IRONICALLY, fake news itself has become the subject of news. Governments around the world grapple daily with how to cope with the consequences of misinformation.
This weekend’s French presidential election was not spared. The so-called “Twitter bots” that pose as real people and disseminate fake news on social media have surfaced in the run-up to the polls.
Public figures are often the victims of fake news.
The current form fake news is taking is inflicting huge problems on the whole media industry, including in the newsroom, advertising and marketing, at a time when the industry is beset with deep-rooted issues.
In the last three decades, almost every aspect of the news industry has changed.
Politicians no longer need to rely on the press to reach their audiences but instead can engage directly on Twitter.
The mix of digital news feeds, based on algorithms and not journalistic ethics, and a reduced editorial force, are making fake news a very real rival for consumers’ time and attention.
What is fake news and why is it growing so rapidly?
Fake news is a story dressed up as news that is based on false information.
A major problem is that the Internet has dismantled the traditional barrier between professional news-gathering and amateur rumour-mongering.
Fake news works — in the sense of generating lots of shares — because of what media experts say is confirmation bias — the irrational tendency of people to embrace information that reinforces their beliefs and to reject information that challenges them.
In the post-truth era of fake news, filter bubbles and social media, readers generate their own content or cherry-pick news sources to suit their own biases and dismiss the rest.
And, with the advent of social media, readers tend to share a story that appeals most to their feelings and these are usually not the good ones.
A recent study found that anger was the “key mediating mechanism” determining whether someone shared information on Facebook; the more partisan and enraged someone was, the more likely they were to share news online.
And, the stories they share tended to make the people who read them even more furious.
In other words, we have gone from a business model that produces consent to one that spawns dissent, which could breed anger and popular uprising against the establishment.
But there is another serious dimension why fake news is such a big business for tech giants like Facebook and Google, which sell digital advertising space.
Two important questions about fake news have not yet been answered: how much revenue would Facebook sacrifice if it removed fake news from its site? Does Facebook generate over half its ad revenue from fake news?
A BuzzFeed News analysis of top fake news traffic before the 2016 US election suggests that the proportion of time that users spent on fake — as opposed to real news — on Facebook was considerable.
In a recent published interview, Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman suggested that more data is needed to come up with an accurate estimate of the proportion of Facebook’s ad revenue attributable to fake news.
Damian Tambini, director of the Media Policy Project at the London School of Economics, argued that the underlying structures of the online advertising industry made fake news lucrative.
He said one of the questions in the UK Parliament’s inquiry into “fake news” was: “Have changes in the selling and placing of advertising encouraged the growth of fake news, for example, by making it profitable to use fake news to attract more hits to websites, and thus more income from advertisers?”
The answer to this question was “yes”, he said.
Coincidentally, dealing with fake news is the main theme at two media-related speeches by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak last week.
In his address to top editors at the Publish Asia 2017 conference, Najib said a free press must ensure that the still small voice of truth is heard amid the maelstrom of both information and misinformation that new technologies have unleashed.
Najib cited the case of how misinformation on Malaysia almost cost the country a US$7 billion investment by oil giant Saudi Aramco in a Petronas refinery project.
He even took a dig at a well-known foreign newspaper for printing lies about the Malaysian government.
Senior editors attending the conference said while their challenges in fighting fake news remained an uphill task, there was some ray of hope. It seems more people mistrust what they read on social media due to the “toxic spread of fake news”, they said.
“Not all stuff in social media is bad, but people are realising the world has many charlatans,” World Editors Forum president Marcelo Rech told The Star in an interview.
A JALIL HAMID feels in a digital world, the winner does not always take all.