OH: Another Chinese national is arrested for trespassing at Mar-a-Lago: Woman, 56, is detained for taking photos of the private resort after being asked to leave.
A free press is essential to our democratic way of life.
Independent, factual information enriches communities and helps each of us make
decisions about our daily lives. Because of journalism, we are better informed.
We are more connected. We are stronger.
Because questions of "why" are the ones that keep us
up at night. They’re the most complicated. The ones that get brushed aside when
the rest of the world moves on. The ones that require time, persistence and
courage to answer.
“Alternative facts.”
The first time that phrase was uttered was on NBC’s
“Meet the Press” in 2017. Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway used it
to defend then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false attendance
numbers for Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The phrase was so bizarre that “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck
Todd laughed when Conway said it. “Alternative facts?” Todd asked.
These days, that term has become common in American politics and
media, along with “fake news.”
So on Sunday, Dec. 29, “Meet the Press” will air a special
edition called “Alternative Facts: Inside the Weaponization of Disinformation.”
In describing the show, NBC News said it will “take an in-depth look at the
techniques of spreading disinformation, how it’s designed to create chaos and
confusion, and its negative effects on the public.”
Scheduled guests include New York Times executive editor Dean
Baquet and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron. The roundtable that
day is scheduled to include Recode founder Kara Swisher, NPR “1A” host Joshua
Johnson, New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser and Washington Free Beacon
editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti.
On Wednesday, I had a chance to ask Todd about moderating “Meet
the Press” at a time when “alternative facts” are so common.
In an email, Todd told me, “If people are looking to spread
misinformation, this is the wrong network to try to do that. We never knowingly
let someone use our platform to spread disinformation and we don’t let
newsmakers conflate opinion with fact. That’s something I can’t emphasize
enough. Specifically on allegations of Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016
election, I’ve had folks ask me, ‘Why can’t someone have a different opinion
about what Ukraine did?’ At what point though is an opinion no longer valid in
the face of facts? Someone could have legitimately had that opinion about
Ukraine three years ago, but the weight of facts that debunk this theory, or
‘opinion,’ is quite overwhelming now.”
So why even allow such voices on the air? One of the criticisms
“Meet the Press” and many other shows get is inviting guests who are simply
going to lie or mislead the audience.
“I will never permanently ban anyone from ‘Meet the Press,’” Todd
said. “My job is to help Americans find out what’s happening — whether it’s
their government or a political campaign. Every once in a while, the public has
to see for themselves what an attempt at gaslighting looks like, but I won’t
knowingly put anyone on I know will openly attempt it and I don’t let these
instances go unchallenged. I also don’t endorse members of the media booking
someone simply to feel good about ‘winning’ an interview to flex their Twitter
muscles.”
Still, moderating a show such as “Meet the Press” has to be much
different now than when Todd first started moderating in 2014.
“I think what’s
changed the most is that uttering a known falsehood or blatantly lying is no
longer treated as a character deficit,” Todd said. “Instead, there is a reward
structure for somehow ignoring questions or avoiding confirming a fact. There
is an active media ecosystem, mostly on the right, that rewards lying if the
act embarrasses someone they don’t politically agree with. If the media
ecosystem isn’t going to share the same standards for truth and fact then the
entire system gets poisoned and that’s how disinformation flows more easily
than ever.”
Reflecting on
fact-checking in 2019
For
fact-checkers around the world, 2019 was a big year.
In
October, the Duke Reporters’ Lab counted more than 200 fact-checking projects
around the world. Facebook continued to grow its partnership with such
organizations, hosting
its first fact-checking summit at the company’s Menlo Park, California,
headquarters. And misinformation continued
to grow as a global problem.
Each
year, the IFCN makes a series of predictions for how fact-checking and
misinformation will change. As we say goodbye to 2019, we wanted to check on
how the predictions we made last year held up.
1. We’ll see more
credibility scores deployed — and possibly misfiring
Maybe
it’s because we kind of stopped paying attention to these tools, but this
didn’t seem to be as big of a trendline in 2019 as we thought.
