Campus Joins Forces to Take on Issue of Fake News

Campus Joins Forces to Take on Issue of Fake News

On the eve of the 45^th president’s inauguration, media experts and educators met at UC Berkeley to discuss a problem that has become paramount since November’s election: fake news.

What began as an inquiry into how to define fake news and why it is made and consumed, ultimately broached the questions of what problems it creates, possible courses of action and who should be responsible for taking that action.

The panel was led by media ethics expert Edward Wasserman, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. It included Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vice president of news feed, Craig Newmark, a Web pioneer, speaker and philanthropist, Laura Sydell, NPR’s digital culture correspondent, Catherine Crump, professor and co-director of Berkeley Law’s technology and public policy clinic and Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley’s University Librarian and a professor at the School of Information.

“Fake news now has become a big messy topic, there’s not even really agreement,” Wasserman said. “In fact it’s being brandished as an all-purpose slogan to describe everything from errors to deliberate falsehoods.”

Since the election, Facebook and other media platforms have faced increasing pressure to curb the propagation of fake news. In mid-December, Facebook announced initiatives to make it easier to report fake news, label disputed stories and disrupt the financial incentives for distributing these stories. It also said it would hire Campbell Brown, formerly of CNN, to lead its media partnerships.

NPR’s Sydell walked the audience through a story she produced where she found and interviewed a producer of such faux news sites. She said understanding the “intent” of those producing fake news is crucial to identifying when a false story is an outright fabrication or when, as in the case of Judith Miller from the New York Times, it’s a function of a reporter getting it wrong.

Crump said that new platforms like social media make it easy for people to create news stories that appeal to certain readers and enhance a certain narrative. That narrative is then propagated, and “the speed with which that can happen is something that’s new and we don’t have the same gateways controlling the media that we traditionally had,” she said.

“The content platform providers now want to actually lower the barriers for people to bring content to them,” MacKie-Mason said. “At the same time they want to keep out the manipulations, the spam and the disinformation, but telling the difference is very hard.”

Facebook is making attempts at labeling certain stories that were disputed by fact checking organizations they trust such as Snopes, Factcheck.org and PolitiFact. While not outright censoring any content, this lets readers know the story may not be entirely factual.

“One thing platforms can do is provide more context about what people are reading,” Mosseri said. “Another is to try to go further upstream and try to prevent the quantity of fake news entering the system in the first place and this is where disrupting the economic model is so important.”

As Sydell pointed out, fake news is profitable. The producer she spoke to said he was earning between 10,000 and 30,000 dollars a month. Just like established media organizations, he made money from advertising.

Newmark said stopping this money is one way to try to stop fake news. As an example of the type of work he was referring to, he cited Sleeping Giants, a group formed after the recent election that informs companies if their ads appear on sites that the group has deemed to be racist, sexist, anti-Semitic or homophobic.

But Newmark said another route to take is to support trustworthy journalism. He mentioned the Trust Project and how it is working to find ways for media outlets to convey to their readers that they are a trustworthy source of information.

And on the flip side of that, MacKie-Mason brought up the need for media literacy and for people to learn how to distinguish dependable reporting from falsehoods.

Wasserman summed it up: “If you had told me when I first started getting interested in media that 40 or 50 years hence I’d have this device that would give me access to bigger audiences than the widest newspaper on earth had and would give me access to more information than the best sourced reporter on earth had, I would say ‘Well that sounds like paradise,'” he said. “Instead, here we are and we’re finding that there is a dark underside to that and we’re finding when we look around that more people believe things that are not true than perhaps ever before.”

By Nate Sheidlower (’18)