2017 was a year full of sensation from wildfires and North Korean missiles to Mugabe’s ultimate fall from the highest echelons of power. Yet when it was time for Collin Dictionary to award its eagerly watched ‘word of the year’ it chose ‘Fake News’. This development served to merely solidify the concerns of the masses, as the term saw a resurgence after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Yet it existed far before and continues to loom over masses worldwide long after Trump has left the white house, it thrives even under the eyes of Biden and Boris. Neither is fake news a purely American phenomenon it is visible in Kremlin-controlled media and stretches far beyond the ‘west’ into the realms of India’s WhatsApp lynching to populist politicians in Sub Saharan Africa. Evidently, fake news is an issue, yet the solution isn’t as straightforward.
It is important to consider the difficulty that comes in defining it. This is because the term often consists of falsely spread information with malign intent behind it, ‘misinformation’ and that without, ‘disinformation’. Additionally, in the ‘post truth’ era it is often used as a tool by populist politicians or networks across the political spectrum to insight anger or bring out supporters and thus defining it becomes infinitely more challenging, in cases like omitted information from a rallying speech or misrepresented data on a news report. This of course doesn’t yet consider, as Nick Anstead (2021) pointed out, the ever-changing definition of the term. It has in the past been used to refer to satire and parody. Governments are thus left facing an enemy that they can’t necessarily define, let alone prosecute.
Therefore, it naturally follows that the first step they must take when enacting laws against the issue is accepting that they can’t necessarily label it and thus they can’t use the brute force of the courts to control it. Any legal approach such as one proposed in South Korea that would punish those that are deemed to be publishing fabricated information leads to failure. They are often paradoxical in being standardised in assuming that reactionary legal arm twisting is effective in all the unique cases of false information- even those cause merely by ‘gross negligence’- and arbitrary in their use of vague terms that cast a mist of political sleaze and lead to abuses by those in power. Both the Rwandan blogger being sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly spreading rumours about the 1994 genocide and the journalists in Myanmar facing sentences for reporting ‘falsely’ on government embezzlement of public coffers have been prosecuted under the guise of combatting fake news (Poynter, 2019).
Governments should instead take a proactive approach. People begin to turn to alternative news sources and rumours when they stop trusting traditional sources of media, only 32% of South Korea’s population and 29% of the US’s say they trust it for example (Statista, 2021). When fact-checked words taken from primary sources by firms with reputations to uphold are instead replaced by circular reporting with no trusted roots-based purely on viewer generation, fake news proliferates. The best way to combat that would be to change the law to encourage independent and non-profit journalism. Government-supported media can be tricky business with qualms about corruption rightly risen, however, if done right it can be imperative in regaining people’s trust and eroding their reliance on dubious sources. A good example is NewsMatch, a fund created by some generous foundations in the US that promise to ‘match’ any money raised by smaller non-profit news organisations from the communities in which they operate. If a similar larger fund promising to exponentially ‘match’ funds raised was also put in place by governments, it would create a democratic process wherein governments can support independent news reporting whilst ensuring that they have no say on the content produced. By removing the incentive of profit, it also ensures that the news isn’t sensationalised and distorted to gain viewership and revenue.
Yet it would be naïve to think that all news outlets that proliferate would choose to be ‘non-profit’, especially with a rising cohort of people getting their news online and advertisers inadvertently spending over $235 million on advertisements on existing fake news websites alone (GDI, 2019). In the wake of the 2016 elections with reports coming out of countries like Macedonia of teenagers creating fake news sites for a living, social media companies have started to make it harder to place ads on questionable content. However, ad tech companies themselves have yet to take much action on the same. New government regulation requiring established ad tech companies, the largest of which is Google, to invest in building partnerships with pre-existing fact-checking bodies such as the IFCN and explicitly restricting ads on content that is deemed to be ‘misinformation’ would take away that financial incentive and largely reduce the creation of fake news.
Yet all that these actions can do is place barriers on the creation of fake news, they are ultimately hurdles those that are very determined can jump. Eventually, it comes down to the individual and how they use their access to the internet to consume news. Thus, possibly the most powerful tool that the government will have to combat fake news is public campaigning and education. Wherever the government plays a role in the education sector, online media literacy should be made by law a mandatory part of secondary schooling, whereas online campaigns that target the general population should also be run on a periodical basis. It is at the end of the day the people’s own discretion that will stop the rampant sharing of misinformation online. Fake news often preys upon those that are frustrated with society and are highly sensitive to its underlying cracks, an issue that requires not just a change in the law but a change in the mind, as fostered of course by government ‘steering’ rather than iron fists. It is more organic and may often seem bovine, but it is the only way to ensure meaningful change.
Comentarios