What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Fake News?

Nick Anstead, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781529717884, 9781529717891
• eBook ISBN: 9781529737066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Voters need to be informed to make political decisions, but what if their media diet not only prevents them from getting the information they need, but actively shapes inaccurate perceptions of the world?

Drawing on examples and evidence from around the world, this book aims to make a timely intervention to the debate about the concept of fake news. Its underlying argument will have three objectives. First, to offer more precise definitions for a term that is often loosely used. Second, to offer a less technologically determinist view of fake news. New social media platforms, such as Facebook and WhatsApp, are clearly an important part of the story, but they exist in wider social, political and institutional settings. Third, to situate the idea of fake news (and our concern about it) in broader arguments about an ongoing crisis and loss of confidence in liberal democratic institutions. Only with this perspective, it will be argued, can we possibly address the question of what we should do about fake news.

Written by leading social scientists, the What Do We Know and What Should We Do About...? series offers concise, up-to-date overviews of issues often oversimplified, misrepresented or misunderstood and shows you how to enact change.

"Short, sharp and compelling." - Alex Preston, The Observer

"If you want to learn a lot about what matters most, in as short a time as possible, this is the series for you."- Danny Dorling, 1971 Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

1 Introduction

This short volume attempts to understand a term that has become ubiquitous in recent years: fake news. Whether we are talking about misinformation circulating during the 2016 US presidential election, the activities of the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, or falsehoods targeting minority groups appearing on WhatsApp during elections in India, the world's largest democracy, talk of the challenge posed by fake news seems to be everywhere. The concept has generated much commentary, with academics producing books on the topic (Farkas & Schou, 2019; McNair, 2017) or related subjects such as post-truth politics (McIntyre, 2018), misinformation (O'Connor & Weatherall, 2019) and propaganda (Benkler, Faris, & Roberts, 2018). One respected BBC journalist even published a volume where he described society as having reached ‘peak bullshit’ (Davis, 2017).

However, ubiquity provides no guarantees of understanding or precision in a term's use, so it is certainly worth asking: what exactly do we mean by fake news, what do we know about it and what can we do about it?

This book addresses these questions over the next four chapters. The first offers an historical account of fake news. This is a necessary response to an observation that is frequently made in discussions about fake news – specifically, that lies have always been a part of politics. A logical extension of this position is that contemporary concerns about fake news are in some way overblown or exaggerated. Another version of this argument holds that contemporary fake news only differs from historical examples in the scale of its production and the velocity it circulates at.

The historical account I offer is a response to these challenges and starts to sketch out an argument which will run through this volume: that is, our ideas of both truthfulness and falsehood are inherently bound up in questions of power, trust and authority, and the institutions and people on which they are bestowed. Our ideas of what is true – and by implication what is false – are very different to those that people might have had in the past. We are currently witnessing a major shift in who is trusted to provide information and how it is received. It is this that creates many of the questions and problems that this book focuses on.

In the next chapter, we turn our attention to empirical questions. The first set of issues to be addressed are contextual. How do citizens get their news and how is this changing? As importantly, how do people relate to politics? Both of these factors provide the essential context for debating fake news. The chapter then moves on to empirical questions about fake news itself. Where does it come from and why is it created? How widespread is it and how does it spread? Among which people? And – perhaps most importantly of all – what impact does fake news have on wider political processes in democratic societies?

This chapter will conclude by addressing another important issue: what don't we know about fake news that we need to know? Contemporary discussions about fake news are often framed in the context of the changing ways in which citizens get information and particularly the emergence of online social media services, such as Facebook and Twitter. However, social networks of this kind present a big challenge to researchers and regulators, and a lot remains unknown.

The next chapter looks at possible solutions to the problem of fake news. I subdivide these solutions into two different types. First, I examine policy-based solutions. These involve people and institutions in the news process (journalists, social media sites, governments or regulators) acting in a different way or providing different sorts of content. This section includes a variety of solutions, including actions that can be taken by social media platforms and increasing government regulation.

While these solutions have some merit, the argument I offer is that (with the possible exception of improved media literacy) they can only provide a ‘sticking plaster’ for a much larger problem – that is, how citizens relate to and think about political institutions, including the media. I therefore also consider what I term discursive solutions. Essentially, these are different ways of thinking about political institutions, the democratic process and the challenge of fake news. Reinventing these ideas can open up new avenues and solutions.

I expand on this point in the final chapter of the book, offering a brief conclusion where I situate the problem of fake news in a broader institutional, social and democratic context. This final chapter also includes a short postscript, considering some of the arguments made in this book in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this event highlights the broader trends and challenges on which this book focuses. It certainly shows that the quality of information citizens have access to and the levels of trust they have in that information can be a matter of life and death.

Before we go any further, though, one important question needs to be addressed in this introduction: what exactly is fake news?

The Problem of Defining Fake News

The term fake news has been central to political discussion in recent years. But what exactly is fake news? On the face of it, fake news seems like a very easy concept to define – simply put, information that is not true but is shared as if it is.

