Keeping up with the
falsehoods
We
are now 18 months from the United States presidential election, but the
challenges facing reporters and fact-checkers assigned to cover Donald Trump’s
re-election bid are already clear.
Some
of them are challenges journalists have faced before, but taken together they
add up to an escalation that illustrates how hard it will be to ensure readers
are getting the truth in the run-up to next year’s voting.
Among
them:
- The growth in the number of the president’s falsehoods
is accelerating. As Daniel noted in
a piece on how The Washington Post’s Fact Checker tallies Trump’s
false or misleading claims, there were 3,251 falsehoods from Trump between
January 2017 and June 2018. President Trump crossed the 5,000 milestone
601 days into his term, in September. It took him only 226 more days
to cross the 10,000 mark, according to The
Fact Checker’s database.
- The president and his allies are continuing to retweet
from the fringe. Last weekend, his Saturday morning tweets included some
propaganda from far-right groups, including one
video from an account called Deep State Exposed that said, “The
‘elite’ proclaim America must submit to Islam or else!!!” A senior
campaign aide this week also tweeted a 2015 video showing a Ukrainian
rocket launch, suggesting the
footage was of rockets being fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip and
using it to criticize Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
- Even when something Trump has said or tweeted is proven
false, the president is doubling down rather than backing off. A good
example came this week when Trump repeated a false claim that the U.S. has
“given” Puerto Rico $91 billion in aid, which has been checked and
debunked by The
Post, the
Associated Press and the
Orlando Sentinel, among others.
- Marginalized groups like Latino, Muslim and Jewish
communities are disproportionately targeted by misinformation online,
according to a new study covered
by BuzzFeed News this week. When messages are co-opted from these
groups by far-right extremists, vulnerable communities are less likely to
engage in politics online.
- Fact-checking might not always help. That’s according
to another study covered
in Nieman Lab this week, which found that “dueling fact
perceptions are rampant, and they are more entrenched than most people
realize.” And fact checks rarely reach the people who need to see them.
The
repetition of false claims — often talking points politicians love to repeat
because they fire up a specific slice of their base — and their amplification
by online extremists is something we’ve noted before. And it’s likely to
continue as the campaign heats up.
Combined
with the other two phenomena — a growing number of falsehoods and the potential
for them to arise from conspiracy theorists — the repetition means
fact-checkers and reporters will need to be especially diligent about not only
debunking misinformation, but also putting it in context. Why for example, does
Trump want you to believe the United States has sent $91 billion to Puerto
Rico? Where does that falsehood come from?
The
need for context was highlighted in a study
this week from the nonprofit group Media Matters for America, which
monitors misinformation on the right. The report said major media outlets often
just amplify Trump’s claims by “passively” repeating them in a headline or
tweet, even if the claims are debunked in the body of a story. The group used
The Post’s Trump database to conduct the research.
It’s
lost on no one that providing this kind of context takes resources and time,
both of which are hard to come by in today’s newsrooms. Eventually, automated
systems such as those being developed by Bill Adair and his team at the Duke
Reporters’ Lab, which was profiled
in The Atlantic this week, could help us plow through the mountain of
misinformation that continues to come out of Washington.
In
the meantime, as Kessler told Daniel, the number of falsehoods has “become bit
of a burden because it consumes so much time.” Kessler, too, is looking at an
onslaught as the 2020 race heats up.
“I
don’t know what we’ll do when it comes to campaign season and he’s holding
three rallies a day,” Kessler said.
… technology
- In an expansion of Facebook’s partnership with
fact-checking outlets, Instagram has started limiting the spread of false
posts, Daniel
reported Monday. Posts that are debunked by fact-checkers will be
removed from Instagram’s Explore tab and hashtag result pages. But
Gizmodo wants
to see more data about how the fact-checking project is already
working on Facebook — and
so do we.
- Speaking of Facebook, on Monday, the company announced that
it had removed 97 Facebook accounts, pages and groups for coordinated
inauthentic behavior originating from Russia and focusing on Ukraine. The
removed accounts, pages and groups had a combined following of more than
100,000 users.
- Following the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris
last month, misinformation spread
far and wide on social media — much of it aimed at
villainizing Muslims. This week, the
Agence France-Presse profiled two students who became the targets
of online hate after a photo of them spread with a caption wrongfully
blaming them for the fire.
… politics
- “The heroic efforts of India’s small band of
independent fact-checking organizations should be bolstered with public
and private support,” wrote
Samir Patil of Scroll.in, an India news and fact-checking site, for
The New York Times this week. Misinformation has
plagued the election there for the past several weeks — much
of it occurring on private messaging apps like WhatsApp, The
Financial Times reiterated in a story this week.
