Fake news: Don't make the cure worse than the disease

When a guy with an assault rifle walks into a pizza joint to "self-investigate" the made-up conspiracy theory he found on the Internet about a non-existent child-prostitution ring, there is no doubt we have got a problem.

And regular folks are reasonably alarmed.

A new Pew Research Centre study finds that two in three United States adults say that fabricated news stories cause "a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events". This sense is shared widely across incomes, education levels, political affiliations and most other demographic characteristics, according to the study.

Pope Francis agreed, memorably comparing the consumption of fake news to the eating of excrement. (A much-shared fake story said he had endorsed Mr Donald Trump for president.) President Barack Obama has chimed in on the dangers, too: "When there's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well," he said, it poisons political discourse.

Facebook, initially reluctant to step into the fray, announced on Thursday that it would take some first steps. "We've focused our efforts on the worst of the worst," wrote Mr Adam Mosseri, a Facebook vice-president.

People walking on the sidewalk past the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington, US, on Dec 5, 2016. The pizzeria vowed to stay open despite a shooting incident sparked by a fake news report that it was fronting a child sex ring run by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. PHOTO: REUTERS

Those efforts include testing ways for users to report what they suspect is fake news; working with the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network to provide users with verified information on "disputed" stories; and reducing the financial incentives to spammers.

The idea is to slow the spread of fake news without turning Facebook into a worldwide censor.

It is a promising start, given Facebook's outsize role as a purveyor of fake news to its nearly 2 billion users.

And it certainly beats one of the ideas that surfaced in the Pew survey - that the government or politicians should act to stop the spread of fake news. (Asked who should tackle the problem, respondents gave about equal weight to government, tech companies such as Facebook and Google and the public.)

Government involvement is a seriously bad idea. It could put the question of what constitutes real news and what constitutes fake news in the hands of those who may be most affected by it.

And given the ascendancy of Mr Trump, who traffics in falsehoods on a regular basis - and has been clear about wanting to limit long-established press rights - it is an even worse notion.

"We need to be very rigorous in defining the problem and thinking through the implications," said Mr Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

For one thing, he says, "there's a very narrow category of content that everybody would agree upon".

The term "fake news" is fuzzy. It can refer to a multitude of problems, including disinformation, propaganda, conspiracy-mongering or what Mr Jaffer calls "very biased takes on public affairs".

"I don't think we want the government - or, for that matter Facebook - to be the arbiter of what's true and what's false," Mr Jaffer told me.

So what else can be done?

Mr Eli Pariser, founder of the viral-news site Upworthy, has set up an online clearinghouse for potential solutions. One of these: verified news-media pages. A news organisation would have to apply to be verified as a credible news source, after which its stories would be published with a "verified" mark, similar to Twitter's check mark.

Another is adding a "fake news" flag to questionable articles. This could be user-generated or crowdsourced; it would mean that readers would at least see a warning box before they click through, thus potentially slowing the spread.

As the Guardian noted in a recent survey, this could be vulnerable to gaming the system: "Users could spam real articles with fake tags." All of these ideas are open to claims of bias.

In a world increasingly plagued by social-media filter bubbles and partisan echo chambers, it is tough to get agreement even on the colour of the sky - much less the role of Russian cyber-intrusion into the American presidential election.

Ms Amy Mitchell, Pew's director of journalism research, told me that the new survey reinforces earlier research findings: "Americans have a hard time agreeing on the facts." But the Pew survey - mostly done before the gunman walked into the aforementioned Washington, DC, pizza shop, Comet Ping Pong - makes clear that people find the proliferation of fake news confusing, and want action.

Facebook and other tech giants need to keep moving on this, while being ever-mindful of legitimate free-speech concerns. That is a very tricky balance, with hazards everywhere.

The answers do not lie in government oversight, which can quickly turn to censorship.

Perhaps, more importantly, we all must get smarter about what we are reading and viewing.

Schools should be redoubling their efforts to teach news literacy, civics and history. News literacy organisations deserve more support than ever. Fact-checking, and good judgment, informed by radical scepticism, matter most. And yes, a slower trigger finger on the share buttons, will help as well.

Truth may indeed be hard to pin down. But facts do exist - and underground tunnels at Comet Ping Pong do not.

WASHINGTON POST

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on December 17, 2016, with the headline Fake news: Don't make the cure worse than the disease. Subscribe