NDM News: Globalisation and fake news

The Guardian & the global problem of fake news

Guardian feature - Fake news: an insidious trend that's fast becoming a global problem 

1) What similarities do you notice between the different countries outlined in the article and their problems with fake news?

Majority of the fake news is associated with social media. For example, in Australia the link between the halal certification industry and terrorism – repeated by politicians despite a lack of evidence – was so persistent that an inquiry was held late last year. Concerns over halal certification flourished on Facebook, even after the inquiry found there was no basis to the connection. In Brazil, as the impeachment process that Rousseff and her supporters called a politically motivated coup began heating up, three out of the five most shared news stories on Facebook were false.In Italy, a Twitter account showed a picture of Elena Boschi, the reform minister, on the phone. It suggested she was sharing insider information with her father, who was a top executive at Banca Etruria, a Tuscan bank. The bank was rescued by the Italian government in 2015 but there is no evidence that Boschi helped her father or committed wrongdoing.A Burmese friend recently put it like this: in the old days, people went to the tea shop to get their news. Now, they go to Facebook.After decades of isolation under successive military regimes, Myanmar’s 51 million people began to come online rapidly in 2014 after telecoms reforms. They leapfrogged the era of dial-up and desktops, starting with mobile phones and social media. For many, Facebook is synonymous with the internet.

2) Is fake news an inevitable consequence of the "culture of freedom and innovation" that the internet has brought with it? Is there a way to stop it?

There are politically motivated pages that reinterpret and distort existing stories from big news outlets and that much of what they share is more biased opinion than pure falsehood. Problems with fake news and fraudulent reporters exist despite the  "culture of freedom and innovation"  due to people often presenting themselves as journalists and threatening companies with negative coverage in an attempt to extort money. However, due to the development of technology and social media, it has become easier to create moral panic about a story that isn't necessarily true at all.

New York Times and the creation of fake news

New York Times feature - Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’

1) Which fake news stories were particularly successful for Beqa Latsabidze, the 22-year-old student in Tbilisi, Georgia, who tried to make money from web articles on Trump? 

“The Mexican government announced they will close their borders to Americans in the event that Donald Trump is elected President of the United States.” Data compiled by Buzzfeed showed that the story was the third most-trafficked fake story on Facebook from May to July.

2) How much can Facebook and Google be blamed for this global rise in fake news?

Facebook and Google have engaged in soul searching over their roles in disseminating false news. Google announced that it would ban websites that host fake news from using its online advertising service, while Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, outlined some of the options his company was considering, including simpler ways for users to flag suspicious content.