Disinformation on the Internet
On June 22, 2017, the founder and CEO of snopes.com, David Mikkelson, visited the “Amerika Haus Wien” (at the invitation of the Embassy of the USA). Under the title “Disinformation on the internet”, he talked about the development of his fact check site, which he had begun in 1994 as a hobby. Since then, snopes.com has risen to become one of the most respected fact-checkers. If you are in doubt about a news article, you can check it out at snopes.com.
From the invitation:
“David Mikkelson is the co-founder and CEO of Snopes.com, a popular, independent fact-checking website that covers stories of unknown or questionable originals, including urban legends, internet rumors, and e-mail forwards. The website is routinely included in the annual “Best of the Web” lists and has been awarded the two Webby awards. David Mikkelson has made ABC, BBC, and CNN; The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal”.
Bad information
The question was asked what “bad information” really is, because not all bad information is necessarily “Fake News”. Bad information can also arise by being one-sided, ideologically coloured, or taken out of context. Alternatively, it may be that the journalist has not researched carefully and critically enough, or a news item was originally conceived as satire.
Fake news
Fake news often does not have a political purpose (such as false notifications à la Russia Today), but may be absurd or abstruse headlines with stories that will lead to clicks (so-called click baits), which generate advertising revenue.
For Mikkelson fake news is viewed as a symptom rather than the disease itself. In the USA this “disease” is the political-ideological polarization between Republicans and Democrats, which reached a climax in the last presidential election campaign.
Mikkelson asked the question why the correction of a lie is often less often read, “liked” and shared than the lies themselves. How can we explain this? News has become a product that can be consumed around the clock. If the consumer is not concerned with information but with entertainment, whether the information is true or false becomes irrelevant. In addition, people prefer to hear or read news which confirms their opinions and beliefs. Even when something that they have willingly believed, is proved to be wrong, many people are not readily willing to change their minds.
Entertainment instead of information
Most of the news is just for sensation – like the conjurors’ tricks at the fairgrounds of the past. The public may not have believed their tricks, even though they could not see how the tricks were performed.But ultimately this was not relevant; it was just good entertainment for the moment.
Today the question arises, what drives people to share sensational messages on social media? Why do they do the marketing for the producers of these messages? Really relevant news is spread over all media anyway. Is it about the social media built-in feedback? (Who has more friends, followers, etc.?)
Even fake news is news, and sometimes the more interesting one when it does not pretend to inform, but wants to entertain. Of course, fake news primarily wants to generate clicks. But clicks are now also an aim of serious news, and even of scientific open access articles. However, fake news, that is, sham news, does not want the clicks for itself, but to redirect the intrigued reader to pages, which often have nothing to do with the fake news (e.g., internet casinos). If they are well-invented, they serve the same purpose as crime thrillers for many readers. And like all other trivialities of life, they are shared with the “like-minded” in the social networks. This sharing requires digital and media competency. A deficit of information literacy only becomes evident when someone takes the fake news at face value and no longer recognizes the difference between appearance and reality.
Why are emotional and anecdotal news stories so much more appealing, more convincing, more effective and more credible than facts, statistics and figures which form the sole basis of the sciences.
Alternative facts, previously known as ‘lies’
Together with fake news the world became especially aware of Alternative Facts during the American election campaign in 2016. One could also call them lies, which are precisely the alternative to reality. But while lies generally have bad connotations, these which obscure or gloss over an unwelcome reality we sometimes wrongly regarded as “white lies”. They create an illusory world, in which one establishes oneself comfortably, in which one is always right, and is protected from changes, at least until reality reasserts itself with merciless harshness. If you have to choose between harsh reality (facts) or “self-incurred immaturity”, many people still opt for the latter, just as if there had never been an Enlightenment. Ignorance has become a reaction to a complex world full of uncomfortable facts, which are more and more difficult to validate. Thus, some media have already proclaimed the “post-factual age” where facts are replaced by perceived or group-specific “truth” (keyword “echo chambers” on the social media).
Fact check sites and media watchblogs
If you are interested in German-speaking (Germany, Austria, Switzerland plus the Netherlands) fake news, we recommend the pages of “Mimikama – Verein zur Aufklärung über Internetmissbrauch“. They are running a website at http://www.mimikama.at/ . One of Mimikama’s tasks is to expose false notifications and fake news (“bad information”) and clarify twisted contents, which are reported by Internet users.
The Hoaxmap (http://hoaxmap.org/) is recommended for all who are interested in rumours (and their explanation) .
“Hoaxmap has emerged from the desire to bring order into the multitude of scattered rumours and to facilitate the deconstruction of them. All “resolutions” are taken from established media and linked. “
In Austria two online platforms report about the media sector:
“Kobuk” (https://www.kobuk.at/) is a media watchblog of students in the “Multimedia-Journalismus” course at the University of Vienna.
“Dossier” (https://www.dossier.at/) is a member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
In Germany, “CORRECTIV – Enquiries for the Society” operates a non-profit research centre (https://correctiv.org/).
The Schmalbart Network (Notice: The address https://www.schmalbart.de/ is no longer availaible as of February 25, 2020.) considers itself as a counterpoint to the US media portal “Breitbart News Network”. According to its own definition it is
“about objectification and clarification, about clean discussion and dispute about attitudes. But we also want to draw borders when untruths and distortions or even forgeries are spread. We will fight incitement, racism, anti-semitism and any other kind of human hostility.”
Facebook and Google are now acting to address the spread of fake news on the Internet. A team of fact checkers (including snopes.com and factcheck.org) are used to deal with false notifications (bad information).
Facebook has a special need for action in order not to be discredited as a rumour-mongering and hate platform.
Google is concerned about the quality of their more and more personalized news because pages can be adapted in such a way that the Google search algorithms can be fooled.
Finally, a video from Factcheck.org: “How to Spot Fake News”
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