It’s
true that projects like NewsGuard, which has its trademark nutrition labels for
the reputability of websites, has
grown over the past year. Newer projects, such as the Global Disinformation
Index, are
working on a similar approach. And there were some misfires; the IFCN even
had its own snafu with trying to compile a database of misinforming
websites.
But
overall, it seems that the industry has somewhat backed off a labeling approach
to anti-misinformation efforts this year. And that may
be for the best.
2. More platforms will take
active measures to reduce the reach of misinforming content
This
was certainly one of the biggest fact-checking stories of 2019 — but it
comes with some caveats.
The
biggest moves platforms made to combat misinformation came in the form of
targeting specific kinds of content. In March, Facebook announced
that it would remove groups and pages that share anti-vaccine misinformation
from its recommendations — a move that came after similar actions from Pinterest
and YouTube.
Two months later, Twitter followed
suit.
But
at the same time, our explicit prediction — that both Twitter and WhatsApp
would follow in Facebook and Google’s footsteps — did not really come to
pass.
Aside
from Twitter tackling anti-vaccine misinformation, neither it nor WhatsApp
really did much to tackle misinformation head-on in 2019. WhatsApp’s efforts,
namely limiting the number of accounts to which users can forward messages, may
actually be ineffective. And while Twitter banned
political ads in October, the company has still not worked with
fact-checkers in a way that’s comparable to Facebook.
3. Misinformers will
continue to retreat to smaller groups and platforms where it’s harder to
measure content
If
platforms taking more action against misinformation was the biggest story of
2019, this was a close second.
While
hoaxes have
long thrived worldwide on platforms like WhatsApp, this year we saw
misinformation spreading on more apps in the United States. In the weeks after
back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, false shooting
rumors spread
on platforms like Snapchat and iMessage. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said
he wants to make the platform more ephemeral, which experts say could
give misinformers the cover they need to spread their false messages.
Aside
from the proliferation of misinformation in smaller groups on mainstream
platforms, some have been kicked off those platforms altogether. In June,
YouTube banned
white supremacist content, removing thousands of channels in the process.
Twitter has
continued to suspend accounts around the world for manipulating its
platform.
Those
moves, while welcome for many misinformation experts, have
also resulted in the growth of fringe platforms like Gab and BitChute.
Misinformers don’t have as much reach on those fringe platforms, but only time
will tell if they will have any sort of impact on mainstream discourse.
4. The EU will take center
stage in the battle against online misinformation
The
EU has certainly made some moves to combat the spread of misinformation on the
continent. But it’s still unclear what result those moves will have in the long
run.
As
it promised last year, the EU did
set up an action plan to combat disinformation, which requires monthly
reports from the platforms and an early alert system for member states. The
governing body has
also regularly pressured tech companies to live up to its voluntary code of
practice, which lays out certain self-regulatory steps the companies can take
to limit their role in the dissemination of misinformation.
However,
by the EU’s own admission, there is still more work to be done. Meanwhile,
other government attempts to regulate online misinformation have
been called into question for their use against journalists and activists.
5. Videos will become an
even more fraught source of evidence
This
was an understatement.
While
rancor over the potential havoc of deepfake videos continued into 2019, we saw
the very real rise of two strains of misleading videos: “cheapfakes” and
“dumbfakes.”
In
an example of the former, an edited video of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.) went
viral on Facebook in May. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated (someone
just slowed down Pelosi’s speech to make it look like she was intoxicated), but
the video set
off an entire news cycle about visual misinformation.
More
recently, a pair of comedians created a video that purportedly showed staffers
for Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg dancing to a Maroon 5
song. The video was satirical, but it
fooled pundits across the political spectrum and showed how easy it is to
trick people with a bogus Twitter bio.
In
short, our prediction that the deepfake threat would continue to be mostly
theoretical was correct. But there were still plenty of misleading videos to be
had in 2019 — and the same will likely hold true for 2020.
. . . technology
- Lead
Stories wrote about how fake profiles of people who do not exist are
being used on Facebook to influence the 2020 U.S. elections.
- Can you easily detect who is real and who is fake on
the internet by just seeing profile pictures? Play WhichFaceisReal.com,
a project developed by the University of Washington.
