Fake news has recently returned to
prominence in our mass media, as the public’s opinion of the news media as well
as news revenue has dropped. This pairs
with the disruption of delivery of the news as it moves from printed newspapers
and TV and radio news shows to widespread use of web-based news sites,
smartphone apps, and social media. A
reduction in subscription and advertising revenue of mainstream media has reduced
the amount of real news available due to cuts in news budgets. Fake news and less journalism have lowered the
public’s opinion of the media (Soll, 2016; Graves, 2017). Jacob Soll (2016), writing in Politico Magazine, says that the new
sources of news are easier to manipulate into falsehoods and misleading
statements than the largely professional journalism we have had for many years. Journalists and others are responding in many
ways, including increased fact-checking, training people to verify news information and using
technological means to identify dubious news items.
As the number of fake news sites
increases there have been increases in the number of fact checking sites and
the number of items found to be false or misleading (Graves, 2016; Berghel,
2017). Lucas Graves (2016), in a book
published by Columbia University Press, called it the fact-checking movement. He says it includes reputable journalists,
serious newspapers and at least three major efforts: FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com
and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. These
all review stories in the media and provide detailed responses, indicate
accepted truths, and identify contrary statements. Sometimes they are
themselves accused of bias. Since they
are not currently equipped to keep up with all the fake news, they work with a
subset of the news (Graves, 2016).
Everyone is responsible to evaluate
the sources they use for facts, and to discount sources that are of
questionable accuracy, but this can be difficult (Caulfield, 2017). Training to manually validate news sources in
reliable ways is being developed in many forms, from newspaper articles to
books. These training materials
emphasize the need to use critical thinking to estimate the chances of the report’s
accuracy, and provide long lists of things to check about the source and the
story in question (Caulfield, 2017; Berghel, 2017). Mike Caulfield
(2017) identified four strategies and a habit for checking. The habit is the most important: “Check your
emotions.” Don’t allow the story to
trigger your emotions. The strategies
outline a process that starts with looking for previous fact-checking work or a
synthesis of research. Follow up by going
upstream to find the sources that this source is using and look at them. The next step is to find what others say
about each source. When you get lost or
aren’t making much progress, you circle back.
Using what you now know, go back to the first strategy; look for
previous work about the sources. This
should give you an idea about where the story came from, who curated it and how
reliable it is (Caulfield, 2017).
In addition to manual verification, it is possible to build into
browsers and apps the means to identify fake news or at least flag articles
with issues, using many different paths to get there. There are proposals to build algorithms that
identify the “tell-tales” of fake news, but they are not yet reliable (Berghel,
2017). Hal Berghel (2017), writing in Computer from IEEE, called for the
creation of the Interactive Gaudy-Fact Crap-Detector (IGFCD). Interacting with users as they surf the net, it
accesses a database maintained by scholars and journalists in real-time to give
people information about the accuracy of the web site at that link. As the automated detectors become more
reliable, they can be added to the IGFCD.
To control the adverse impact of
fake news we will need to use all of the above methods as each has its own
contribution. Fact checking sites are a
good part of the solution, but require an informed user community, a bevy of
fact-checkers and an active audience. Manual
verification is a useful activity but is unlikely to be performed diligently by
a majority of users, as it can be time consuming and difficult. The Interactive Gaudy-Fact Crap-Detector is more
automatic and usable given a fast internet connection, good software and active
scholars and journalists. News consumers
will need to control their emotions to allow them to use these tools to verify
the accuracy of the stories they are reading before they respond or forward
them to others.
My hope is that when people are able to identify
and use reliable news sites, the business of those sites will see revenue
increases from subscriptions and advertising.
Unreliable sites will see decreases in revenue which will hopefully reduce
their numbers quickly. Less fake news
should improve the public’s opinion of mass media and then increase media revenue.
References
Berghel , H. (2017). Lies, Damn
Lies, and Fake News. Computer, 50(2),
80-85. Retrieved March 18, 2017, from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7842838/
Caulfield, M. (2017, February). Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.
Retrieved March 19, 2017, from https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/
Graves, L. (2016). Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political
Fact-Checking in American Journalism. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
Soll, J. (2016, December 18).
The Long and Brutal History of Fake News. Politico
Magazine. Retrieved March 19, 2017, from http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/fake-news-history-long-violent-214535
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