25 May 2017
Propaganda and Lies
How can we combat “Fake News”?
by R.D Shackleton
That such a seasoned MP as Labour’s Jon Trickett could be duped into believing a preposterous story about the Prime Minister provides yet more reason for worry about the impact of ‘fake news’ – that most Trumpian of terms – on the impending General Election.
Back in February, Damian Collins, the Tory Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee went as far as to say that this phenomenon now posed a ‘threat to democracy.’ Amid much media grandstanding, he pledged that his Committee would investigate the phenomenon to ensure that miscreants were named, shamed and brought to account. Collins knows his onions here, with a background at M & C Saatchi, but we will have to wait to hear the extent to which we, the British public, are being, in his words: ‘fed propaganda and untruths.’ After just a few hearings and written submissions, his Committee has: “ceased to exist”, according to its own website. And hopes of reading a considered report and recommendations on this most timely of topics have perished on the bonfire of parliamentary work halted by the decision to call a snap election.
Just how pernicious the impact of fictitious content on the electoral process has been is impossible to know, given that, typically, fake news is first disseminated into the fragmented world of social and digital media. Its progress tends to be viral, influencing groups of users outside the conventional focus groups, away from the polling methods used to track conventional paid-for media. Fake news in a British electoral context is usually characterised by salami-sliced propaganda and nuanced misinformation about the detail of electoral pledges. These are often subtle untruths which, nevertheless, shape and manipulate opinion but very largely fall under the public radar, right across the political spectrum. This is the real danger with fake news: it quietly shapes opinion within an electorate that does not even realise what is happening.
On occasion, though, crass attempts to tarnish the political process are exposed to public scrutiny. It was a sharp political reporter on The Independent website this week, for example, who spotted how Trickett had fallen for an audacious spoof story that Theresa May had been planning the compassionate release of Ian Brady in the run-up to the Moor’s murderer’s death. Trickett, a former campaign manager of Jeremy Corbyn, was (understandably) outraged at reading a screen grab on a mocked up BBC website. Without questioning the authenticity of this highly unlikely story, he retweeted it as “truly astonishing” to his own twitter followers. It then gathered a momentum of its own, retweeted again 45 times before he realised he had been duped and deleted the content. This was not enough to save him from a tirade from the right for his naivety, including vitriolic comments from the ConservativeHome website, with continued outrage amongst elements of his own supporters who clearly believed the story.
Our fake news may not be on the same scale as the super-sized lies weaponised during the US election. Think of the Obama ‘birther’ smear. Or the ‘Pope backs Trump’ and ‘Hilary backs ISIS’ headlines. (Fake news websites in the US are so widespread they now boast their own Wikipedia page.) Yet the principles remain the same. Gross factual inaccuracies will always be rebuffed by the mainstream media but their impact lingers on in the digital ether, on Facebook in particular. This is now the primary source of news, according to US publication, Political Insider, for 44 per cent of Americans – hence the rapidly diminishing influence of the paid-for media.
A major issue here – and its just as relevant in the UK – is that news consumption across social media is distorted by algorithms used by the likes of Facebook and Google to provide a so-called ‘filter bubble’ where users are rewarded with content they are already known to approve or agree with. ‘News’ in this context simply reinforces prejudice. And the more sensational the headline, the more likely it is to go “viral”, all buoyed up by advertising mega-bucks that are solely interested in content generating the highest volume of views.
The first step, therefore, in any sustainable drive to crack down on fake news, whether in a political, commercial or indeed any other context, is to reform the way advertising revenue is distributed. As things stand, those companies which distribute content – the likes of Google or Facebook – receive the lion’s share of the advertising revenue. They get far more than those originating content – look how Guardian revenues have dropped, for example, despite the success in attracting readership of their on-line offering.
The industry is fully aware that a shake-up is inevitable. Sensing the way the political winds are blowing, Facebook has already taken the welcome step of shutting down tens of thousands of UK accounts suspected of disseminating fake news. Google, too. has dismantled sham ‘publishers’ which allow advertisements to be run across websites and content. We need more pressure, too, on the advertisers who unwittingly bankroll the fake news phenomenon. A number of big name corporations were recently spooked by revelations that their commercials had appeared, without their knowledge, on extremist websites, courtesy of the media buying protocols of the big content distributors. The world’s biggest advertisers hold the power to force through reforms. And they’ll act if they fear that their association with fake news could damage their brand equity.
Self-regulation of content, though, will only stretch so far. For all their fine words, the distribution platforms are in thrall to their quarterly revenue figures. And their revenues are determined by user traffic. This is a wholly different business model to media publishers – such as the UK’s national press – which are compelled to sustain their readership with credible and good quality content.
The second step is to bring the methods of distribution platforms such as Google and Facebook under some form of regulation in order to police the distribution of fake news. Both Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority would seem to have an interest, given the size of the markets commanded by these two companies. It seems likely that we need a new regulatory regime to address the concept of fake news with a mandatory code of conduct as there is some over-lap in the jurisdiction of relevant regulators which were, in any event, put in place before Facebook was even founded.
All this must be the top priority for the next Culture, Media and Sport select committee when it is re-formed after the election. Trickett, one would hope, won’t be hoodwinked by digital media again but fake news will undoubtedly play an underhand role in swaying the direction of the election. And after Collins’ dire pronouncements, British voters can’t complain that they haven’t been warned.
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