Fake News and disinformation – the dangers of how news from dubious or unchecked sources can fuel our emotions, pre-conceived beliefs and prejudices
Text: Chris Graeme; Photo: Fernando Bento
There’s a well-worn truism that is taught at media and journalism colleges that “if it’s fake news it’s not news, and if it’s news it’s not fake.”
But how can anyone tell if what they are reading is true if it is based on half-truths, or contains facts mixed with pure invention or downright lies?
Here we hope to rely on the research and fact-checking of journalists says Clara Almeida Santos, a seasoned journalist who has worked for SIC Online and is a university lecturer in journalism at the University of Coimbra, and who gave an enlightening talk to members of the International Club of Portugal (ICPT) on Tuesday, 28 January at the Sheraton Hotel & Spa.
Technically known as ‘communication disorders’ there is a difference between misinformation which is false or inaccurate information — getting the facts wrong and disinformation which is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead —intentionally misstating or distorting the facts. The latter is more commonly known as fake news.
Fake news, she says, has nothing to do with journalism in principle since in the best of all worlds journalism goes through a process of fact-checking filtration and if done correctly should not result in the dissemination of false information.
On the other hand, if the information is false, it shouldn’t be in the news. These various types of information disorders have been well studied by academics.
And there are plenty of examples of information disorders. For example, a town in North Macedonia became famous for spreading fake news to US voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election of 2016.
According to researchers at Stanford University, ‘partisan clickbait’ websites in Veles, North Macedonia and respective ‘content farms’ copied content from well-known right-wing conspiracy theory websites in the United States and spread thousands of dubious stories that were shared by more than 100 pro-Trump websites in the town.
The stories influenced the public discourse in the United States ahead of the election and, some argue, may have affected the outcome. International media organizations initially reported that the fake-news industry in Veles was run by tech-savvy teenagers.
But an investigation in 2018 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its partners revealed “secret players” behind the English-language political-news industry in Veles.
The sites were launched by a well-known Macedonian media attorney, Ttajche Arsov who worked closely with two high-profile American partners for at least six months during the period that overlapped with election day, and found that at least one employee of Russia’s troll factory in St. Petersburg – Internet Research Agency (IRA) – had visited North Macedonia just three months before Arsov registered the web domain in 2015 for his country’s first US-focused political website Usapoliticstoday.com.
“An investigation by a US publication Wired showed that a series of people working in the North Macedonian town created false profiles on social networks. At that time Facebook, which had the most influence, circulated news which allegedly helped Donald Trump win the elections,” recounted Clara Almeida Santos.
The era of post-truth
The year 2016 was also the year when Oxford Dictionaries added the term ‘post-truth’ – a term that refers to the widespread documentation of, and concern about, disputes over public truth claims in the 21st century.
Oxford Dictionaries popularly defines it as “relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Clara Almeida Santos says the term is much more than a synonym of false information, rather post-truth is a concept that explains that our opinions on what we think about certain issues are much more easily formed or based on information that resonates with our personal beliefs and emotions than actual facts.
“We are often much more influenced by things that correspond to our preconceived personal beliefs about a specific issue, or what we feel, and this conditions us far more than facts.”
What is truth?
And that brings us to the question of truth. Is there even one truth. In fact, the notion of truth is one of the most disputed ideas in history.
For example, if we take the Bible and the gospels about the life of Christ, the question is if these stories are actually true, and there is no answer.
While most scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus of Nazareth existed in 1st century Judea, they differ on the historic veracity of specific episodes described in the biblical accounts of him.
The historical reliability of the Gospels is evaluated by experts who have not reached complete consensus. While all four canonical gospels contain some sayings and events that may meet at least one of the five criteria for historical reliability used in biblical studies, the assessment and evaluation of these elements is a matter of ongoing debate.
When it comes to any historical event there are facts and counter facts making an evaluation extremely complex.
