Download Fake news spread through social media platforms was

• Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers,
market value, and, in some cases, their sense of
mission. (Brown, Losing the News, p. 7).
• Independent, publicly traded American newspapers
have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the
past three years.
• Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages
of eighteen and thirty-four claim to look at a daily
newspaper. The average age of the American
newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising. Since 2004,
newspapers were least preferred source for news
amongst young people. (Brown, Losing the News).
Changes in media ecosystem
• Online news sites are growing rapidly and
some low quality sites have far more readers
than traditional “respected” news sites.
• Some have argued that demand for “clickbait”
created by Facebook causes some online
reporters to become more sensationalist and
less careful about the facts.
• Raises issue of politics of algorithms and “filter
bubbles” (Pariser)
Changes in media ecosystem
• Many traditional gatekeepers, fact checkers
and filters disappear.
• Is this more democratic?
• The collapse of gatekeepers, agreement on
facts, and the emergence of fake news, with
Facebook playing a key distribution role.
• What was your Facebook page like in the
months preceding the election?
• Mainstream news, in an economic death spiral due to
the new social media landscape, edges closer to
entertainment and farther from public service? (How
many questions about climate change in the
presidential debates?)
• “The contraction in the reporting corps, combined with
the success of disinformation this year, is making for
some sleepless nights for those in Washington who will
have to govern in this bifurcated, real-news-fake-news
environment.” Kristof
• ‘It’s the biggest crisis facing our democracy - the
failing business model of real journalism.” Senator
Claire McCaskill
“Post Truth”?
The First “Facebook Election”?
• “In the last couple of weeks, Facebook, Twitter and other social media
outlets have exposed millions of Americans to false stories asserting that:
the Clinton campaign’s pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote a secret memo
detailing plans to “salvage” Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by launching a
radiological attack to halt voting (merrily shared on Twitter by Roger
Stone, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign); the Clinton campaign
senior strategist John Podesta practiced an occult ritual involving various
bodily fluids; Mrs. Clinton is paying public pollsters to skew results (shared
on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr.); there is a trail of supposedly suspicious
deaths of myriad Clinton foes.”
• “As Mike Cernovich, a Twitter star, alt-right news provocateur and
promoter of Clinton health conspiracies, boasted in last week’s New
Yorker, “Someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate.” His
content can live alongside that of The Times or The Boston Globe or The
Washington Post on the Facebook newsfeed and be just as well read, if not
more so. On Saturday he called on a President Trump to disband the
White House press corps.
• Some journalists and scholars are claiming sites like
Facebook may have had a significant impact on the
election via “fake news”(sour grapes?)
• When faced with claims that news distributed via
Facebook may have impacted the election, Zuckerberg
at first dismissed this as “a pretty crazy idea.”
• Yet almost 50% of Americans get most of their news
via Facebook.
• Facebook’s algorithms actively curate the material we
see (they are no longer displayed chronologically). It is,
in some real sense, a “publisher,” not just a platform.
• Facebook took credit for its role in the Arab Spring, i.e. that
it played a vital role in political struggle overseas.
• In Myanmar misinformation on Facebook reportedly
helped fuel ethnic cleansing, creating a refugee crisis.
• Antonio Garcia-Martinez helped lead Facebook's efforts to
target ads. He says his ad team used to joke: “It would be
so easy to throw an election, just by showing vote
reminders to select counties.”
• "There's an entire political team and a massive [Facebook]
office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that
Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the
other. Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way,
Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.'
It's contradictory on the face of it."
• In 2010 Facebook conducted an experiment on 61 million users before
the midterm elections. One group was shown a “go vote” message as a
plain box, while another group saw the same message with a tiny
addition: thumbnail pictures of their Facebook friends who had clicked on
“I voted.” Using public voter rolls to compare the groups after the election,
the researchers concluded that the second post had turned out hundreds
of thousands of voters.
• In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for
an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts,
while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more
upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts;
those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other
research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social
networks. All of this renders preposterous Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that
Facebook, a major conduit for information in our society, has “no
influence.” (Zeynep Tufekci)
• On November 15, 2016, Zuckerberg vowed to “weed out fake
news.”