- In the Philippines, fact-checkers were attacked again
— this time for an non-bailable charge. Daniel
reported on Friday that both Rappler and Vera Files were
wrongfully accused of coordinating a government destabilization plot by a
newspaper that’s owned by a spokesman for President Rodrigo Duterte.
- The Spanish election was last weekend — and
fact-checkers were on the frontlines of misinformation about the campaign.
IFCN associate director Cristina Tardáguila spoke
with two outlets that debunked false claims about the election.
And here’s how Maldita.es used
a reader survey to bolster its work.
… the future of news
- Full Fact, Africa Check and Chequeado are
among the 20 international winners of the Google Organization’s
AI Impact Challenge. The fact-checkers will work with the Open Data
Institute for three years to “use artificial intelligence to dramatically
improve and scale global fact-checking efforts.” The four organizations
will share $2 million in funding.
- Several American companies are hiring firms to analyze
social media for misinformation about their business. Why? False posts can
tank companies’ stock prices, NBC
News reported.
- Will TikTok be the next social media platform to get
swarmed with conspiracy theories? It is billed as a fun and benign video
app that’s full of memes, but The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz has
found a few posts mentioning conspiracy theories, and
Motherboard wrote
in January about how the same algorithms that power other
platforms struggling with misinformation also power TikTok.
Each
week, we analyze five of the top-performing fact checks on Facebook to see how
their reach compared to the hoaxes they debunked. Read more about this week’s
numbers, and how false quotes are still among the most common types of
misinformation on social media, here.
- Factcheck.org: “Social
Posts Spin Harris’ Gun Control Proposal” (Fact: 2.5K engagements
// Fake: 2.1K engagements)
- Faktisk: “This
is not a Swedish woman who has been raped by immigrants” (Fact:
1.7K engagements // Fake: 432 engagements)
- Estadão Verifica: “When
Disinformation Can Kill: Baking Soda Is Not Remedy Against Cancer” (Fact:
1.7K engagements // Fake: 71.6K engagements)
- Agence France-Presse: “Assimilation
of immigrants: the Theodore Roosevelt quote falsely attributed to former
Canadian PM Laurier” (Fact: 380 engagements // Fake: 256K
engagements)
- Agência Lupa: “Gleisi
did not say Senna was a ‘car racer and nothing else'” (Fact: 350
engagements // Fake: 4.1K engagements)
Misinformers
frequently make things up about politicians and other public figures. Rarely do
they fabricate an entirely new one.
But
that’s exactly what happened in India, where a fictitious member of the
legislative assembly (MLA) named Anil Upadhyay has become the subject of viral
misinformation during this month’s general election.
Fact-checking
site Boom Live debunked
the bogus politician May 2, reporting that the character first
appeared in a Twitter video posted April 8. The user falsely claimed that the
politician beating a police officer in the video was Upadhyay when in fact it
was a counselor from Uttar Pradesh.
Since
then, Upadhyay has been blamed for everything from attacking a man in Gujarat
to praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a member of the opposition party.
Boom found that false posts mentioning the MLA are all over social media
— but the politician doesn’t exist.
What
we liked: In its
analysis, Boom broke down the origin of the Upadhyay hoax, how it spread on
social media and what kind of effect it has had on social media conversations
about the election. The fact-checker took a pretty bizarre piece of
misinformation and made it easy for anyone to understand.
- Last week, Poynter and the IFCN published a list of
unreliable news sites based on five lists from fact-checkers and
academics. Then, we retracted it. Here’s
why.
- Facebook and Instagram banned several
far-right personalities who have spread misinformation in the past,
including InfoWars’ Alex Jones. But there
are still loopholes.
- Writing for Wired, Paris Martineau spoke
to someonline extremism and disinformation researchers who are burned
out from the constant barrage of bad news.
- BuzzFeed
News reported on how spammers have been hijacking Facebook pages
with large followings to harvest advertising money.
- Speaking of ads, how does their transparency affect
voter behaviors? Teyit analyzed
that question in the Turkish context.
- Misinformation about New York schools is spreading in
Chinese on WeChat, CJR
reported.
- This
Guardian longread about why people believe conspiracy theories is
good for many reasons, but perhaps the best is the fact that the writer
went on a cruise called “Conspira-Sea.”
- In Latin America, fact-checkers are
collaborating to cover the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.
- More than half of Europeans might have seen some form
of disinformation promoted by Russian actors on social media, Politico
reported.
- Old and out-of-context photos and videos were sharedon
social media after Cyclone Fani hit the Indian state of Odisha on Friday.
