{"id":544,"date":"2017-05-01T18:00:40","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T18:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thinking.is.ed.ac.uk\/wir\/?p=544"},"modified":"2017-05-01T18:00:40","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T18:00:40","slug":"sifting-fact-from-fake-news-international-workers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinking.is.ed.ac.uk\/wir\/sifting-fact-from-fake-news-international-workers-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Sifting fact from fake news – International Worker’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CC BY 2.0-licensed photo by CEA+ | Artist: Nam June Paik, \u201cElectronic Superhighway. Continental US, Alaska & Hawaii\u201d (1995).<\/p><\/div>\n

Woodward and Bernstein, the eminent investigative journalists involved in uncovering the Watergate Scandal, just felt compelled to assert that the media were not ‘fake news’ at a White House Correspondents Dinner the US President failed to attend. In the same week, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, felt compelled to create a new site, WikiTribune,<\/a> to combat fake news.<\/p>\n

This is where we are this International Worker’s Day where the most vital work one can undertake seems to be keeping oneself accurately informed.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/strong>We live in the information age and the aphorism \u2018one who possess information possesses the world\u2019 of course reflects the present-day reality<\/em>.\u201d – (Vladimir Putin in Interfax, 2016).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sifting fact from fake news<\/h4>\n

In the run up to the Scottish council elections, French presidential elections and a ‘strong and stable<\/em>‘ UK General Election, what are we to make of the \u2018post-truth\u2019<\/a> landscape we supposedly now inhabit; where the traditional mass media appears to be distrusted and waning in its influence over the public sphere (Tufeckzi in Viner, 2016) while the secret algorithms\u2019 of search engines & social media giants dominate instead?<\/p>\n

The new virtual<\/em> agora (Silverstone in Weichert, 2016) of the internet creates new opportunities for democratic citizen journalism but also has been shown to create chaotic \u2018troll\u2019 culture & maelstroms of information overload. Therefore, the new \u2018virtual generation<\/em>\u2019 inhabiting this ‘post-fact’ world must attempt to navigate fake content, sponsored content and content filtered to match their evolving digital identity to somehow arrive safely at a common truth. Should we be worried what this all means in \u2018the information age\u2019?<\/p>\n

Information Literacy in the Information Age<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cFacebook defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want <\/em><\/p>\n

and Google defines what we think.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

(Broeder, 2016)<\/p>\n

The information age is defined as \u201cthe shift from traditional industry that the\u00a0Industrial Revolution\u00a0brought through industrialization, to an economy based on computerization or digital revolution<\/em>\u201d (Toffler in Korjus, 2016). There are now 3 billion internet users on our planet, well over a third of humanity (Graham et al, 2015). Global IP traffic is estimated to treble over the next 5 years (Chaudhry, 2016) and a hundredfold for the period 2005 to 2020 overall. This internet age still wrestles with both geographically & demographically uneven coverage while usage in no way equates to users being able to safely navigate, or indeed, to critically evaluate the information they are presented with via its gatekeepers (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al). Tambini (2016) defines these aforementioned digital intermediaries as \u201csoftware-based institutions that have the potential to influence the flow of online information between providers (publishers) and consumers<\/em>\u201d. So exactly how conversant are we with the nature of their relationship with these intermediaries & the role they play in the networks that shape our everyday lives?<\/p>\n

Digital intermediaries<\/h4>\n

\u201cDigital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook are seen as the new powerbrokers in online news, controlling access to consumers and with the potential even to suppress and target messages to individuals<\/em>.\u201d (Tambini, 2016)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s CEO Mark Zuckerberg may downplay Facebook\u2019s role as \u201carbiters of truth<\/em>\u201d (Seethaman, 2016) in much the same way that Google downplay their role as controllers of the library \u201ccard catalogue<\/em>\u201d (Walker in Toobin, 2015) but both represent the pre-eminent gatekeepers in the information age. 62% of Americans get their news from social media (Mint, 2016) with 44% getting their news from Facebook. In addition, a not insubstantial two million voters were encouraged to register to vote by Facebook, while Facebook\u2019s own 2012 study concluded that it \u201cdirectly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people<\/em>.\u201d (Seethaman, 2016)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"image003\"Figure 1 Bodies of Evidence (The Economist, 2016)<\/em><\/p>\n

This year has seen assertion after assertion made which bear, upon closer examination by fact-checking organisations such as PolitiFact (see Figure 1 above) absolutely no basis in truth. For the virtual generation, the traditional mass media has come to be treated on a par with new, more egalitarian, social media with little differentiation in how Google lists these results. Clickbait journalism has become the order of the day (Viner, 2016); where outlandish claims can be given a platform as long as they are prefixed with \u201cIt is claimed that<\/em>\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNow no one even tries proving \u2018the truth\u2019. You can just say anything. Create realities.\u201d <\/em>(Pomerantzev in the Economist, 2016)<\/p>\n

