Daily News Editorial

Of fake news and alternative facts

28 January 2017

Unless you were living under a rock for a couple of years, you would have noticed a disturbing worldwide trend called “fake news”. Logic dictates that the two words cannot even be in the same sentence, let alone together because we tend to think that all news is true.

Fake news denotes news items (including video clips and photographs) that have been fabricated skillfully to give the impression that they are true events or statements. This phenomenon came to the fore with the rise of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, where anyone can post anything, only be to seen and shared instantly by millions more. But social media alone cannot be blamed – today’s 24 hour news cycle on TV, radio and the Net should take part of the blame. Indeed, the truth sometimes becomes a casualty of the race to be the “first” among the various media and fake news can sometimes win in the heat of the moment. The term shot into prominence during the US Presidential Election campaign, where Facebook was accused of allowing fake news to dominate the trending topics.

Lest you think fake news is confined to the West, it is very much alive in countries such as ours, where we recently saw a picture of a soldier getting kicked by a man in the street captioned as having been taken in Jaffna. The picture has actually been taken in Bangladesh. But thousands of people instantly believed that the picture depicted a true incident in Sri Lanka. Governments and Internet Service Providers can rarely, if ever, fight back in such instances because of the porous nature of the Internet, where things are often not what they seem.

However, social media sites themselves can and should take up the challenge. Both Facebook and Google are fighting back - Facebook has announced changes to its ‘Trending’ section, which it claims may help prevent the spread of fake news. The updates may “help prevent hoaxes and fake news from appearing in Trending,” Facebook said. Google no longer allows fake news sites to benefit from Google Ads, which deprives them of revenue. Google has banished 200 fake news sites completely.

Scientists have also chipped in, developing a fake news “vaccine”. Researchers at the Cambridge University suggest “pre-emptively exposing” readers to a small “dose” of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims. They said “the idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible.”

As if fake news was not enough, we also have to contend with the “post-truth”, the Oxford dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016. The dictionary said the adjective is defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. There is, in fact, an entirely new branch of politics known as “post-truth politics”. Again, this was very much in evidence during the UK’s Brexit referendum campaign and the US Presidential Election campaign. During campaigning for the British EU referendum campaign, Vote Leave made repeated use of the claim that EU membership cost £350 million a week, although it later began to use the figure as a net amount of money sent directly to the EU. Although this was easily debunked officially, both votes and campaigners were emotionally preoccupied to see the truth.

This is not the end. Soon after US President Donald Trump was sworn in, his Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that the crowd “was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period”. This was false and several news organisations pointed that out. He later insisted that “sometimes we can disagree with facts” which is actually true. For example, everyone believes that the Titanic sank after a collision with a massive iceberg to the point where it has become an established fact. But disagreeing with this fact, several researchers recently said the actual cause of the sinking was an onboard fire.

Now an even more intriguing term has come into circulation. Interviewed on Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press show on NBC, Kellyanne Conway, Advisor to President Trump, said Spicer was merely offering “Alternative Facts” about the inauguration crowd. The somewhat Orwellian phrase has since gone on to become a hit, while making George Orwell’s 1984 the best-selling book on Amazon. Interestingly, the only place where “alternative facts” belong is history itself – the ravages of time have obscured many chapters of the past and many alternative theories are available on historic events and people.

The takeaway from all these scenarios is that things cannot always be taken for granted, especially online. It is also up the readers and viewers to think for a moment when they see something that is literally too good to be true. If we are perceptive enough, we can mentally filter fake news and alternative facts. As always, comment is free but facts are sacred.