Fake news

VIENNA – Fake or false news is not unique to the Philippines. Thanks to the internet and social media, the problem has become a global phenomenon, undermining democracy and a free press.

The good (and real) news is that the platforms most widely used for spreading fake news are moving together with media organizations and the academe to address the problem.

Social media giant Facebook, criticized for its role in the spread of hoax news (and in countries such as the Philippines, trolls), is at the heart of the battle. At the annual summit of the Global Editors Network (GEN) in this Austrian capital, stopping the proliferation of fake news was tackled by Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown. As her job title implies, Brown is working to accomplish this mission through partnerships with mass media companies.

“Solving the problem of fake news on our platform is very, very important for us,” Brown told hundreds of journalists at the GEN Summit.

Google is doing something similar, and the two giants are not just tilting at windmills. In April, the two partnered together with BuzzFeed and others to prevent the spread of fake news during the presidential election in France. This was part of Crosscheck, a coalition of 17 organizations that worked to track and verify content released publicly online. The verification covered not just news, photographs and video footage but also memes and comment threads.

In the same month, Facebook launched the News Integrity Initiative, a $14-million project to enhance media literacy. The fund, donated by non-profits such as the Ford Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Mozilla and Tow Foundation, is administered by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York together with the London School of Economics, Sciences Po in France and other educational institutions in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, tasked to oversee the project, said at the launch, “The bottom line is to find ways to improve the public conversation and figure out why things spread the way they do, and what conversations people are having.”

Craigslist and Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund is another donor. Its founder Craig Newmark said at the launch, “In high school US history, I learned that a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy. As a news consumer, like most folks, I want news we can trust. That means standing up for trustworthy news media and learning how to spot clickbait and deceptive news.”

In January, Facebook launched the Journalism Project to promote news or media literacy and curb news hoaxes. It has also started using flags to fact-check stories that go viral on Facebook. Experts are still assessing the effectiveness of this system.

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Despite dizzying advances in information and communication technology, there is no magic wand that can be waved and instantly filter fake from real, reliable news. But social media platforms and news organizations are moving to address the problem.

Working for a newspaper, I should be happy that the proliferation of fake news on social media is driving people back to traditional or legacy media, where journalists have the constant burden of accountability and the need for accuracy, fact-checking and fairness.

Fewer people are using online ad blockers these days, according to a study conducted by the Reuters Institute. Thanks to fake news, people are willing to pay for reliable news.

Facebook has a personal stake in combating fake news. The Reuters study showed public trust in social media declining in the US and UK, two of the most mature news consuming markets, with people’s trust in social media only about half the trust in conventional media. People are also increasingly getting news from personal messaging apps such as Viber instead of social media, according to the Reuters Institute.

In the digital media industry, such a trend, left unchecked, can be irreversible and spell doom even for industry leaders. An industry giant that fails to keep up and adapt can go bankrupt virtually overnight. 

So we believed Brown when she told us, “Our interests in this are all aligned. This has to be a joint effort.”

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Technology also makes conventional media vulnerable to fake news. Everyone makes mistakes; traditional media can also slip. In the ancient days, we called it a bum steer – nakuryente. Technology has made the risks higher. So journalists and media companies have a stake in fighting fake news. Around the world, we’re all looking for sustainable business models.

“There’s no silver bullet. There’s no one size fits all,” Brown told us. “But I think journalism has to be in a healthy place.”

Social media platforms and traditional media are also partnering to deal with the news consumption side. This means educating readers and viewers.

News literacy was a buzz phrase at the just concluded GEN summit. The goal is to help people to be discerning about information they read or, as Brown put it, “to make informed judgments about what they’re reading online.” “We’re just getting started,” Brown, a journalist for 20 years before joining Facebook, said. The ongoing collaborative efforts, she said, aim to secure “a future where quality journalism not only survives but also thrives.”

What technology cannot kill is old-fashioned journalism. Regardless of the medium or the platform, news will still have to be based on what we were taught in journalism school: hard facts, informed perspective and nuance, fairness. Only credible news can survive.