Fake News & the Future of the Digital Age

This week's seminar on Fake News, Alternative Facts and Propaganda was especially interesting and really shone a light on a number of impending issues arising in the media landscape. For this post, I am going to focus particularly on Fake News.

Presenter Alice Peart provided some quality definitions to the current media landscape to start of this quite content heavy topic and issue:

• Fake News: separate from the more traditional, hyper-partisan news sources as they exist purely for profit…their main goal is to generate ad revenue by bringing as many people as possible to their site, generate as many clicks, as much web traffic as possible (Reifler 2017, ABC).
• Misinformation:  inadvertent or unintentional spread of inaccurate information without malicious intent (Facebook 2017, p.5).
• Disinformation: Inaccurate or manipulated content that is spread intentionally (Facebook 2017, p.5).

For myself, just hearing these definitions sparked a fair bit of worry and caution and I really started to wonder if the content I was consuming online was actually legitimately true. So, this begs the question:

How important is it for us to recognise and identify fake news?

The video below explores the potential ramifications and harm of fake news that the future of news can face. 

But with all these new technology programs being introduced and their ability to manipulate visual and audio material, how will the public be able to differentiate it as true or false? While Facebook accepts its substantial role as the main vehicle in disseminating fake news and offers tips to recognise fake news, senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Paul Ralph maintains that this will do nothing to stop it in its path. Throughout his article on The Conversation, he refers to a number of more practical measures that Facebook could take on including this suggestion:

"[T]he problem is not unassailable. The key to reducing inaccurate perceptions is to redesign technologies to encourage more accurate perception. Facebook can do this by developing a propaganda filter — something like a spam filter for lies." (Ralph 2017)

It's clear that the prevalence of fake news in this digital age is an issue, with Buzzfeed News noting that after analysing the top 20 fake news stories on Facebook leading up the US Presidential Election, they found that these stories generated more engagement in the form of shares, reactions, like and comments than that of real news stories (Feik 2017, p. 29). But, the problem is not black and white and cannot be solved immediately. Filter bubbles and echo chambers are also inherent problems with fake news.

Perhaps the most practical solution is educating users in digital literacy where members of the public are able to analyse the content they are consuming and search for alternative sources to verify its reliability. It seems like a step in the right direction for me anyway.

References: 

Facebook (2017). Information Operations and Facebook. Whitepaper. [online] pp.3-13. Available at: https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/facebook-and-information-operations-v1.pdf [Accessed 11 Sep. 2017].

Feik, N. (2017). Killing our Media: The impact of Facebook and the tech giants. The Monthly, (135), pp.25-33. 

Ralph, P. (2017). Facebook's new anti-fake news strategy is not going to work – but something else might. [online] The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/facebooks-new-anti-fake-news-strategy-is-not-going-to-work-but-something-else-might-76327 [Accessed 11 Sep. 2017].