However, such a definition could cover a huge range of different types of content, created for a variety of different purposes. One way to tackle this challenge is to create a typology of fake news. A prominent article on the subject undertook a literature review of academic research that used the term fake news to see how it had been employed (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2018). This overview provided no fewer than six different types of fake news:

1. Satire. Defined as fake news because it adopted many of the presentational elements of real news communication. Focused on political events for humour.
2. Parody. Similar to satire, in that it adopted many of the presentational features of real news, but did not draw so heavily on real news content. Instead, it mocked the style of news coverage.
3. Fabrication. Made-up news stories, with the intention of misleading the audience (this is why it differs from parody).
4. Photo manipulation. This focuses on manipulation of visual items in news content.
5. Propaganda. Inaccurate content produced by governments to mislead or change the minds of either domestic or international audiences.
6. Advertising and public relations. Media that is created to look like news, but with the intention of selling a product to the public.

These definitions are further organized based on whether they intend to deceive viewers (news parody does not intend to deceive, propaganda does) and the extent to which different types of fake news rely on any kind of facts as the basis for their content (satire is a response to an established base of facts, fabrication is completely made up).

While useful in some situations, multi-faceted definitions of this kind can never be entirely satisfactory. At least some of the types overlap to some degree. Satire and parody seem very close to each other, for example. Furthermore, this sort of definition inevitably emphasizes what is different across the range of fake news described, rather than what is similar and unifies the concept. If we can identify six types of fake news, do we really have a definition at all?

There are other challenges in defining fake news. Definitions are hard to separate from the purposes they are being created for. Many computer scientists, for example, are interested in developing automated tools that can identify and filter untrue news stories. This sort of work requires a very clear definition that a computer is capable of applying. One article in the journal Computer suggests ‘we skip the philosophical debates and deal with fake news at a technological level’ (Berghel, 2017, p. 87).

Needless to say, social scientists take a very different approach. For them, fake news is a term to be studied in its wider context. Necessarily, this means fake news cannot be understood simply as a form of content, but rather as something that has a wider social existence. This approach was reflected in an article published in the journal Nature which was authored by a number of leading social scientists. The definition of fake news they offered was ‘fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent’ (Lazer et al., 2018).

This deceptively simple definition contains no fewer than four elements:

1. Fabricated: the content is untrue.
2. Genre/appearance: the content is presented in a form that makes it look like genuine news media.
3. Production: the content is not created in the manner of traditional news.
4. Purpose: the intent of the content is not the same as traditional news.

The definition is further complicated by elements 3 and 4 being negative descriptions: that is, the production process and purpose are said to be not the same as traditional news, but there is no positive statement as to what the process or intent of fake news actually is (as discussed in the next chapter, fake news is created in a number of different ways for a variety of reasons).

Another definitional problem is that academics and policy-makers cannot really decide if fake news is a useful concept at all. This debate has become more prominent since populist politicians, notably Donald Trump, started talking about fake news as a way to attack media organizations whose coverage they dislike. This problem was highlighted by The House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the UK who conducted a major investigation on the issue. In its final report, it declined to use the term fake news, as it had ‘taken on a variety of meanings, including a description of any statement that is not liked or agreed with by the reader’ (House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, 2019, p.10). Instead, the Committee followed a precedent set in recent academic work on the topic and opted for the twin terms of disinformation, which is inaccurate information created with the intention of causing harm or disruption, and misinformation, which is inaccurate information created without intent (for the original articulation of this distinction, see Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017).

The mis/disinformation dichotomy based on intent has proved popular. However, the focus on intent is problematic, for a couple of reasons. First, intent is a very difficult thing to measure. We cannot assume it simply from analyzing a piece of content published online. Second, how readers interpret a news story is not necessarily related to the intent of its creator. A piece of satire might not appear misleading when published on an obviously humorous website. However, it could easily be reposted on social media and, stripped of context, become something that people actually believe.¹

Towards an Institutional Definition of Fake News

It will be unsurprising to readers that this volume contends that fake news is a useful concept. That said, it must be deployed with care in order to enhance rather than diminish our understanding. In order to offer a useful definition, it is worth first revisiting the way in which the term has historically been deployed in academic and public discourse.

