But all the fact-checking institutions in the world will never be able to beat down every rumour or fake "fact". And while some media reports have cast doubt on the efficacy of fact-checking, Mantzarlis is convinced that his work has an impact. "What we've seen over the past two years is that consistently, across the board, regardless of partisanship, when people get told a falsehood and get presented with a correction, their belief in the falsehood goes down," he says. People might be "fact resistant", but very few are "fact immune", he says.
"Google and Facebook have both said that they are going to be hiring a lot of people to review content and enforce their terms of service and keep fake and illegal stuff off their platform. I'm interested to see how that is actually done," Buzzfeed's Silverman says. "The opaqueness of these platforms and their power and the fact that so much speech has moved on to them is something that we need to pay attention to and make sure that we don't turn them from places where misinformation is running rampant to places that are so locked down that they are inhibiting speech," he says.
Alongside worries about the power of the social media companies, the experts also have concerns about the power of governments. "Sometimes well-intentioned but ill-informed legislators will overreach and do more harm that the problem they are trying to fix, with legislation on fake news," Mantzarlis says, noting that legislation is being proposed in several countries across Europe. The most sweeping such legislation came into effect on 1 January in Germany. The law demands that social media sites quickly remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material or face fines up to 50m euro (£44.3m, $61.1m).
Ever since the debate over the issue really took off a little over a year ago, there's been enormous disagreement as to whether false stories spread online actually have any impact on people's politics or voting patterns. In one of the first academic studies about the consumption of fake news, researchers at Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Exeter estimated that about 25 percent of Americans visited a fake news website in a six-week period around the time of the 2016 US election.
But the researchers also found that the visits were highly concentrated - 10% of readers made 60% of the visits. And crucially, the researchers concluded "fake news does not crowd out hard news consumption." "The reach was relatively wide, but not so deep," Mantzarlis says. "It's quite a big step further to say, are people voting on this, making decisions on it. To say it's poisoning our democracy or it won this guy or the other guy an election, we need a lot more research to be able to say that."
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42724320
To conclude that fake news only influences those who visit those sites is a big leap. If the dubious/fictious arguments are picked up and addressed on more reputable sources, the discussion has still been shifted. The prime way this happens is by repetition of disproven items, such as allegations of Clinton graft in Whitewater long after the special investigation turned up no wrongdoing.
ReplyDelete"Veles" has been seen, over and over through history. The histories of the Roman emperors were almost all written by their enemies. Yellow Journalism completely dominated the news: WR Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer didn't much care about facts. They cared about circulation. Hearst famously said of the Spanish-American War, "You give me the pictures and I'll give you the war."
ReplyDeleteI don't think fake news can be stopped. We might be able to attenuate it, somewhat, but it can't be cured. Politicians lie, the newspapers report it, if we're lucky they do some due diligence and present the contradictory evidence and people figure out it's a lie. But that process takes time. And it's not cheap.
Only a good reputation can overcome Fake News.
Dan Weese We will never, ever, ever be able to stop people from telling lies. As you say, we might be able to attenuate the lying, or at least the effects of telling lies. But as for more specific recent technological examples - Macedonian teenagers cranking out garbing, Russian professional trolls on Twitter etc., bots on social media : those I remain more optimistic about. As per the article you recently posted, those sorts of problems are new but, I believe, ultimately addressable. For the moment, it's a treatable condition.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface of how damaging fake news could potentially be. Currently, video or audio recordings of what people said and did are still reliable evidence. Give the CGI artists ten more years, and that may no longer be the case. Then things get really interesting.