. . . politics
- A political consultant has opened shop in Washington to
help campaigns fight disinformation, The
New York Times reported. Examples of how candidates are vulnerable to
misinformation abound, the story said.
- “Still, few politicians or their staffs are prepared
to quickly notice and combat incorrect stories about them, according to
dozens of campaign staff members and researchers who study online
disinformation,” wrote Davey Alba.
·
Did
the U.K. election show public resistance to fact-checking? Jen
Birks, an assistant professor in Media and Political Communication at the
University of Nottingham, is researching this and, based on preliminary
results, says that fact-checking still faces challenges in popular reception.
In 2017, she analyzed fact-checkers’ activity and engagement on Twitter during
the campaign period and wrote a book
about it.
. . . the future of news
·
Starting
this week, Facebook will have a team of community
reviewers working in the United States. The group, currently being
assembled by Appen, will analyze “obvious online hoaxes” but are not supposed
to flag false information on the platform. The final call about the veracity of
a piece of content will still be made by professional fact-checkers, Facebook
said.
- The fight against fake news is inextricably tied to the
need to save local news, Emily Bell of Columbia University’s Tow Center wrote
in the Guardian, citing how a U.K. newspaper editor’s thoughtful
response to a reader also came packaged with a “heap of dubious
advertising and problematic content.”
- “For a dwindling number of journalists to be paid to
dispel the social media ‘dust cloud of nonsense,’ as Barack Obama once called
it, their publications have to rely on the services of companies such as
Facebook and Taboola, who make money from having disgracefully low or
non-existent editorial standards themselves," she wrote.
·
“Whenever
I scroll through my mum's Facebook newsfeed — full of viral hoaxes — a part of
me dies inside,” wrote Anna Levy for ABC Life in Australia. Perhaps reading her
guide
to social media isn’t such a bad idea for people who will encounter
parents, grandparents and others during this holiday break.
Since
2015, an image of a man holding a decapitated head has circulated on French
social media along with a photo of the same individual wearing jeans and hoodie
in a busy shopping center.
The
caption under the two images claims that the first photo shows a Syrian member
of ISIS somewhere in the Middle East and that the second was taken in Europe,
after the terrorist became a refugee.
AFP
Factual's team used a reverse image search, found the man in the images,
went over many of his Facebook posts, used Google Earth content to match
locations, reached out and interviewed his lawyers to finally debunk the
story.
The
individual shown in both photos is not a former ISIS member. He was actually a
member of an Iraqi militia who fought against ISIS.
He
is also not a refugee in Europe. In 2015 he was arrested in Finland and
ultimately given a 16-month suspended sentence after being convicted of
committing a war crime by desecrating the body of an ISIS combatant and posting
the image on Facebook.
What we liked: AFP's fact-check was produced by
students in their first year of the Sciences Po journalism school, under the
supervision of three professional fact-checkers. It is another indication that
media literacy programs work and should be added to university curricula.
1. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has updated
its database of President Trump’s falsehoods. It counted his false or
misleading claims at 15,413 as of Dec. 10. Also in year-end roundups,
PolitiFact identified its “lie
of the year.” And The Post identified its “biggest
Pinocchios.”
3. Accounts linked to Russia have been
posting and promoting fake stories on the community section of BuzzFeed and
other sites, the
BBC reported.
4. Newsrooms will formalize practices
around combating disinformation, news philanthropist and Craigslist founder Craig
Newmark said in his 2020 Nieman Lab prediction.
5. A new
study says “fake news" is costing the global economy $78 billion a
year, ZDNet reported.
6. Top state election officials across the
United States have launched a
nationwide campaign to fight misinformation around elections.
7. Facebook investor and billionaire
investor Peter Thiel is at the center of divisions within the company over
political issues, The
Wall Street Journal reported, including its decisions not to fact-check
political advertisements.
8. Last week we wrote about how anti-vaxx
groups are now using new strategies to dodge social media policies. Truthmeter,
in Macedonia, found connections between these groups and the Russian Orthodox
Church.
10. Baybars Örsek, the IFCN’s director,
wrote an end-of-year report and talked about 2020. You might want to take a
look at this
article.
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Daniel, Susan and Cristina
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