Tackling the misinformation ecosystem

Social media and the digital sphere offer a great new opportunity for journalism, enabling reporters to tell stories in different ways, while working with data to create better experiences for their audiences, says Caroline Scott(3 common myths about disinformation your newsroom should know) in a post for Journalism.co.uk this month.

However, propaganda activists are also doing this successfully, deliberately fuelling the misinformation ecosystem to push their own agendas, leading to a loss of trust in the media in the process.

“The media are a target, a target in a way that many journalists don’t realise they are, in a way that they are actively aiding propaganda and purposes of political activists,” said Ms Scott quoting Lisa-Maria Neudert, researcher, Computational Propaganda Project, Oxford Internet Institute.

The computational propaganda uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks.

For the Project, Neudert’s team had carried out a big data analysis, researching the use of social media for public opinion manipulation.

Among other findings, results showed that 50 per cent of shared news in America was misinformation, with every piece of authentic, professional journalism matched with a piece of ‘fake news’, while the UK and Germany had 20 per cent of their social ‘news’ shared as misinformation.

Neudert listed three myths that need to be understood in order for journalists to work against the misinformation ecosystem. She warned journalists to be critical of the information that they are seeing online, as failure to do so will lead to journalists and news organisations becoming part of the problem and thus fuelling the spread of disinformation.

Myth #1: All bots are stupid

“There are bots on social media that are communicating just as well as a human can, while distributing fake news on a scale that no human can do,” Neudert said.

Many bots are so well designed that users on social media cannot identify them as being such, she continued.

“Bots are getting smarter. A lot of money and resources right now in technology are being invested in technology interfaces — just look at Google Assistant, Siri and Amazon Alexa.

Myth #2: In data we trust

“Yes, data forms a key part of any newsroom and helps journalists understand what is going on and which issues are important right now, but the problem is often that the data we are seeing is being gamed,” she said.

“A lot of bots don’t focus on communication, they drive metrics — likes, views and shares, which manipulate your metrics. When it is on a large scale, it is very difficult to detect those bots.

“It is becoming problematic for both algorithms, which use metrics to see what is trending, and for journalists to see what is happening, particularly during political elections. If journalists are taking those manipulated metrics, and are carrying out the agenda and inflating it, then that is a big part of the problem.”

Myth #3: The fake news era will pass

“I think we are still in the situation where we are repeatedly being fed the information that fake news is an over inflated problem, but it is a difficult trend that will pass.

“But it’s not something that is going to go away,” she said.

She advised newsrooms to focus on educating their audience to be aware of disinformation, and being vigilant themselves not to run quickly with what is trending — to think twice before they set the news agenda.

Meanwhile, a Unesco report, World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development highlights such positive developments as civil society mobilising to push for greater access to information, media houses cooperating with fact-checking services to push back against a torrent of disinformation, and more and more governments adopting freedom of information laws.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 18^th, 2017.

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