Fake News

Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.Schlesinger, Robert (April 14, 2017)
"Fake news in reality"
'' U.S. News & World Report''. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term "fake news" was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common."The real story of 'fake news': The term seems to have emerged around the end of the 19th century"
Merriam-Webster. Retrieved October 13, 2017. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information. It's also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavourable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.

The prevalence of fake news has increased with the recent rise of social media, especially the Facebook News Feed, and this misinformation is gradually seeping into the mainstream media. Several factors have been implicated in the spread of fake news, such as political polarization, post-truth politics, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and social media algorithms.

Fake news can reduce the impact of real news by competing with it. For example, a BuzzFeed News analysis found that the top fake news stories about the 2016 U.S. presidential election received more engagement on Facebook than top stories from major media outlets. It also particularly has the potential to undermine trust in serious media coverage. The term has at times been used to cast doubt upon credible news, and former U.S. president Donald Trump has been credited with popularizing the term by using it to describe any negative press coverage of himself. It has been increasingly criticized, due in part to Trump's misuse, with the British government deciding to avoid the term, as it is "poorly-defined" and "conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference".

Multiple strategies for fighting fake news are currently being actively researched, for various types of fake news. Politicians in certain autocratic and democratic countries have demanded effective self-regulation and legally-enforced regulation in varying forms, of social media and web search engines.

On an individual scale, the ability to actively confront false narratives, as well as taking care when sharing information can reduce the prevalence of falsified information. However, it has been noted that this is vulnerable to the effects of confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases that can seriously distort reasoning, particularly in dysfunctional and polarised societies. Inoculation theory has been proposed as a method to render individuals resistant to undesirable narratives. Because new misinformation pops up all the time, it is much better timewise to inoculate the population against accepting fake news in general (a process termed "prebunking"), instead of continually debunking the same repeated lies.

Defining fake news

Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. The term is a neologism (a new or re-purposed expression that is entering the language, driven by culture or technology changes). Fake news, or fake news websites, have no basis in fact, but are presented as being factually accurate. Fake news has also been called junk news, pseudo-news, alternative facts, false news, hoax news and bullshit.

National Endowment for Democracy defined fake news as: " sleading content found on the internet, especially on social media ..Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites and Facebook pages gaming the platform for advertising revenue." And distinguished it from disinformation: " ke news does not meet the definition of disinformation or propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a larger agenda."

Media scholar Nolan Higdon has defined fake news as "false or misleading content presented as news and communicated in formats spanning spoken, written, printed, electronic, and digital communication. Higdon has argued that the definition of fake news has been applied too narrowly to select mediums and political ideologies. While most definitions focus strictly on content accuracy and format, current research indicates that the rhetorical structure of the content might play a significant role in the perception of fake news.

Michael Radutzky, a producer of CBS ''60 Minutes'', said his show considers fake news to be "stories that are probably false, have enormous traction opular appealin the culture, and are consumed by millions of people." These stories are not only found in politics, but also in areas like vaccination, stock values and nutrition. He did not include news that is "invoked by politicians against the media for stories that they don't like or for comments that they don't like" as fake news. Guy Campanile, also a ''60 Minutes'' producer said, "What we are talking about are stories that are fabricated out of thin air. By most measures, deliberately, and by any definition, that's a lie."

The intent and purpose of fake news is important. In some cases, what appears to be fake news may be news satire, which uses exaggeration and introduces non-factual elements that are intended to amuse or make a point, rather than to deceive. Propaganda can also be fake news.

In the context of the United States of America and its election processes in the 2010s, fake news generated considerable controversy and argument, with some commentators defining concern over it as moral panic or mass hysteria and others worried about damage done to public trust. It particularly has the potential to undermine trust in serious media coverage generally. The term has also been used to cast doubt upon credible mainstream media.

In January 2017, the United Kingdom House of Commons commenced a parliamentary inquiry into the "growing phenomenon of fake news".

In 2016, Politifact selected fake news as their Lie of the Year. There was so much of this in this United States election year, won by President Donald Trump, that no single lie stood out, so the generic term was chosen. Also in 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected post-truth as its word of the year and defined it as the state of affairs when "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Fake news is the boldest sign of a post-truth society. When we can't agree on basic facts—or even that there are such things as facts—how do we talk to each other?

Roots

The term "fake news" gained importance with the electoral context in Western Europe and North America. It is determined by fraudulent content in news format and its velocity. According to Bounegru, Gray, Venturini and Mauri, a lie ''becomes'' fake news when it "is picked up by dozens of other blogs, retransmitted by hundreds of websites, cross-posted over thousands of social media accounts and read by hundreds of thousands".

