‘Fake News’

Next up in this ICA 2018 session is Harry L. Simón Salazar, who continues the ‘fake news’ discussion. He notes the longer history of this topic, especially in Latin American countries such as Venezuela. Hugo Chavez supporters suggested that an attempted coup against him was driven by ‘fake news’ stories circulating through the mainstream media, for example, and Latin American media have a long history in such political propaganda.

This can be linked to longer-term trends of mediatisation across many societies: mediatisation is a variety of ways in which possible orderings of the social by media are further transformed and …

I’m not seeing quite as many ICA 2018 sessions as I might like, because of other meetings, but this Sunday morning I’m in a session on ‘fake news’, whatever we mean by that term. Mo Jang is starting us off. He begins by noting that the knowledge production and publication system has diversified with the increasing role of online publication, and this has undermined gatekeeping processes. This has also led to the increasing spread of unverified information, rumours, hoaxes, and other forms of ‘fake news’.

How may this be combatted, then? Literacy is one approach; enhanced algorithms is another; and …

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.

The term has a long pre-history in Germany; it was used by extremist political groups (and especially the Nazis) since the 1920s, and also re-emerged several times during the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The term challenges some …

The next speakers in this ICA 2018 session are Dorian Davis and Adam Sinnreich, whose focus is on the concept of ‘fake news’ as it has been operationalised in Donald Trump tweets. How and why is Trump using this term, and what are the concrete implications of this use?

The study downloaded some 1,000 tweets from Trump during the first six months of his presidency, and identified terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘fraud news’ in his tweets. These were contextualised against contemporary media coverage, and the study also explored the online and offline consequences of this rhetoric.

First, Trump …

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

But this seems to have failed with social media for now; instead, there is a trend towards fragmentation that has seen the emergence of mainstream and non-mainstream journalists: those at the largest and most prestigious journalistic organisations and those at alternative, often explicitly anti-mainstream and hyperpartisan outlets. These journalists were identified from the Cision database of newsworkers.

How did these two groups compare in their use of social media …