‘Fake News’

The final IAMCR 2019 panel I’m attending today is on ‘fake news’ and hate speech, and we start with Andrew Duffy. His focus is on why people share ‘fake news’ stories via social media.

Much of the research on ‘fake news’ points out that it damages democracy – but it can also have significant negative or positive impacts on personal relationships. The sharing of such content fits into existing sharing behaviours; sharing the news with others is now a widespread social practice, and news is usually shared especially because stories are useful, emotions, bizarre, positive, entertaining, or exaggerated.

’Fake news’ …

For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.

This was the case for 19th-century Jewish community: ‘fake news’ in Hebrew journalism is as old as journalism itself. This is in spite of religious commandments prohibiting lies, in …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Yoav Halperin, who shifts our attention to the issue of ‘fake news’. This is a problem especially in social media: there is plenty of evidence for mis- and disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide range of countries, with the aim to influence public opinion and disrupt political processes.

The aim here is to shape users’ views about particular issues, but also to shape their perceptions of broader political opinion, especially to create the impression that specific views are at more popular or unpopular than they actually are. How do social …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

This event, and the information and misinformation that circulated around it …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Stephanie Jean Tsang, whose focus is on media use in China. She contrasts this with news coverage in western nations, where news stories about particular incidents usually results in questions over which side (official statements or citizen stories) to believe.

In China, the media environment means that this plays out somewhat differently: rumours may circulate on its social media platforms, but official institutions including police departments are often directly engaged in the discussion, and will provide updates on these stories directly on these platforms, and seek to suppress the distribution of further online …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Christian Schwarzenegger, whose focus is on the use of alternative information sources by people who no longer trust the mainstream media. Historically, the latter have been key pillars of society, providing citizens with a shared and reliable set of news – but ‘the’ public sphere is now multiple, and there is no longer a guarantee that everyone will encounter the same set of news stories.

With this increasing diversity and fragmentation, the role of journalism as a social institution is increasingly contested; this also manifests in significant distrust in their ability to provide …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

The project focussed on the recent Turkish local elections (before the re-runs of some of the contested polls), using focus groups, media diaries, and semi-structured interviews. News users generally had very low trust in the news media, yet still accepted the news narratives being constructed …

Day two at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with another ‘fake news’ panel, and the first presenter is Seong Choul Hong. His focus is on the continuing controversy over global warming, which remains a target for mis- and disinformation. Even Donald Trump has described climate change as a ‘hoax’ in the past. The present project is interested in the third-person effect of such controversies. This effect appears to be stronger in countries with less content regulation, incidentally.

Generally, audiences tend to be very confident about their own ability to detect ‘fake news’, and believe such content to mainly affect others …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Asta Zelenkauskaite, whose interest is in micro- as well as macro-perspectives on influence in online contexts. This understands influence as non-linear and context-dependent, mediated by available media and information infrastructures and their affordances.

Asta’s study is focussing on the deviant spaces where influence is deliberately orchestrated and shaped by interested users. The study investigates the far-right social media platform Gab, and how its users make sense of the Russian trolling news frame. The platform is designed to cater to specific audiences and discourses, but is open to anyone to contribute …

The final presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Luisa Martinez-Garcia, about a ‘fake news’ event in Spain that involved a widely shared news story claiming that a local town attempted to stop the time. This is an example of a post-truth event, Luisa suggests.

Post-truth stories make false equivalences, referencing Web content and building on emotional argument. They deny empirical evidence and instead connect to readers’ commonsense understandings of the world. Importantly, the concept of post-truth is related, but not identical to ‘fake news’, and the latter is currently used significantly more widely, in spite of its contested …