Fake News Era: Does the truth still matter to you?

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Do you believe what you read online or see on TV? Should you?

Trust in media – traditional and social – is an issue striking at the heart of societies across the world.

Cynicism towards mainstream media is not a new phenomenon, but since the Twitter savvy Donald Trump began his campaign to be president of the United States he has taken the issue mainstream by selectively knocking established media with the label “fake news.”

Social media is not exempt. What started as an innocent digital community of friends updating friends on babies, holidays and relationships seems to have mutated into a web of vipers.

In October, tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google were lined up and grilled by the US Congress for their facilitation of Russia’s alleged attempts to manipulate last year’s presidential election. A huge question mark still hovers over the companies’ efforts to stem the spread of extremist propaganda online.

Fact or fiction?

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According to the Digital News Report 2017, a joint piece of research by Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, only a quarter (24 percent) of respondents from 36 countries and regions think social media does a good job in separating fact from fiction, compared to 40 percent for the news media.

Almost a third of respondents reported active avoidance of news, a number that rose to 38 percent in the United States.

“Our qualitative data suggest that users feel the combination of a lack of rules and viral algorithms are encouraging low quality and ‘fake news’ to spread quickly,” the report concluded.

Inaccurate news, willful or not, was hardly born with the dawn of the digital era. So what makes it seem more threatening now?

The information boom that has often left fact-checking redundant is regularly the first to be blamed for the decline of people’s faith in the news.

“Everybody is a publisher now," John Pullman of Reuters told CGTN Digital.

“Reports” of various qualities now flood social media, trying to grab users’ attention. In the process, the task of verifying information is rendered daunting to impossible. A case in point was the “news” articles about Hilary Clinton, the Democratic candidate who vied with Trump in 2016, that questioned her health and accused her of selling weapons to an extremist group.

‘Democratization of storytelling’

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The established brands in TV, radio and news publications still deem themselves as “authoritative," but “self-publishers” are bringing about a revolution.

Yusuf Omar, founder of online live streaming start-up Hashtag Our Stories, has hailed the “democratization of storytelling.” The trend is shaking traditional media’s grip over information and could help “recover” the voice missed by the establishment.

“Traditional media could be in danger of being marginalized should this trend continue,” warned Lyu Ningsi, editor in chief of Phoenix TV.

Regaining trust?

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In some countries, distrust in media reflects a deeper political rift, rather than a simple loss of confidence in news organizations’ competence to sort fact from fabrication. But the loss may not be irretrievable.

According to the Reuters/Oxford report, after the 2016 election “the news media in the US gained five points from the prior year in terms of audience trust, at the same time that subscription rates climbed for the first time in years and major platforms – from Facebook to Twitter – sought to pay for quality work.”

'Your mom tells you she loves you, check it'.

Although the issue of “fake news” today has a digital bent, to solve it may require reporters and editors to revisit time-honored journalistic principles.

Facing a swarm of input from multiple sources, traditional media must be very careful and take precautions with more thorough fact-checking, said Michael Wegener, head of the content center at the German broadcaster ARD.

“Your mom tells you she loves you, check it,” reiterated Yang Huayun, media strategy director of Sina News, quoting the famous newsroom idiom.

Fact-checking and alternative facts

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In an era in which presidential aides speak of “alternative facts," checks are akin to “censorship” to some social media users.

And in the online world, whose responsibility is it to get facts right? Mandatory checks would deal a blow to the heart of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube’s user-generated business models, even before the thorny question of whether algorithms used on social media to select news are “impartial.”

“They (social networks) are like paperboys that used to deliver newspapers, and you didn't blame paperboys for fake news,” said Pullman. Though the paperboys didn’t make as much money as the social networks do today, he joked.

Yusuf, a devoted live streamer, cautiously puts his faith in the more developed algorithms to tackle the problem of fake news.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are going to go a long way in helping to eradicate some of the problems that we see on social media,” he said.

Post-truth?

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Some senior news workers view the problem as being philosophical rather than only technological, so answers may lie in the examination of a bigger change in social ethos.

“This is a time of post-truth,” argued Mr. Lv, referring to the idea that truth matters less in a public debate than fanning emotion among audiences with any selection of facts from a bigger pool.

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Anger, in particular, is a helpful route to attention. A study based on Facebook five years ago by political scientist Timothy Ryan at the University of Michigan found “anger-inducing ads (relative to anxiety-inducing and emotionally neutral ads) to double the likelihood that Internet users would click on them to learn more information on a political topic.”

On a platform full of people yelling, the truth may be more easily drowned in the noise. This could, in turn, worsen the “echo chamber” effect where audiences are selective about what they want to hear.

“People are more willing to believe what they’ve already believed,” said Lin Yu, deputy director of CNC World Channel at China’s Xinhua News Agency.

The problem may be philosophical but it doesn’t mean technology cannot lend a hand.

The Reuters/Oxford report found that the algorithms underlying the online news aggregators may have been helping diversify content that people are seeing.

“Users of search, social media, and online aggregation services are significantly more likely to see sources they would not normally use.”

“Social media now is an unmistakable and permanent part of the media landscape,” added Andrew Stevens, international correspondent of the American broadcaster CNN.

“It’s a part of the evolution of where technology and media meet. And there’s no point being scared of something you can’t do anything about.”