• “Some Facebook employees are worried about the spread of racist
and so-called alt-right memes across the network, according to
interviews with 10 current and former Facebook employees. Others
are asking whether they contributed to a “filter bubble” among
users who largely interact with people who share the same beliefs.
Even more are reassessing Facebook’s role as a media company and
wondering how to stop the distribution of false information. Some
employees have been galvanized to send suggestions to product
managers on how to improve Facebook’s powerful news feed: the
streams of status updates, articles, photos and videos that users
typically spend the most time interacting with.
• Facebook became “a sewer of misinformation.”
(Harvard’s Nieman Lab).
• “I’ve come to think that the rise of fake news —
and of the cheap-to-run, ideologically driven
aggregator sites that are only a few steps up from
fake — has weaponized those filter bubbles.
There were just too many people voting in this
election because they were infuriated by madeup things they read online.” Nieman Lab
• One example: I’m from a small town in south
Louisiana. The day before the election, I looked at
the Facebook page of the current mayor. Among
the items he posted there in the final 48 hours of
the campaign: Hillary Clinton Calling for Civil War
If Trump Is Elected. Pope Francis Shocks World,
Endorses Donald Trump for President. Barack
Obama Admits He Was Born in Kenya. FBI Agent
Who Was Suspected Of Leaking Hillary’s
Corruption Is Dead. (Nieman Lab)
•
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/
• “A fake story claiming Pope Francis — actually
a refugee advocate — endorsed Mr. Trump
was shared almost a million times, likely
visible to tens of millions,” Zeynep Tufekci, an
associate professor at the University of North
Carolina who studies the social impact of
technology, said... “Its correction was barely
heard. Of course Facebook had a significant
influence in this last election’s outcome.”
Fake News & Digital Literacy
1. Fake news spread through
social media platforms
was far bigger and more
influential than previously
thought. One study
suggests “top fake election
news stories generated
more total engagement on
Facebook than top
election stories from 19
major news outlets
combined.”
• Automated AI Twitter “swarms” or “commentbots” whenever topics like climate change,
gun control, or other hot-button issues come
up? Some evidence for this emerging.
• In a way these echo fabricated letters to the
editor, astroturf groups, and other strategies
from the past. However, at present, they are
harder to identify and track.
Fake News & Digital Literacy
2. It is becoming an international phenomenon.
• The degree of the problem is suggested by the
fact that some major political figures could
not tell fake news from real news. Two
prominent examples were president Trump
and General Flynn, the (until recently)
national security advisor.
•
A day after a black activist was kicked and punched by voters at a Donald Trump rally in
Alabama, Trump retweeted an image packed with racially loaded and incorrect murder
statistics originally published by a white supremacist.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/business/media/trump-fake-news.html?_r=0
Why it Matters
• Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs
Nuclear Threat at Israel.
Why?
• “Why is this all happening now? Clay Shirky, a professor at New
York University who has studied the effects of social networks,
suggested a few reasons.
• One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic
scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion
people now log on to the service every month. Because social
networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among
people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With
about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the
possibilities are staggering. “When the technology gets boring,
that’s when the crazy social effects get interesting,” Mr. Shirky said.
• One of those social effects is what Mr. Shirky calls the “shifting of
the Overton Window,” a term coined by the researcher Joseph P.
Overton to describe the range of subjects that the mainstream
media deems publicly acceptable to discuss.
• From about the early 1980s until the very recent past, it was usually
considered unwise for politicians to court views deemed by most of
society to be out of the mainstream, things like overt calls to racial bias.
• “White ethnonationalism was kept at bay because of pluralistic
ignorance,” Mr. Shirky said. “Every person who was sitting in their
basement yelling at the TV about immigrants or was willing to say white
Christians were more American than other kinds of Americans — they
didn’t know how many others shared their views.”
• Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can
see that he’s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can
do things — create memes, publications and entire online worlds that
bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream. The groups
also become ready targets for political figures like Mr. Trump, who
recognize their energy and enthusiasm and tap into it for real-world
victories.
• Mr. Shirky notes that the Overton Window isn’t
just shifting on the right. We see it happening on
the left, too. Mr. Sanders campaigned on an antiWall Street platform that would have been
unthinkable for a Democrat just a decade ago.
