CC BY 2.0.
JULES HOEPTING
Managing Editor
“Fake news” is a charged term that has skyrocketed in usage within the last decade.
In the age of the internet — where the ability to spread information requires less physical effort than brushing your teeth — misleading and incorrect information has become ubiquitous.
Being able to identify what is true and what is fake is a sought after skill.
This year’s Maytum Convocation theme, “Finding Truth: Communication in an Age of Misinformation,” brought in Craig Silverman, a Canadian award-winning journalist, author and one of the world’s leading experts on online disinformation, fake news and digital investigations.
Silverman is a former media editor of BuzzFeed and now works for ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism.
Silverman prefaced his lecture on Sept. 23 by acknowledging the lack of trust many have in government, business, law enforcement and traditional media.
“We need to figure out ways of reinventing trust, and ways of having a society where we can be properly skeptical of information and of institutions, but also find ways to work together to move forward,” Silverman said.
The lecture began with an anecdote set in Veles, North Macedonia where a toxic-producing polluting factory — which the community was economically dependent on — got shut down because a journalist exposed the impacts the factory had on the environment. The community was economically hurt and needed to find means to make ends meet.
Young residents figured out they could make a lot of money through Google AdSense by creating sensationalized headlines appealing to American audiences. U.S. audiences are considered a more valuable demographic to advertisers because the U.S. is a wealthier nation than most countries.
Residents of North Macedonia began publishing English language Facebook pages and creating flashy content about things like motorcycles and cars.
According to Silverman, young Veles residents were earning “10, 20, 30 times what their parents were earning” from advertisers — all from people clicking and engaging with misleading or false content.
In early 2016, someone figured out a prime topic for U.S. consumption: polarized, sensationalized U.S. politics — especially about Donald Trump.
By November 2016, over 140 U.S. political websites emerged in Veles. The citizens knew what they were doing was misleading and “bad,” but the digital marking of fake news was too “economically transformational” to stop, according to Silverman.
In today’s media-saturated environment, exaggerated content continues to grab people’s attention more than real content.
This means exaggerated content grabs the algorithm of social media’s attention and often gets shared more than real content, which can often lead to the spread of conspiracy theories.
Silverman started using the term “fake news” in 2014 to refer to websites like National Report, which publish entirely false articles like “Ebola Infected Passenger Explodes Mid-Flight Potentially Affecting Dozens,” create bios for fake journalists and write fake comments on those stories. These comments often point out a flaw in the fake story but end with praise for covering the story, thus helping to create the illusion the fake story is real.
Since Trump has taken over the term “fake news” and because the term means different things to different people, Silverman now uses the terms “disinformation” and “misinformation” to describe misleading or false information.
“Disinformation” is when people intentionally create false or misleading content to make money or cause harm.
“Misinformation” is when people share disinformation but they don’t realize what they are spreading is false or misleading; they are spreading information because they are trying to help.
Although some mis/disinformation is entirely false, most of it is not; the information has been built upon.
Content becomes misleading when it is given context different from its original format to imply something else; think a close-up image of a celebrity sneezing on the front cover of a magazine with the words “mental breakdown” written above it.
Content is false when accurate sources are impersonated; think making up a quote and ascribing it to an important person.
Furthermore, satirical content, a type of humor where the subject is often exaggerated, is often shared without people realizing the content is meant to be taken as a joke; think Saturday Night Live skits being taken seriously.
Media that is visually appealing, whether that be a meme or a video, is more likely to be shared than media heavy with text.
Furthermore, media that appeals to emotions is more likely to be shared amongst personal networks.
Every person holds a unique perception of the world based on their unique experiences. People like to feel comfortable; people like to think they are right.
Thus, when someone looks at an article that supports their preexisting beliefs, they interpret the information in that article as true. When someone looks at an article that opposes their preexisting beliefs, they will find ways to argue why their current beliefs are true and why that article is false.
People will actively find ways to discredit, discount or avoid information that does not align with their beliefs.
The need to support preexisting beliefs paired with the fact that exaggerated, sensationalized content captures attention better than everyday, pedestrian content is why people tend to become polarized in their beliefs.
And since people can make money by creating emotionally targeted, polarized, sensationalized content, they do.
In fact, Silverman showed two polarized political websites covering the same stories with different spins. Both websites were owned by the same group of people — they were able to make money through ads by spinning the story to either political extreme.
Although people like to think of themselves as rational thinkers, people are “still at the mercy” of their own bias, Silverman says.
To make matters more complex, improving technologies like Photoshop make it increasingly difficult to determine what is real and what is fake on social media.
In recent years, Facebook has put more effort into getting fact checkers to ensure misleading content being distributed is labeled as being inaccurate. But fact checking does little to change peoples’ opinionated minds.
On top of the misleading information, there are misleading users.
There are servers that allow people to give their permission to the server to utilize their real accounts for fake engagement. Users give the server abilities to use their account to like, comment and follow on other users’ posts in exchange for other users to engage with their account. Thus, the owners of the account might be real, but their engagement is not.
In Silverman’s “How to Identify and Investigate Media Manipulation and Misinformation” workshop on Sept. 29, he provided a few resources and strategies for everyday folks to use to decipher between truth and deception.
Lateral reading — looking for information about a subject across multiple sources — can guide whether or not something is truthful.
Most websites claim the information presented is true, but it is important to check other websites and social media for reviews of the initial website. Think of this as referial contacts; when someone is applying for a job, of course they are going to say positive things about themselves — it is important to verify with previous employers and coworkers that the person is who they say they are.
Another good idea is to copy a key sentence and/or quote from an article into a search engine and see where it pops up; if the results are suspicious, the information is probably suspicious. For those who wish to use a search engine focused on privacy rather than targeted ads Silverman recommended DuckDuckGo.com.
For social media accounts, it is wise to check over factors like whether or not the account is verified, the date of account creation, whom the user is following, the type of content they are posting, the people they are hanging out with and the location they claim to be in.
Silverman also suggested searching a person’s name along with their username to see if the username comes up on other platforms and if there is consistency within these same name accounts. A good resource for this is WhatsMyName.app.
A useful way to get a sense of where visual content originally came from is to use Google Image Search. After uploading a photo, Google will regurgitate anywhere on the web that photo appears.
If an image appears in a variety of contexts, there is a good chance the image is in the public domain, meaning it can be used freely without giving credit. Popular public domain image sites include Pexels and Creative Commons images with a public domain mark.
With images, it is important to keep in mind whether what is seen in the image is consistent with what is being claimed in an article. For example, if it was raining during the entirety of an event and the image shows people walking in the sun, the image was not taken during that event.
Checking to see if the photo is credited with a photographer is important as well.
In today’s internet age, traditional media no longer serve as a gatekeeper of information. Thus, it is increasingly important for people to hold themselves accountable for the validity of the information they are consuming.
As Silvermen puts it, “I think a lot of navigating this misinformation environment is understanding your own biases, trying to control for them, and not to pretend as if they aren’t there. Because they are there. They affect all of us.”
For more information on Craig Silverman and how to identify mis/disinformation, visit craigsilverman.ca.