more people than real news, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who did a large study of Twitter stories spanning 2006 to 2017. "It's sort of disheartening at first to realize how much we humans are responsible," said Sinan Aral, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and an author of the study. His point: we humans are inclined to prefer false news to real news. To quote from this study by the M.I.T. researchers,
The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news.
-"The Spread of True and False News Online," by Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral, Science, 09 Mar 2018, page 1146.
Real news tends to be less interesting than fake news. It's exciting to read that a famous sports star burned the American flag in the locker room and the Secretary of State had a pedophilia group hidden in a room in a pizza restaurant. Interesting but fake.
If you cannot quickly sort the real from the fake because it is not about your area of expertise, then you are apt to look for help. Most persons do not know an expert who can tell the difference between genuine and fake, so they usually look to the groups they already identify with for what to believe about a story. They ask, “What are my people saying about this?” or “What do the places I trust say about it?” Most persons will not check for themselves. Who has the time? The powers behind the fake news know this, and they exploit it. They design fake news that is especially interesting to special groups of social media users, news that the users would wish were true. Who doesn't want their enemy to look bad?
The most effective creator of fake news is someone who successfully slips fake news in among the genuine news at news sites. News sites sometimes find the news for themselves, but because doing original journalistic research is expensive, very often a news site will pick up news from another news site and publish it on their own site. In this way a fake news story that was embedded into one of those news sites will more likely to spread across the news media, and occasionally to news sites we, or “our people,” use and trust.
Luckily for us critical thinkers, the very best sources of news have their own defenses up and do not re-broadcast fake news. At the very least they will precede the news item with the phrase, “According to so and so,” or “As reported in....” Also, they will be clear about when they are offering news and when they are offering advertising and when they are offering more disguised advertising that is usually called “sponsored content.” Ads do not come to us with a tag that says, “Hey, I am an ad,” do they? So, it takes some critical thinking to separate them from the news.
Think about that last Twitter message you read. How do you know whether it came from a real human user or from a re-tweeting bot [that is, a software robot, an automated account] that automatically generates spam to make an issue seem to be more popular than it really is? A bot can turn a minor hashtag into a trending hashtag that catches the eye of journalists who re-mention the issue on more mainstream news sites. A trending item is one that gets the clicks, and the trending items spread more easily to a bigger audience. The bot-maker thinks, “Create a trend, and you create believers.”
Here are some very unreliable sources of information in the United States: the newspaper National Enquirer, the newspaper Weekly World News, and the website World News Daily Report. Here are some very reliable sources of information: peer-reviewed scientific journals, the magazine The Economist, and these four daily newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. There are, of course, many reliable sources of information that are not American. “Peer reviewed” means that other experts in the relevant field act as referees who must approve in advance the publication of the article. The best peer reviewing is via blind refereeing, which means that, during the referee process or decision process about whether to publish, the author is never told the names of the referees, and the referees are never told the name of the author. This promotes objectivity. Unfortunately, no method will absolutely guarantee objectivity.
Why should Americans believe that their traditional news organizations are trustworthy? The reporter Steve Inskeep at National Public Radio answered this question:
Many news organizations produce stories that are checked before publication. Others don't. It's a big deal. Hiring an editorial staff shows the publication's respect for you…. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have different owners, audiences, stories, perspectives and obsessions. Both have made mistakes and omissions; but both send reporters out into the world and back them up with an editorial process that catches and corrects many errors. This means both can be informative, regardless of your politics or theirs.
When we say a traditional news source backs up its reporters with an editorial process that catches errors, what does this mean? It means that the editors press their reporters to double check the reports, and it means the editors recommend the reporter get at least a second, independent source for any unusual claims about situations that the reporter is not a direct witness to. Unlike so many blogs, the mainstream news organizations employ professionals who are devoted to separating fact from fiction. And for them, making up sources is a great sin.
We critical thinkers need to be alert to the difference between claims that are backed up by reasons and claims that are not. If we are given reasons, we should ask ourselves whether those reasons are good enough. Also, we should ask ourselves, “Am I forwarding this twitter feed to my friends because it is interesting and because I know it to be true, or only because it is interesting?” Think before pressing the "share" button. Does that tweet you received about "breaking news," even contain a link to a credible news source, or is it just an interesting claim?
Some news stories that we suspect could be fake can be checked by us for accuracy by our visiting the websites Snopes.com or FactCheck.org or Politifact.com. They specialize in verifying which interesting news stories are true and which are misleading or totally false. Be alert that some fake news stories might say, “as verified by Snopes.com,” even though Snopes.com actually has done no such thing, and the faker is saying this just to discourage any attempt by us to do more checking.
Nobody can check regularly on hundreds of news sources, nor even read or view them. Most people will find one or two news sources they trust, and then put their investigative skills on cruise control and just absorb whatever those news sources say. This procedure can be very efficient time-wise, but it occasionally can be dangerous. We need to do our own checking once in a while, even with the news sites we usually trust, especially for the really important news that might cause us to say, “That news means my congressperson is a criminal,” or “If that’s true, then it was their country who provoked our country, not the other way around, so we need to retaliate now,” or “That means that what he did is the reason why people like me don’t have a better job.”