• The upshot is further unforeseen events. “We’re
absolutely going to get more of these insurgent
candidates, and more crazy social effects,” Mr.
Shirky said.
• Mr. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. Prepare
for interesting times.
From an era of “Truthiness” to a “Posttruth” age?
• Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as
2016's international word of the year. The
dictionary defines “post-truth” as “relating to
or denoting circumstances in which objective
facts are less influential in shaping public
opinion than appeals to emotion and personal
belief.”
• In a 2008 book, I argued that the internet would
usher in a “post-fact” age. Eight years later, in the
death throes of an election that features a
candidate who once led the campaign to lie
about President Obama’s birth, there is more
reason to despair about truth in the online age.
Why? Because if you study the dynamics of how
information moves online today, pretty much
everything conspires against truth.
Farhad Manjoo, “How the Internet Is Loosening
Our Grip on the Truth”
• “The internet is distorting our collective grasp
on the truth. Polls show that many of us have
burrowed into our own echo chambers of
information. In a recent Pew Research Center
survey, 81 percent of respondents said that
partisans not only differed about policies, but
also about “basic facts.” Manjoo.
Fake News: Institutionalized and
“Weaponized”
• “Where hoaxes before were shared by your great-aunt who
didn’t understand the internet, the misinformation that
circulates online is now being reinforced by political
campaigns, by political candidates or by amorphous
groups of tweeters working around the campaigns,” said
Caitlin Dewey, a reporter at The Washington Post who once
wrote a column called “What Was Fake on the Internet This
Week.”
Ms. Dewey’s column began in 2014, but by the end of last
year, she decided to hang up her fact-checking hat because
she had doubts that she was convincing anyone.
What is the top story on your face
book feed today – is it this?
• What solutions are being proposed?
• Critical digital literacy is thus far more
important than we had assumed.
• So what is to be done?
• [One] option might be to empower users to
improve their online communities through peerto-peer sanctioning. To test this hypothesis,
I used Twitter accounts I controlled (“bots”) to
send messages designed to remind harassers of
the humanity of their victims and to reconsider
the norms of online behavior.
• I sent every harasser the same message:
– @[subject] Hey man, just remember that there are
real people who are hurt when you harass them with
that kind of language
• I used a racial slur as the search term because
I thought of it as the strongest evidence that a
tweet might contain racist harassment. I
restricted the sample to users who had a
history of using offensive language, and I only
included subjects who appeared to be a white
man or who were anonymous.
• I created two types of bots: white men and black men. To
manipulate the race, I used the same cartoon avatar for the
bots’ profile picture and simply changed the skin color. Using a
method that has been frequently employed to measure
discrimination in hiring, I also gave the bots characteristically
white or characteristically black first and last names.
• Here’s an example of “Greg,” a white bot:
• “Overall, I had four types of bots: High Follower/White;
Low Follower/White; High Follower/Black; and Low
Follower/Black.
• Results? Only one of the four types of bots caused a
significant reduction in the subjects’ rate of tweeting
slurs: the white bots with 500 followers.
• Overall, I found that it is possible to cause people to
use less harassing language. This change seems to be
most likely when both individuals share a social
identity. Unsurprisingly, high status people are also
more likely to cause a change.”
• Many people are already engaged in sanctioning bad
behavior online, but they sometimes do so in a way
that can backfire. If people call out bad behavior in a
way that emphasizes the social distance between
themselves and the person they’re calling out, my
research suggests that the sanctioning is less likely to
be effective.
• Physical distance, anonymity and partisan bubbles
online can lead to extremely nasty behavior, but if we
remember that there’s a real person behind every
online encounter and emphasize what we have in
common rather than what divides us, we might be
able to make the Internet a better place.
• But action can be risky – a professor and her
students created a list of fake sites and criteria
to evaluate the credibility of sites was
targeted, threatened, and doxxed, and later
took the material down.
• See the handout (“How to spot fake news”).
This is a compilation of the advice published
to help people deal with the fake news
epidemic.
• Does anything seem useful?
• Can you think of additional solutions,
strategies or tools?
• What should be done?