Countering Fake News
Today I attended ‘Combating Fake News: An Agenda for Research and Action’ at Harvard Law School. It was quite possibly the most…
Today I attended ‘Combating Fake News: An Agenda for Research and Action’ at Harvard Law School. It was quite possibly the most academically star-studded room I’ve ever been in, with researchers and writers like Cass Sunstein, Eli Pariser, Yochai Benkler and Duncan Watts all featured. As the title suggests, the focus of the day-long conference was the new and disruptive phenomenon of fake news. As organizer Matthew Baum suggested at the outset, fake news might best be characterized as news stories which evoke the trappings and symbols of a legitimate news organization, but which misinforms its readers — undermining the ‘real’ organizations they attempt to mimic.
As the day progressed, however, both the qualities of newness and disruptive typically ascribed to fake news were called into question. To some extent, fake news is old wine in new bottles: as historian Kelly Greenhill of Tufts argued, American history is replete with examples of public figures — up to, and including, several presidents — incorporating untruths in attempts to drive particular policies. FDR and LBJ, for example, both incorporated falsehoods in attempts to ramp up involvement in the Second World War and Vietnam War respectively. And long-established organizations have, as a result, defined their mission in accordance with fighting this falsity: both Helen Boaden, former Director of BBC News, and Lori Robertson, from factcheck.org, represent institutions that have been committed to truthful reporting for almost a century and over a decade respectively.
Nor is fake news as disruptive as might be assumed. This isn’t to say fake news isn’t a problem at all, or one that can be easily solved. But even as the media landscape has changed immensely in recent years with the rise of social media, recent empirical research suggests the continued relevance of longstanding structures of communication. Duncan Watts, for example, suggested that the amplification of fake stories on Twitter is driven almost exclusively by actors with pre-existing prominence in the network, like existing news organizations (including epistemologically dubious sources like Breitbart.)
In fact, it fairly quickly became clear that the challenge posed by fake news actually lies upstream: not so much with the fake news itself, but with how it — alongside ‘real news’ — is disseminated and discussed. Cass Sunstein’s keynote broadened the focus in this direction, exploring how the provision of different forms of information in different deliberative contexts affects decision-making and opinion-forming.
Yet even if all this was rather encouraging — there was a distinctly upbeat esprit de corps among the assembled academics and journalists — this is not to say that nothing has changed in the last few years, nor that fake news won’t change anything going forward. First, though Watts showed that the concept of virality is almost wholly dependent on the sharer’s existing position in the network, clearly the internet has broadened the definition of what, or who, counts as a broadcaster. Second, as Sunstein noted, Facebook and other online platforms serve to cleave citizens into narrower and narrower filter bubbles, every day. As Adam Sharp noted, the filter bubbles that used to be defined by the geographical restriction of technologies like the radio are now constituted by an abundance of content options, between which users must choose.
Finally, as Yochai Benkler noted, technological advances have dovetailed with specific political developments, in particular on the right wing. Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination was only the most obvious above-ground manifestation of a seismic shift in the underbelly of the conservative media, which has seen center-right outlets diminish at the expense of far right sources, most notably Breitbart. Thus Trump, David Lazer said, “stepped into a structural opportunity that contemporary media offered”.
Little mentioned in the conference was Donald Trump’s recent attempts to co-opt “fake news” to mean any news that he doesn’t like. (If anything, this underlines the drawbacks of using a new label to describe a longstanding problem, since newer definitions are — by definition — less well-defined.) Nor did panelists reflect on (nor questioners ask about) the impact on the media ecology that such a news-reactive president like Trump may have. Yet the seriousness of the issue that we might instead call “non-news” was given a timely airing. As noted in the opening remarks, a well-functioning democracy requires an effective ecosystem of truth-telling. Any societal challenge of this magnitude requires the sort of response for which this event represented a small but important first step.