Clara Almeida Santos says it is one of the reasons why people mistrust facts, particularly as presented in the news by the media.
“Something that tugs at our emotions or scares us causes phenomena that have been well studied by psychologists, particularly ideas of selective perception and selected memory, and the creation of selective knowledge and the idea that our emotions can dictate what we think and believe to be true.”
Disinformation, misinformation, and mal information
This brings us to three concepts: disinformation, misinformation, and mal information.
Misinformation is anathema to quality of journalism and the circulation of trustworthy information which complies with professional standards and ethics. However, dis- and misinformation are not new but rather have become increasingly prevalent as they are fed by new technologies and rapid online dissemination of communications.
The consequence is that digitally-fuelled dis- and misinformation, especially in contexts of polarisation, risks eclipsing quality journalism, and the truth, according to the site Media Defence.
Disinformation is information that is false, and the person who is disseminating it knows it is false. It is a deliberate, intentional lie, and points to people being actively misinformed by malicious actors.
Misinformation is information that is false, but the person who is disseminating it believes that it is true.
Mal information is information that is based on reality, but it is used to inflict harm on a person, organisation, or country.
In the latter case, facts may be true but are truncated, taken out of context, or reflect a part of the story but not the whole truth, or deliberately mixes
“When a story is told, for example, and the person wants to look ‘good in the photograph’ they don’t tell the whole truth about what happened, so there are degrees of truth, omissions, lies or distortions which change the way the story is perceived.”
When irony and comedy get misconstrued
One unhappy example of misinformation was news that was disseminated about the party congress of the Portuguese far-right political party Chega concerning one of the party members, Rui Cruz who stated at the congress: “I am a father, I am a grandfather, I am a fascist, and I am a Chega party member”.
He wasn’t a fascist and was being ironic. However, the mainstream media seized upon the phrase and took it out of context.
Perhaps Rui Cruz should have known better than to use such an unfortunate choice of word in a soundbite driven age, and it took the Chega party leader André Ventura had to inform the press that the words were clearly delivered as irony because of the idea, held erroneously among certain sections of Portugal’s political and media life, that Chega is a fascist party or at least has fascist leanings.
A case in point in Portugal was the Expresso newspaper supplement ‘Inimigo Público’ (Public Enemy) that deliberately made news up to attract laughs, some of it so absurd and fantastic that any informed person with a sense of humour would understand that, yet apparently some more gullible readers fell for it.
“Sometimes I take excerpts from ‘Inimigo Publico’ and give them to my journalism students to see if they fall for it or not,” said Clara Almeida Santos.
And for those of us covering news in Portugal for the foreign press, who can forget the famous case of false news of the supposed mass raid by gangs of youths on a beach in Carcavelos near Lisbon in June 2005.
This was a piece of false news published widely by the Portuguese media about an alleged collective robbery – the kind that have actually happened in Rio de Janeiro – that in the Portuguese alleged case never actually happened.
June 10 is a public holiday in Portugal, the weather was hot and the beaches near Lisbon were packed. Eyewitnesses reported a large number of ‘Black’ youths on the beach packed together and related a tense atmosphere.
By the end of the morning, it was reported that there were some pranks on the beach and the Public Security Police (PSP) were alerted. The police arrived with additional backup at around 2.20 pm.
Within 30 minutes radio and television began reporting that these youths had been running along the beach in a pack and seizing bags and belongings, describing it as aggressive thefts organised by gangs.
By the late afternoon, the story had ballooned into 500 young adults and youths who had poured onto the beach at 3 pm, assaulting and robbing beachgoers and causing “total terror” according the Lusa news agency.
On the evening news channels the story was accompanied by photos taken by the owner of the Windsurf Café who was also interviewed as an eyewitness and whose photographic evidence purportedly showed that the marauding gangs were made up by youths of “African origin.”
In fact, they were just groups of young people of colour milling around together having fun in the sun.
