Finding Solutions to the Issue of False Information Multiplied by Social Media

The 2016 U.S. presidential election, the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the 2017 presidential election in France are just a few events that brought our attention to the issue of false information spread online. Fake news is not a new phenomenon. It is an “old one multiplied by social media,” as one of the participants of the Milton Wolf Seminar described it. The 2019 Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy was dedicated to finding solutions to this problem. Researchers, practitioners in media, law, and civics exchanged their findings about what can eliminate or diminish the effect of false information at the international level.

Disinformation is an intention to deceive. For example, the easiest way to use it is through directing it toward vulnerable people to influence the way they vote. Targeted and often focused on a minor divisive issue, false information can cause a nationwide crisis. “The narcissism of small differences makes people more aggressive than big differences,” as one of the Milton Wolf Seminar presenters described the problem. This brings up the case of global disorder. New technologies and knowledge have changed people. Now we are facing the challenge of fighting propaganda and disinformation online. It spreads faster and is more targeted than any traditional media could have ever imagined. The speakers and participants of the seminar outlined a few major routes that can help us to address the issue of false information online and minimize its harmful effects.

Nurture Your Credibility

The only way out is to adjust. This was the first thing participants of the seminar agreed on. Consider traditional media. The audience does not look at it as the only source of truth. People no longer believe that if something has been broadcast, it is necessarily important. In fact, while TV is still the number one source of news in the United States, according to the survey by Pew Research Center, in 2018 more people were getting their news from social media than from newspapers in the U.S. (Shearer, 2018). Social media is the number one source of information for the 18-29 year old demographic. The audience wants to interact with the news, partake in the coverage, comment, and be heard. Decreasing trust in and credibility of traditional media outlets has helped to make it easier to mislead audiences. Consider some of the most prominent politicians in the U.S. Demeaning media has helped officials to demean corruption investigations into them.

According to the experts in the field of journalism participating in the 2019 Milton Wolf Seminar, this is why traditional media sources need to adjust and introduce some sort of self-imposed policy that ensures that they transmit only verified information to the general public.

One recent example of a media outlet that actually started doing just that is NewsGuard. Journalists have created it as an add-on to Google Chrome. It tells you how credible the news source, the website that you are visiting, is. The program has human moderators who correct mistakes if they occur.  Without humans, it is too easy to mislead the system, added another participant of the seminar. Just think about the last time YouTube’s UpNext (the function that is supposed to automatically display videos similar to the one you just watched) offered you or your child content that is clearly not in line with what you’ve been watching before.

Start With What You Have, Use Existing Resources

A black market of false information and the resources to create it is already out there. The prices are low. Forty euros for a hacked account and 12 euros for 1000 comments, that is all it takes to boost the virality of your post. All of this matters because people are relying on heuristics to decide whether they trust information or not.  Metrics have become more powerful than content. By heuristics we understand the design of the post, the number of people who interacted with it, and other people who follow the source. Add to this the ability to share any post in seconds and you have got a steady flow of potentially false information flowing from one user to another.

Education might answer this question partially, but that is a tough one. According to recent research, people age 65 and older are almost four times more likely to share fake news on social media than people from other age groups (Owen 2019). What does this mean? That education programs should target the age group 65 and up, as well as the younger population who use social media anew. This might end up being a very expensive project.

James Pamment, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Strategic Communication at Lund University, presented another approach. His stressed that there is already communication infrastructure in each country, city, and town. Spending an hour with each person already working in this infrastructure is an example of smart targeted education. It will be more fruitful to teach people in the industry how to counteract false information. Pamment breaks the whole education process into three main steps:  understand the problem, identify it, and contract it. During trainings participants should not just work with some theoretical vague information. They should be given a cyber attack situation and asked to react and resolve it, said Pamment.

Back to the Roots: Utilizing Local media  

Follow credible media because objective truth is their main journalism function that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else. These days social media gets traditional media into trouble, said another participant of the seminar, an expert in the field of international affairs and media. Propaganda and disinformation are not new phenomenon but social media has amplified them. Social media contributed to the atomization of the international debate. Under the current circumstances a great narrative is a non-narrative, it is a narrative of disinformation.

Trust in media was up in 2018, this is especially true for the local news sources, according to the Poynter Institute (Lakshmann, 2018). Seventy-six percent of Americans trust their local TV news stations and 73 percent have confidence in their local newspapers. Experts propose that the reason for high trust in local media is based on the relationship between personal experience and media converge. When evening news talks about issues people are facing on a daily basis, this reinforces trust and perceived credibility to the medium. This is why local media can become busters of fake news on the local level.

As for the national and international levels, media organizations should become educators, explaining the details and answering as many potential questions as possible to avoid misunderstanding, explaining decisions made by editors and journalists when covering especially divisive topics. All of this will make media more authentic, and as one of the experts put it “authenticity is a new truth.”

Re-Adjusting the Narrative: from Politics to Culture

Fake news can be battled at the level of a local grocery store. Participants of one round table mentioned how disinformation is a cultural thread. The creators of false news stories use small disagreements, extend them, and try to create a bigger divide in society. Some posts that were circulated on social media before the Brexit referendum focused on small-town issues. Some social media posts, for example, highlighted that a local pub closed but a mosque opened and that the corner store stopped selling their favorite chocolate and instead polish food had taken over the shelves. National governments around the globe are introducing new legislation against what is referred to as online misinformation. However, to battle it effectively governments at all levels should work closer with media organizations to support press freedom and provide fact-based information in a less politicized manner. “It is not about politics. It is about culture” as one of the participants of the round table put it. The media should talk to people who will share their experience. This will make the coverage of any issue more authentic.  “Personal experience will overpower everything else in the judgment of the audience,” according to another participant in the discussion. This supports transportation theory, which proposes that people trust the story more and change their intentions and attitudes to reflect the story if its narrative is realistic and provides an opportunity to “enter” the world and empathize with the characters described in the story. The transportation effect can be enhanced by the design of the media and how information is presented. For example, implementing such features as live-streaming, comments by other users, and highlighting the personal experiences of other people or journalists dealing with the issue can help the audience feel that they are a part of the story and thus they will trust it more.

To summarize, while national governments are struggling to adopt perfect legislation that will regulate the spread of misinformation online, there are other approaches that media and civic organizations can adopt to fight false information and increase their own credibility. Experts in the field of international relations and media who discussed how institutions can adjust to the new environment filled with disinformation as a part of the 2019 Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy outlined a few effective solutions. Traditional media should work toward increasing their credibility and ensure that the information they publish is verified and accurate. Self-policing that includes human moderators and fact checkers would ensure that a higher quality of information is shared with the public. Framing of the information impacts the trust of the audience. If the journalist openly explains how the information was gathered and checked, incorporating new features like live-streaming and photo galleries will enhance the credibility of the source. It is also worth keeping in mind the value of targeted education with a focus on people who already work in the field of communication. They are interested in addressing the issue since they have to deal with it as a part of their jobs. They are familiar with the basics and they are the ones who can further educate the general public. Finally addressing the issue of false information as a societal and cultural issue rather than political will increase the audience’s trust to verified sources of information.

References

Lakshmanan, I. (2018). Finally some good news: Trust in news is up, especially for local media. Poynter.

Owen, L. (2019). Old people are the most likely to share fake news on Facebook. They are also Facebook’s fastest-growing U.S. audience. NiemanLab.

Shearer, E. (2018). Social media outpaces print newspapers in the U.S. as a new source of information. Pew Research Center.