The evolving nature of online business models encourages the production of information that is "click-worthy" and independent of its accuracy.

The nature of trust depends on the assumptions that non-institutional forms of communication are freer from power and more able to report information that mainstream media are perceived as unable or unwilling to reveal. Declines in confidence in much traditional media and expert knowledge have created fertile grounds for alternative, and often obscure sources of information to appear as authoritative and credible. This ultimately leaves users confused about basic facts.

Popularity and viral spread

Fake news has become popular with various media outlets and platforms. Researchers at Pew Research Center discovered that over 60% of Americans access news through social media compared to traditional newspaper and magazines. With the popularity of social media, individuals can easily access fake news or similar content. One study looks at the number of fake news articles being accessed by viewers in 2016 and found that each individual was exposed to at least one or more fake news articles daily. As a result, fake news is omnipresent among the viewer population and results in its ability to spread across the internet.

Fake news has the tendency to become viral among the public. With the presence of social media platforms like Twitter, it becomes easier for false information to diffuse quickly. Research has found that false political information tends to spread "three times" faster than other false news. On Twitter, false tweets have a much higher chance of being retweeted than truthful tweets. More so, it is humans who are responsible in disseminating false news and information as opposed to bots and click-farms. The tendency for humans to spread false information has to do with human behavior; according to research, humans are attracted to events and information that are surprising and new, and, as a result, causes high-arousal in the brain. Besides, motivated reasoning was found to play a role in the spread of fake news. This ultimately leads humans to retweet or share false information, which are usually characterized with clickbait and eye-catching titles. This prevents people from stopping to verify the information. As a result, massive online communities form around a piece of false news without any prior fact checking or verification of the veracity of the information.

Of particular concern regarding viral spread of fake news is the role of super-spreaders. Brian Stelter, the anchor of Reliable Sources at CNN, has documented the systematic long-term two-way feedback that developed between President Donald Trump and Fox News presenters. The resultant conditioning of outrage in their large audience against government and the mainstream media, has proved a highly successful money-spinner for the TV network.

Its damaging effects

In 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee claimed that fake news was one of the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends that must first be resolved, if the Internet is to be capable of truly "serving humanity." The other two new disturbing trends that Berners-Lee described as threatening the Internet were the recent surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen-surveillance purposes, and for cyber-warfare purposes.

Author Terry Pratchett, previously a journalist and press officer, was among the first to be concerned about the spread of fake news on the Internet. In a 1995 interview with Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, he said "Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War, and the Holocaust didn't happen, and it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up". Gates was optimistic and disagreed, saying that authorities on the Net would index and check facts and reputations in a much more sophisticated way than in print. But it was Pratchett who more accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimize fake news.

When the internet first became accessible for public use in the 1990s, its main purpose was for the seeking and accessing of information. As fake news was introduced to the Internet, this made it difficult for some people to find truthful information. The impact of fake news has become a worldwide phenomenon. Fake news is often spread through the use of fake news websites, which, in order to gain credibility, specialize in creating attention-grabbing news, which often impersonate well-known news sources. Jestin Coler, who said he does it for "fun", has indicated that he earned US$10,000 per month from advertising on his fake news websites. Research has shown that fake news hurts social media and online based outlets far worse than traditional print and TV outlets. After a survey was conducted, it was found that 58% of people had less trust in social media news stories as opposed to 24% of people in mainstream media after learning about fake news.

Types of fake news

Claire Wardle of ''First Draft News'', in preliminary findings, identifies seven types of fake news:

# satire or parody ("no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool")
# false connection ("when headlines, visuals or captions don't support the content")
# misleading content ("misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual")
# false context ("when genuine content is shared with false contextual information")
# impostor content ("when genuine sources are impersonated" with false, made-up sources)
# manipulated content ("when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive", as with a "doctored" photo)
# fabricated content ("new content is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm")
Scientific denialism is another potential explanatory type of fake news, defined as the act of producing false or misleading facts to unconsciously support strong pre-existing beliefs.

Criticism of the term

In 2017, Wardle announced she has now rejected the phrase "fake news" and "censors it in conversation", finding it "woefully inadequate" to describe the issues. She now speaks of "information disorder" and "information pollution", and distinguishes between three overarching types of information content problems:
# Mis-information (misinformation): false information disseminated without harmful intent.
# Dis-information (disinformation): false information created and shared by people with harmful intent.
# Mal-information (malinformation): the sharing of "genuine" information with the intent to cause harm.

Disinformation is the most insidious type because of the harmful intent. For example, it is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections.

