Fake and Real

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting By JOHN HERRMANNOV. 18, 2016  Khizr Khan, the father of an American soldier killed in Iraq and a critic of Donald J. Trump, was smeared in articles on pro-Trump sites. Credit Elsa/Getty Images Something is deeply wrong when the pope’s voice, reputation and influence can be borrowed by a source that describes itself as “a fantasy news site” to claim that he has endorsed a presidential candidate, and then be amplified, unchallenged, through a million individual shares. The attention paid to fake news since the election has focused largely on fabrications and outright lies, because they are indefensible, easy to identify and extraordinarily viral. Fake news is created by the kinds of people who, when asked, might call their work satire, or admit that they’re in it for the money or for the thrill of deception. Theirs is a behavior that can and should be shunned, and that Facebook is equipped, and maybe willing, to deal with. For many people, and especially opponents of President-elect Donald J. Trump, the attention paid to fake news and its role in the election has provided a small relief, the discovery of the error that explains everything. But as the attention has spread widely — even President Obama talked passionately about it on Thursday — it may lead to an unwanted outcome for those who see it not just as an explanation, but also as a way to correct the course. It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force. False news stories posted on fly-by-night websites were prevalent in this election. So, too, were widely shared political videos — some styled as newscasts — containing outright falsehoods, newslike image memes posted by individuals and shared by millions, and endlessly shared quotes and video clips of the candidates themselves repeating falsehoods. During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else. I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump. The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them. This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.” Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself. As the campaign progressed, criticism of Mr. Trump was instantly projected back at his opponent, or at the critics themselves. “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained. Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms. This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen. “Fake news” as shorthand will almost surely be returned upon the media tenfold. The fake news narrative, as widely understood and deployed, has already begun to encompass not just falsified, fabricated stories, but a wider swath of traditional media on Facebook and elsewhere. Fox News? Fake news. Mr. Trump’s misleading claims about Ford keeping jobs in America? Fake news. The entirety of hyperpartisan Facebook? Fake news. This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are. Facebook may try to address the narrow version of the problem, the clearly fabricated posts. Facebook has plenty of tools at its disposal and has already promised to use one, to bar sites that have been flagged as promoting falsified content from using its advertising platform. But the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway. Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces. Facebook tried this, to a very limited extent, with Trending Topics. Members of the company’s editorial staff wrote descriptions of trending news stories, accompanied by links they deemed credible. This initiative collapsed in a frenzy of bias accusations and political fear. But it is easy to imagine a system in which a story, upon reaching some high threshold of shares, or a source, upon reaching some cumulative audience, could be audited and declared unreliable. This could resemble Facebook’s short-lived experiment to tag satire articles as such. A number of narrow measures could stop a fake story about the pope, for example. But where would that leave the rest of the media? Answered and rebutted, and barely better positioned against everything else that remained. It would be a still-dominant news environment in which almost everything there before remained intact, the main difference being that it would have all been declared, implicitly, not fake. Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and voting, and yet one where negative inputs are scarcely possible, and where conflict is resolved with isolation. (Not that provisions for open conflict on a platform present any easy alternatives: For Twitter, it has been a source of constant crisis.) Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy — more closely, perhaps, than most of the organizations that are identifying them. Their removal will be an improvement. The outrage at their mere existence, and at their promotion on a platform with the stated goal of connecting the world, will have been justified. But the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force, not despite Facebook but because of it. The company that created the system that resulted in hoax news stories should try to eliminate them, and with any luck it will. But the system stands to remain intact. Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns despite, or perhaps because of, its being credited with causing those concerns. Some have come to the realization that this was mistaken, even absurd. Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

According to Snopes, Fake News is Not the Problem-Failing Media Is.