Broadly speaking, the idea of fake news has been thought of in three different ways in the past two decades:

1. Fake news as comedy. Although not really the subject of this volume, fake news has a longer history than the contemporary interest in the topic. Particularly prior to the events of 2016, the term fake news was used to describe television programmes such as The Daily Show in the United States and The Day Today in the UK, or news websites such as The Onion. The unifying feature in these examples is that they consciously mocked the genre and presentation (and, on occasion, the pomposity) of the actual news for satirical effect.
2. Fake news as misleading content. The events of 2016 – notably the UK's decision to leave the European Union and Donald Trump's election – led to a new definition of fake news, which came to dominate not only academic discussion but also political, journalistic and popular discourse. I suspect it is this definition that most readers had in mind when they picked up this book. In this context, fake news simply meant fabricated stories that were circulating. To cite one seminal example, a story appeared during the 2016 US election claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump. This story led to 960,000 interactions on Facebook (i.e. people liking, sharing or commenting on the story) despite having no factual basis of any kind (Silverman, 2016b).
3. Fake news as populist discourse. The final definition turns the earlier iteration of fake news as misleading content on its head. Populist politicians in various countries have taken to using the term fake news as a rhetorical device to attack media organizations they perceive to be their opponents. Investigative journalism which uncovers their campaign corruption or their administrative incompetence can thus quickly be dismissed as simply more ‘fake news’ produced by organizations with a political agenda.

Can these seemingly disparate and even outright contradictory versions of fake news be unified? One similarity between them is that they all in some respect reflect a broader institutional crisis within liberal democracies. While in retrospect the first generation of satirical fake news may seem benign (certainly in comparison with modern iterations of fake news), its purpose was to offer a critique of the contemporary political and journalistic class. Satirical fake news rose to prominence at a moment when the primary concern about democratic health was a generation of seemingly image-obsessed technocratic politicians and a parallel disengagement from democratic processes among citizens, especially young voters. Indeed, for a period of time there was hope that this sort of satirical fake news would actually prove beneficial to the relationship between citizens and democracy, increasing engagement with democratic institutions and levels of political knowledge among the public.² In this sense, and even if the satire was pretty vicious at times, its creators could still be seen as constructive critics of liberal democratic institutions.

Fake news as misleading content exploited the growing weakness of the same political and media institutions. This weakness was partly a question of decreasing dominance of traditionally powerful media organizations. People could potentially get their news from a much wider range of sources than was previously the case. They also tended to trust traditional news producers less than they historically had. At the same time, long-established conduits for political participation were suffering from declining trust and participation. Fewer people were members of political parties, for example. Across most democracies, citizens had a more negative view of the political class generally. This vacuum was filled with new ways of creating and sharing information, particularly online. At the same time, novel forms of political organization and models of organizing emerged. This is a complex process with a variety of consequences, but one important outcome was that a small political and journalistic elite lost much of its ability to act as gatekeepers, shaping the boundaries of public discourse. In this new environment, political debates have simultaneously become more porous and more fragmented, leaving the way open for more viewpoints and information to circulate, including fake news (these processes are discussed in more depth in Chapter 3).

Finally, fake news as populist rhetoric can be understood as representing a full-frontal assault on democratic and particularly journalistic institutions. Even before his inauguration, Donald Trump attacked CNN for publishing a story about Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. Trump refused to take a question from a reporter from the network in a press conference, on the grounds that ‘you're fake news’ (Jamieson, 2017). The Trumpian mangling of syntax is unsurprising, but also revealing of this particular iteration of fake news. The ‘you're’ is indicative that this version of fake news is directed not at content (i.e. an untrue story) but instead at an individual journalist or the institution they work for. In an environment where these institutions are already struggling for legitimacy, this form of attack is a powerful rhetorical device.

Therefore, what links the three forms of fake news – fake news as satire, fake news as misleading content and fake news as populist rhetoric – is they represent distinct responses to an ongoing and evolving crisis in democratic and media legitimacy.

This definition has important consequences for understanding the challenge of fake news. First, contemporary discussions of fake news cannot be decoupled from the specific historic moment we are living through. Second, and while political lying takes place in all types of regimes, whether democratic or authoritarian, this particular form of fake news exists in societies with democratic institutions.

Third, this leads to an uncomfortable and seemingly paradoxical truth: fake news is simultaneously of democratic life and also profoundly anti-democratic.³ It is the product of the inherently competitive and open nature of democratic politics, where competing politicians and campaigns seek to assert their views and opinions, and use claim and counterclaim to undermine their opponents. At the same time, fake news challenges and undercuts certain ideas central to democracy. It prevents citizens from arriving at informed choices based on reliable information (although, as discussed in Chapter 3, it is questionable whether citizens actually engage with politics in such a rational manner). Furthermore, fake news can be used to launch attacks against institutions that are central to liberal democratic life – a free press, election regulators or an independent judiciary, for example – and undermine public confidence in these institutions. Fake news can also be used to victimize specific individuals or groups in society in a way that is incompatible with the promise of equality that exists within democratic politics.

It is this Janus-faced aspect that makes fake news a much bigger challenge than it might first appear. It is not just a case of removing some untrue content or policing social media sites. Rather, it is a question of building institutions that are more robust and enjoy enough public confidence in a rapidly evolving and unpredictable political and information environment.

Notes

1. Academic research suggests this is surprisingly common. One American study found that a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Titles in the Series
• About the Series
• About the Author
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Background
• 3 What do We Know?
• 4 What Should We Do?
• 5 Conclusion
• Further Reading
• References
• Index