Because of the manner in which former president Donald Trump has co-opted the term, ''The Washington Post'' media columnist Margaret Sullivan has warned fellow journalists that "It's time to retire the tainted term 'fake news'. Though the term hasn't been around long, its meaning already is lost." By late 2018, the term "fake news" had become ''verboten'' and U.S. journalists, including the Poynter Institute were asking for apologies and for product retirements from companies using the term.

In October 2018, the British government decided that the term "fake news" will no longer be used in official documents because it is "a poorly-defined and misleading term that conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference in democratic processes." This followed a recommendation by the House of Commons' Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee to avoid the term.

However, recent reviews of fake news still regard it as a useful broad construct, equivalent in meaning to fabricated news, as separate from related types of problematic news content, such as hyperpartisan news, this latter being a particular source of political polarization. Therefore, researchers are beginning to favour "information disorder" as a more neutral and informative term. For example, the Commission of Inquiry by the Aspen Institute (2021) has adopted the term Information Disorder in its investgative report.

Identification

According to an academic library guide, a number of specific aspects of fake news may help to identify it and thus avoid being unduly influenced. These include: clickbait, propaganda, satire/parody, sloppy journalism, misleading headings, manipulation, rumor mill, misinformation, media bias, audience bias, and content farms.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form ''(pictured at right)'' to assist people in recognizing fake news. Its main points are:
# Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
# Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
# Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
# Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
# Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
# Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
# Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgment)
# Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), launched in 2015, supports international collaborative efforts in fact-checking, provides training, and has published a code of principles. In 2017 it introduced an application and vetting process for journalistic organisations. One of IFCN's verified signatories, the independent, not-for-profit media journal ''The Conversation'', created a short animation explaining its fact checking process, which involves "extra checks and balances, including blind peer review by a second academic expert, additional scrutiny and editorial oversight".

Beginning in the 2017 school year, children in Taiwan study a new curriculum designed to teach critical reading of propaganda and the evaluation of sources. Called "media literacy", the course provides training in journalism in the new information society.

Online identification

Fake news has become increasingly prevalent over the last few years, with over 100 misleading articles and rumors spread regarding the 2016 United States presidential election alone. These fake news articles tend to come from satirical news websites or individual websites with an incentive to propagate false information, either as clickbait or to serve a purpose. Since they typically hope to intentionally promote incorrect information, such articles are quite difficult to detect.

Media scholar Nolan Higdon has argued that a critical media literacy education focused on teaching students how to detect fake news is the most effective way for mitigating the pernicious influence of propaganda. In his book "The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Education," Higdon offers a ten-step guide for detecting fake news. When identifying a source of information, one must look at many attributes, including but not limited to the content of the email and social media engagements. Specifically, the language is typically more inflammatory in fake news than real articles, in part because the purpose is to confuse and generate clicks.

Furthermore, modeling techniques such as n-gram encodings and bag of words have served as other linguistic techniques to determine the legitimacy of a news source. On top of that, researchers have determined that visual-based cues also play a factor in categorizing an article, specifically some features can be designed to assess if a picture was legitimate and provides more clarity on the news. There is also many social context features that can play a role, as well as the model of spreading the news. Websites such as "Snopes" try to detect this information manually, while certain universities are trying to build mathematical models to do this themselves.

Tackling and suppression strategies

Considerable research is underway regarding strategies for confronting and suppressing fake news of all types, in particular disinformation, which is the deliberate spreading of false narratives for political purposes, or for destabilising social cohesion in targeted communities. Multiple strategies need to be tailored to individual types of fake news, depending for example on whether the fake news is deliberately produced, or rather unintentionally or unconsciously produced.

Considerable resources are available to combat fake news. Regular summaries of current events and research are available on the websites and email newsletters of a number of support organisations. Particularly notable are First Draft (in transition to the Information Futures Lab, School of Public Health, Brown University) and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism (Harvard University).

Journalist Bernard Keane, in his book on misinformation in Australia, classifies strategies for dealing with fake news into three categories: (1) the liar (the perpetrator of fake news), (2) the conduit (the method of carriage of the fake news), and (3) the lied-to (the recipient of the fake news).

Strategies regarding the perpetrator

Promotion of facts over emotions

American philosopher of science Lee McIntyre, who has researched the scientific attitude and post-truth, has explained the importance of factual basis of society, in preference to one in which emotions replace facts. A disturbing modern example of this is the symbiotic relationship that developed between President Donald Trump and Fox News, in which the conspiracy beliefs of Fox hosts were repeated shortly after by Trump (and vice versa) in a continuous feedback loop. This served to promote outrage, and thus to condition and radicalise conservative Republican Fox listeners into cult-like Trump supporters, and to demonise and gaslight Democrat opponents, the mainstream media, and elites generally.