According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem Take it from the internet’s chief myth busters: The problem is the failing media. Snopes Managing Editor Brooke Binkowski The day after the election, news began swirling around social media that New York Times columnist David Brooks had called for President-elect Donald Trump’s assassination. Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski had a feeling it was fake. Because, come on now, would a prominent columnist for a reputable news outlet really make that kind of comment? Snopes has made its business out of correcting the misunderstood satire, malicious falsehoods, and poorly informed gossip that echoes across the internet — and that business is booming. Traffic jumped 85 percent over the past year to 13.6 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. The site supports itself through advertising, and in the last three years it has made enough money to quadruple the size of its staff. Sure enough, a bit of Snopes reporting revealed that Brooks had written a column saying Trump would likely resign or be impeached within a year. A news item published on The Rightists claimed Brooks had then said in an interview for KYRQ Radio New York that Trump should be killed. Snopes found The Rightists doesn’t even pretend to traffic in truth. In the site’s “about” section, it describes itself this way: “This is HYBRID site of news and satire. part [sic] of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!” What’s more, the story’s facts didn’t add up. For example, the site claimed Brooks had made the comments on a radio station — KYRQ — that didn’t exist. Verdict: FALSE. This is the state of truth on the internet in 2016, now that it is as easy for a Macedonian teenager to create a website as it is for The New York Times, and now that the information most likely to find a large audience is that which is most alarming, not most correct. In the wake of the election, the spread of this kind of phony news on Facebook and other social media platforms has come under fire for stoking fears and influencing the election’s outcome. Both Facebook and Google have taken moves to bar fake news sites from their advertising platforms, aiming to cut off the sites’ sources of revenue. But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.” The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. “When you’re on your fifth story of the day and there’s no editor because the editor’s been fired and there’s no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don’t have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up,” she says. Founded two decades ago to debunk urban legends, Snopes has grown into a major correction operation with an editorial staff of nearly a dozen people sifting through the internet for news that smells fishy. No, delayed military absentee ballots would not have swung the election. No, Melania Trump has not filed for divorce, nor was her husband born in Pakistan. No, Mike Pence definitely did not tell Fox News that gay conversion therapy saved his marriage. Snopes reporters often choose stories to investigate based on their own web reading. “You know, some of us are just inaccuracy snobs, but some of us are ideologues, too,” Binkowski says. She certainly falls into that camp. “I believe in sunlight being the best disinfectant, and I believe in the power of the truth,” she says. The incendiary made-up headlines are often the most straightforward falsehoods to identify. “Honestly, most of the fake news is incredibly easy to debunk because it’s such obvious bullshit,” she says. “A site will have something buried somewhere on it that says, ‘This is intended to be satire. Don’t sue us.’” Binkowski says the more important work involves setting the record straight at legitimate publications that get things wrong. For example, in December, a story about El Chapo threatening ISIS appeared in the New York Post, on Forbes, and in the Washington Times, among other outlets. It didn’t sit right with a Snopes reporter, yet news outlets were reporting — and rereporting — the story. Binkowski had spent a portion of her professional journalistic career covering the border region between Mexico and the United States. “If El Chapo had made a statement like this, I would have heard about it because I’m in contact with all these Zapatista groups in Mexico,” she says. So she tracked down the original author of the information, a Brit who had written the piece as satire. “He was like, ‘I didn’t think this was going to go viral. I guess I just really nailed that El Chapo narrative,’” she remembers. “I was like, ‘Yeah, you sure did.’” Snopes published a story in which the author said that the El Chapo story was satire and he’d never intended it to get so big. As a result, the duped publications ran corrections. Binkowski also points to the challenges the media face in relaying complex information quickly and accurately. To help, recently Snopes has begun to publish important news-related information as a resource for journalists and others. Last week, for example, Binkowski wrote a piece about how the electoral college functions that served as a reference for other reporters writing about the election. “It’s really complex stuff that you can’t just read about and then write about,” she says. “We’re going to be doing more of that.” Two decades into its existence, Snopes has built a strong brand as a credible myth buster. If you aren’t sure whether something is true, Google it. If a Snopes link is among your first search results, it’s probably not. Even so, corrections rarely get the attention the original stories generate. Against the viral tidal wave of misinformation, it can be hard to tell how much impact the Snopes team is having. “The only thing that we are doing that we can really keep doing is: just say the truth again and again and again and again and again, and just keep doing it,” says Binkowski. “You have to really have a specific type of personality to not want to just go back to bed.”