The age of misleading, incomplete and outright false news

Right now the brutality in Burma against the Rohingya is being encouraged by a flurry of Facebook posts that demonise this embattled minority. The recent US election that brought Trump to the seat of power was facilitated in part by fake news that proliferated on Facebook in his favour.

Facebook it seems is the conduit of polarisation, a far cry from its promise of bringing people together. The enmities of the past that were defined by geography, ethnicity and sectarianism have found a digital vessel, one capable of taking it further than the slow tide of moving people ever could.



Behind all of this is Facebook’s algorithm that tends to give you more of what you already like, more of what you already believe. It’s a paradox of the ultimate open platform, you can be connected to literally anyone but hear only your own voice.

The News is in effect being penalised when its neutral – partisan news is easier to sift for those who want to hear it. Click once on an article and magically more like it appear in your newsfeed.

This has the effect of emboldening bias, bolstered with false bravado that comes from being in an echo chamber. While Mark Zuckerberg, somewhat chastened by recent criticism, has promised to stem the proliferation of fake news, the odds are substantial when there is economic incentives to pursue yellowness in write-ups.

As a light is being shone on this in the US, the staggering sums of money to be made in doing so is becoming clearer. For very little start-up money, one can be in the business of fake news and roll in the green if they have a gift for the incendiary.

Our experience in Pakistan is a little different, but no less damaging. In WhatsApp we have the “forwarded as received” culture, a blithe disclaimer to avoid any rebuke if the purpose of the forward is understood. The purpose is of course to manipulate opinion with clearly false news.

Pakistan in any case is not an easy country for news. Decisions, institutions and real power centres are all purposefully opaque, that is where in part they draw their power. Despite Right to Information laws in some places, verifying information is difficult even for the most credible of newsmongers. An arbitration of contested truths can be done through the courts, which is to really say, it can’t because of the imperfections of our legal system.

So, in an arena like Pakistan where the mainstream news itself is a dicey proposition, rumour can easily pass for news. A WhatsApp, unsourced and without a chain to origin, doesn’t appear all that different even though it is. Despite intense criticism of the media in Pakistan, it has done well for the circumstances in which it seeks to authenticate wheat from chaff.

But where the danger for Pakistan truly lies, is the organisation of social media by our own agencies that fight to forge domestic opinion rather than doing so against external adversaries. In any case, they have succeeded in the former and lost in the latter.

Our domain of fake news in the social media front differs from the West in that it is unethical citizens there who do so chasing personal enrichment, whereas some of the more pernicious examples here are well funded productions, like the recent example against Ayesha Siddique.



The traditional call for freedom of information was bolstered by a confidence in the truth to prevail and a bias about the elevated status of human rationality. While certainly not the reason, but one of the reasons for Trump’s victory has been this emerging problem surrounding social media’s dark side. If anything, it has been legitimised with the Americans electing their first social media troll as President.

Searching for answers is not easy here in terms of policy. Any move to suppress certain parts of speech, both hate and false, in the frontier-less space of digital heightens fears of unmitigated censorship. Where the line gets drawn will be contested and ugly, but it is one that needs to happen more often. The most traditional of proponents of unfettered access happen to be corporations, but lost in their grandiose pronouncements is the censorship that takes place anyway on their terms, however imprecisely they are decided.

Cutting edge technology operating like the Wild West will need sheriffing.