A key strategy to counter fake news based on emotions rather than facts is to flood the information space, particularly social media and web browser search results with factual news, thus drowning out misinformation. A key factor in establishing facts is the role of critical thinking, the principles of which should be imbedded more comprehensively within all school and university education courses. Critical thinking is a style of thinking in which citizens, prior to subsequent problem solving and decision-making, have learned to pay attention to the content of written words, and to judge their accuracy and fairness, among other worthy attributes.

Individual counteraction

Individuals should confront misinformation when spotted in online blogs, even if briefly, otherwise they fester and proliferate. The person being responded to is probably resistant to change, but many other bloggers may read and learn from an evidence-based reply. A brutal example was learned by John Kerry during the US 2004 Presidential election campaign against George W. Bush. The right-wing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth falsely claimed that Kerry showed cowardice during the Vietnam War. Kerry refused to dignify the claims with a response for two weeks, despite being pummeled in the media, and this action contributed to his marginal loss to Bush. We should never assume any claim is too outrageous to be believed.

However, caution applies regarding over-zealous debunking of fake news. It is often unwise to draw attention to fake news published on a low-impact website or blog (one that has few followers). If this fake news is debunked by a journalist in a high-profile place such as ''The New York Times'' , knowledge of the false claim spreads widely, and more people overall will end up believing it, ignoring or denying the debunk. Research is needed to establish the prevalence of this effect, as well as its potential relationship to similar constructs such as the backfire effect, the Streisand effect and - more broadly - psychological reactance.

Strategies regarding carriers

Regulation of social media

Internet companies with threatened credibility have developed new responses to limit fake news and reduce financial incentives for its proliferation.

A valid criticism of social media companies is that users are presented with content that they will like, based on previous viewing preferences. An undesirable side-effect is that confirmation bias is enhanced in users, which in turn enhances the acceptance of fake news. To reduce this bias, effective self-regulation and legally-enforced regulation of social media (notably Facebook and Twitter) and web search engines (notably Google) need to become more effective and innovative.

Media scholar Nolan Higdon argues that relying on tech companies to solve issues with false information will exacerbate the problem. Tech companies lack an incentive for solving the problem because they benefit financially from the proliferation of fake news. Their utilization of data collected is one of the strongest forces empowering fake news producers. Rather than government regulation or industry censorship, Higdon argues for the introduction of critical news literacy education to American education.

Financial disincentives to tackle fake news also apply to some mainstream media. Brian Stelter, the anchor of Reliable Sources at CNN, has provided a substantial critique of the symbiotic but damaging relationship that developed between President Donald Trump and Fox News, which has proved an extraordinarily successful money-spinner for the Murdoch-owned TV network, despite this being a super-spreader of fake news.

General strategy

The general approach by these tech companies is the detection of problematic news via human fact-checking and automated artificial intelligence (machine learning, natural language processing and network analysis). Tech companies have utilized two basic counter-strategies: down-ranking fake news and warning messages.

In the first approach, problematic content is down-ranked by the search algorithm, for example, to the second or later pages on a Google search, so that users are less likely to see it (most users just scan the first page of search results). However, two problems arise. One is that truth is not black-and-white, and fact-checkers often disagree on how to classify the content included in computer training sets, running the risk of false positives and unjustified censorship. Also, fake news often evolves rapidly, and therefore identifiers of misinformation may be ineffective in the future.

The second approach involves attaching warnings to content that professional fact-checkers have found to be false. Much evidence indicates that corrections and warnings do produce reduced misperceptions and sharing. Despite some early evidence that fact-checking could backfire, recent research has shown that these backfire effects are extremely uncommon. But an important problem is that professional fact-checking is not scalable – it can take substantial time and effort to investigate each particular claim. Thus, many (if not most) false claims never get fact-checked. Also, the process is slow, and a warning may miss the period of peak viral spreading. Further, warnings are typically only attached to blatantly false news, rather than to biased coverage of events that actually occurred.

A third approach is to place more emphasis on reliable sources such as Wikipedia, as well as mainstream media (for example, ''The New York Times'' and ''The Wall Street Journal''), and science communication publications (for example, Scientific American and The Conversation). However, this approach has led to mixed results, as hyperpartisan commentary and confirmation bias is found even in these sources (the media has both news and opinion pages). In addition, some sections of the community completely reject scientific commentary.

A fourth approach is to ban or specifically target so-called super-spreaders of fake news from social media.

Fact-checking

During the 2016 United States presidential election, the creation and coverage of fake news increased substantially. This resulted in a widespread response to combat the spread of fake news. The volume and reluctance of fake news websites to respond to fact-checking organizations has posed a problem to inhibiting the spread of fake news through fact checking alone. In an effort to reduce the effects of fake news, fact-checking websites, including Snopes.com and FactCheck.org