The problem of ascertaining truth in the information age can be attributed to three main factors:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The controversial line \u201cpeople in this country have had enough of experts<\/em><\/a>\u201d (Gove in Viner, 2016) during the EU referendum demonstrated there has been a fundamental eroding of trust in, & undermining of, the institutions & \u2018expert\u2019 opinions previously looked up to as subject authorities. \u201cWe\u2019ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers\u2026There is nobody: you can\u2019t go to anybody and say: \u2018Look, here are the facts\u2019<\/em>\u201d (Sykes in the Economist<\/a>, 2016)<\/li>\n
  2. The proliferation of social media \u2018filter bubbles\u2019 which group like-minded users together & filter content to them accordingly to their \u2018likes\u2019. In this way, users can become isolated from viewpoints opposite to their own (Duggan, 2016) and fringe stories can survive longer despite being comprehensively debunked elsewhere. In this way, any contrary view tends to be either filtered out or met with disbelief through what has been termed \u2018the backfire effect\u2019<\/em><\/a> (The Economist, 2016).<\/li>\n
  3. The New York Times calls this current era an \u2018era of data but no facts\u2019<\/em><\/a> (Clarke, 2016). Data is certainly abundant; 90% of the world\u2019s data was generated in the last two years (Tuffley, 2016). Yet, it has never been more difficult to find \u2018truth in the numbers\u2019<\/em><\/a> (Clarke, 2016) with over 60 trillion pages (Fichter and Wisniewski, 2014) to navigate and terabytes of unstructured data to (mis)interpret.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The way forward<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \u201cWe need to increase the reputational consequences and change the incentives for making false statements\u2026 right now, it pays to be outrageous, but not to be truthful.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

    (Nyhan in the Economist, 2016)<\/p>\n

    \"\"

    Original image by Doug Coulter, The White House (The White House on Facebook) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by me.<\/p><\/div>Since the US election, and President Trump\u2019s continuing assault on the \u2018dishonest media\u2019, the need for information to be verified has been articulated as never before with current debates raging on just how large a role Russia, Facebook & fake news played during the US election. Indeed, the inscrutable \u2018black boxes\u2019 of Google & Facebook\u2019s algorithms constitute a real dilemma for educators & information professionals.<\/p>\n

    Reappraising information & media literacy education<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

    The European Commission, the French Conseil d\u2019Etat and the UK Government are all re-examining the role of \u2018digital intermediaries\u2019; with OfCom being asked by the UK government to prepare a new framework for assessing the intermediaries\u2019 news distribution & setting regulatory parameters of \u2018public expectation\u2019 in place (Tambini, 2016). Yet, Cohen (2016) asserts that there is a need for greater transparency of the algorithms being used in order to provide better oversight of the digital intermediaries. Further, that the current lack of public domain data available in order to assess the editorial control of these digital intermediaries means that until the regulatory environment is strengthened so as to require these \u2018behemoths\u2019 (Tambini, 2016) to disclose this data, this pattern of power & influence is likely to remain unchecked.<\/p>\n

    Somewhere along the line, media literacy does appear to have backfired; our students were told that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not (Boyd, 2016<\/a>). The question is how clicking on those top five Google results instead of critically<\/em> engaging with the holistic overview & reliable sources Wikipedia offers is working out?<\/p>\n

    A lack of privacy combined with a lack of transparency<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Further, privacy seems to be the one truly significant casualty of the information age. Broeder (2016) suggests that, as governments focus increasingly on secrecy, at the same time the individual finds it increasingly difficult to retain any notions of privacy. This creates a \u2018transparency paradox\u2019<\/em> often resulting in a deep suspicion of governments\u2019 having something to hide while the individual is left vulnerable to increasingly invasive legislation such as the UK\u2019s new Investigatory Powers Act \u2013 \u201cthe most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy<\/em>.\u201d (Snowden in Ashok, 2016). This would be bad enough if their public & private data weren\u2019t already being shared as a \u201ctradeable commodity\u201d (Tuffley, 2016) with companies like Google and Apple, \u201cthe feudal overlords of the information society<\/em>\u201d (Broeder, 2016) and countless other organisations.<\/p>\n

    The Data Protection Act (1998), Freedom of Information Act (2000) and the Human Rights Act (1998) should give the beleaguered individual succour but FOI requests can be denied if there is a \u2018good reason\u2019 to do so, particularly if it conflicts with the Official Secrets Act (1989), and the current government\u2019s stance on the Human Rights Act does not bode well for its long-term survival. The virtual generation will also now all have a digital footprint; a great deal of which can been mined by government & other agencies without our knowing about it or consenting to it. The issue therefore is that a line must be drawn as to our public lives and our private lives. However, this line is increasingly unclear because our use of digital intermediaries blurs this line. In this area, we do have legitimate cause to worry.<\/p>\n

    The need for a digital code of ethics<\/strong><\/p>\n