Unfortunately, there are news organizations who have decided that profit is their main goal and that it is more profitable to get their audience to feel informed than to be informed. As noted above, acquiring information is expensive. Having their own professional, investigative reporters rather than just writers or “news anchors” is a large, extra expense. It is much cheaper simply to re-broadcast some other organization’s news, and to re-shape it so that one's own audience is told what to believe. The audience leaves feeling informed without being informed. We critical thinkers cannot usually spot this behavior with just a few interactions with the news organization. It takes many interactions and a great deal of sophisticated critical thinking on our part in order to tell which specific news organizations emphasize cost-effective re-shaping of news and which organizations gather news themselves or are very careful about which news sources they themselves use.
If we are checking on a political news item for ourselves, it can be helpful to see whether the item is considered to be news by sources that do not have our own politics. Regarding American TV news organizations, MSNBC is left-wing, CNN is middle of the road, and Fox News is right-wing. If all three report it, then it is probably true, but if it appears on MSNBC News, let’s say, and not Fox News, that isn't a good reason to believe it is not true. It might be true but not be reported on by Fox simply because it is less interesting to them or goes against their politics.
It can be an eye-opening experience to see how the very same story is treated so differently by the above three news organizations. No news source is value-free. Their politics intrude in the phrasing, in what headline is chosen, and in what information is not mentioned—in how they "frame" the news.
The spread of fake news from fraudulent sources has been a problem ever since civilization began, but it is only a symptom: The larger problem is that too many people will doubt a claim simply because it does come from establishment sources—governments, scientists, daily newspapers, TV news programs—when in fact these are reliable authorities. These skeptical people are being naïve when they dismiss real news from traditional sources that are trustworthy. Their alienation from “the establishment” makes them easy receptacles for accepting fake news and rejecting real news.
On the other hand, in many countries the government is too often involved in promoting propaganda and misinformation. The government in turn pressures the newspapers and TV stations they control. If you are living in this situation, then there is good reason to be alienated from the establishment and to be less trustful of its news. Here is a BuzzFeed link to a video showing the Egyptian Minister of Culture telling a crowd that the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted to creating the terrorist organization ISIS (Islamic State). Lebanese media were spreading the same story. How do you know she didn’t create ISIS? Were you there to see for yourself?
Well, you can go to FactCheck.org | Search | Clinton ISIS, and read what FactCheck has to say about whether she did.
Over the years, the U.S. has had its share of corruption within its news establishment, but a smaller share than in the average country.
Critical thinkers should be on the alert for reports containing denunciations of "the right" or “the left” or "Washington" or "the media" or " their supporters." These denunciations should be viewed with suspicion and greatly discounted. Good reporters do not appeal to these vague terms and are more specific about who is making a claim about what.
To repeat the point made earlier about double checking, we critical thinkers have a responsibility to occasionally do some checking ourselves on the reporters and their sources. If we check the occasional claim by viewing the reporter’s own sources for ourselves and by trying to find an independent source who covered the same issue, then we can assign more trust to this reporter in the future.
Critical thinkers should follow President Ronald Reagan’s advice: “trust but verify.” That is, do not always mistrust what someone says, but do demand verification of their claim before we buy it hook, line, and sinker—especially if the claim is surprising and, if we were to trust it, then we would have to reject many of our other beliefs.
A single fact seems puny compared to our ideology—the large set of our beliefs that helps define our worldview. Unfortunately, too many of us, when confronted with a fact that runs counter to our ideology, will immediately discount that fact as our opponent’s partisan opinion. We will not take the trouble to do any of our own fact checking. It is always easier to hunker down secure with our ideology than to take a challenging comment seriously and check on it for ourselves.
What about confronting the person you believe is responsible for promoting fake news? This can be a dangerous thing to do depending on the political situation in which you live. In some countries you could get arrested just for confronting that person. But let’s suppose you are in the United States. In the U.S., the powers behind the fake news, the people who employ bloggers and newscasters to push false news at you, never will be able to have you arrested even if they would like to, but they never will confess to what they are doing when confronted. Most likely they will ignore you. However, sometimes they will attack you. They will yell back; or, in a more public setting, instead of yelling back, they will respond in flowery, formal language such as, “It is clear that absurdity is no prohibition on the actions of you and your sources.” The counter from the faker is very often to say that your facts are just partisan opinions. The faker will try to turn the tables. If that happens, you two are not having a reasoned interchange, and you probably should follow the advice of the American Revolutionary and colonist Thomas Paine:
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead.
But if you have no effect on the faker, at least your discoveries will have a positive effect on you, yourself. You will learn better how to separate the genuine news from the fake. You will better understand that facts are something more solid than mere opinions of the people who hold microphones.
You can learn a bit about fake news by looking at the publishing situation from the perspective of the originator of the fake news. Put yourself in the shoes of the faker. Why do you produce fake news? Because you believe the end justifies the means. You believe that achieving your goal justifies using unethical methods to achieve it.
Once you have created your fake news, which is, let’s say, an article smearing a political candidate who is opposed by the people who hired you, the best way to get it out there circulating among the news outlets is to send it to a news organization that has low investigative standards and that will see your story as good news, or as the sort of story that entertains their intended audience. They will accept your story without checking on it very much, so long as it seems plausible to them. Then, hopefully, other news organizations will pick up your story from that first news organization and use it for their sites. Now your story has momentum. Another successful day for you. If it goes viral, you might get a raise.
However, suppose later that some self-styled critical thinker or some other media people come back at you and demand to know your evidence. You don’t have any. So, what do you do? The only rational response is to stop talking to those people, isn’t it? Or you call your doctor—your spin doctor whose primary skill is deflection of criticism and counterattack against the critic.
OK, step back out of the shoes of the faker, and now ask yourself, “Would I take a high-paying job as the creator of fake news?”