Later investigations showed the event never happened. There had merely been an altercation between a couple and the report of an isolated theft on that day.
On July 1, an investigation by journalist, Diana Andringa resulted in the broadcast of the documentary ‘Once upon a time there was a raid’ in which the bases of the news of the previous month were proved wrong.
The documentary producers showed that the supposed mass robbery by a gang of youths was nothing more than a misconstrued, twisted, and staged event, whose broadcast by the media was not supported by real facts.
Badly captioned photos can mislead, content can be manipulated, while artificial intelligence too can put words into people’s mouths that they are not even saying, and journalists sometime fall for this misinformation, disinformation, and mal information.
“This is nothing new and in the history of humanity there has always been false information circulating,” reminds Clara Almeida Santos.
Cases from history.
One famous historical example of this is the famous Diamond Necklace Affair in Pre-Revolutionary France in which Marie Antoinette’s image and reputation was severely damaged by a fictitious and malicious conspiracy which had the effect of showing the tragic last Queen of France as spendthrift and unconcerned about her starving people.
In fact, the Queen never ordered the necklace. In any case it wasn’t even to her taste. She had been offered it and thinking it gaudy and expensive had declined.
It was as equally false as the statement ‘Let them eat cake’ (Qu’ils mangent de la brioche) which was not said by her, and in fact has been attributed to Rousseau and was said to have been spoken by a “great princess,” but almost certainly not Marie Antoinette.
Another example, which had equally disastrous consequences, were the scurrilous and false rumour that Russia’s last Empress Alexandra was the lover of the notorious Rasputin.
Lurid stories circulated in the newspapers and pornographic posters appeared around the Tsarist capital Petrograd. (St. Petersburg). They were based on misinterpreted private letters from the Empress to the mystic monk that were spread to discredit Rasputin but ended up contributing to maligning Alexandra and making her a universal hate figure in Russia with arguably disastrous results.
The evil of banality
And returning to the present it is astonishing that every minute of every day around 500 hours of new video content is uploaded onto YouTube.
Clara Almeida Santos said these ranged from the banality of fun videos of kittens and babies to harrowing accounts of Auschwitz.”
The philosopher Hannah Arendt who wrote the book ‘The Banality of Evil’ after covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for a magazine showed that those who had committed evil and atrocious acts were actually quite banal and unexceptional people whose acts of cruelty became commonplace and normalised.
“What we’re seeing today with social media is the evil of banality where people spend hours watching videos or posts of the banality of other people’s lives which is contagious and addictive.”
And from 2013 to 2022 there has been a huge increase in the number of searches on Google from 2 million to almost 6 million per minute.
In Portugal 79% of people have admitted in surveys that their main source of news now comes from social media and even though social media networks do not produce news, they disseminate it.
Clara Almeida Santos also refers to the downside of today’s Attention Economy which is social media addiction.
Given the monetisation of human attention, social media platforms (and news platforms) are designed to maximise user engagement, namely by influencing the brain’s reward system.
When users receive positive feedback on social media or view novel content, their brain releases dopamine, leading them to stay on the platform for extended periods of time and come back to it repeatedly.
Social media addiction has been linked to negative mental health outcomes such as depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
No substitute for real journalism.
Clara Almedia Santos rounded off her presentation by stressing that artificial intelligence can never become or replace journalism. “A good journalist should always mistrust, question, check the information that is the basis of a news story”, she says.
“I remember using ChatGPT to compile a biography of myself to put at the end of a document and found that the information it gave back was that I was a physicist and had been a secretary of State among other things about me that were complete lies.”
“Consulting a bot or AI is not a method of verification. Journalists must interview people, go to places where the events happened, and check if the sources are credible. We have an enormous responsibility for future generations to leave a legacy of true information,” concluded the Coimbra university lecturer and journalist”.
Photo: L-R: Clara Almeida Santos with the President of the ICPT, Manuel Ramalho
