FAKE NEWS Is the social media to blame?

Shakespeare said centuries ago, “What’s in a name?” By naming an old wine, false information, as fake news are we missing the point? Today, something called “Fake News” is being discussed ad infinitum on many forums, as if it is something that surfaced just recently in the last few years after the advent of social media.

To go through the litany of virtues of the world’s largest democracy and its “free and fearless media” is perhaps not in order here. What we need to do is really assess how deep the slush of falsehoods we are standing in is. Such an assessment cannot ignore the larger political climate that is at the root of this.

What is fake news?
A site called webopedia defines fake news as “… hoax news refers to false information or propaganda published under the guise of being authentic news. Fake news websites and channels push their fake content in an attempt to mislead consumers of the content and spread misinformation via social networks and word-of-mouth.”

A fact-checking site ‘politifact’ defines it as: "Fake news is made-up stuff, masterfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports that are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word." Notice, both definitions stress online and word-of-mouth spread.

Why?
Why do several entities on the internet make it their businessmouthpiecesto manufacture and spread patently false stories that sound plausible? There are several views. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg seems to think it is mostly for financial gain.

There were apparently dozens of sites run by Trump supporters who made good money from the traffic their false stories generated during election season. Nearly a 100 of them were supposed to be run by teenagers in Macedonia who created American-sounding websites and generated news that had no basis in reality. But the stories found significant traction in election season and generated a kind of “gold rush” through advertising revenue for these sites.

Although Zuckerberg initially did not buy the argument that social media helped swing the election for Trump, post-election, in December 2016, he announced some measures that Facebook proposes to adopt to reduce financial incentives for creating fake news websites that “spoof the existing legitimate domains.” He has also announced link ups for fact-checking with reliable third parties and from the community of Facebook users.

While the Macedonian teenagers may have been apolitical (?) and in it only for financial incentives, the scenario in India appears to be different. Clearly, there are political parties and front organisations employing IT savvy individuals to generate content and to make it viral during elections. Before and during the recent UP assembly elections, on Facebook and on WhatsApp several stories were made viral.

One of them was the horrifying video of a Guatemalan woman surrounded by a mob, abused, beaten and set on fire. The caption for the video, of course, said that a Hindu woman was surrounded by a Muslim mob and set on fire. When such stories are spread on networks like WhatsApp, both the spread and consequences are far worse.

Educated middle-class was enthusiastically sharing the video without pausing to observe the obvious difference in dress and demeanour of the people in the video that clearly shows it is a video from elsewhere. Now a new video from Mexico is circulating on social media.

While salary may be an incentive for a bunch of unemployed, lumpen youth, it is also the unscrupulous strategies that the political parties are adopting to polarise people to win elections and that is at the root of this. There seems to be a political purpose to the more basic economic incentive for the individual.

But is the social media alone at fault, other than the fact that the information travels faster? How is it different with mainstream media?

Is mainstream media clean?
The mainstream media in India today are confronted with a serious credibility crisis. Some of them have had these moments of disgrace during Emergency, but the profession itself emerged smelling better and with a stronger voice in later years, thanks solely to the efforts of some outstanding, courageous journalists.

The current credibility crisis has been brewing since 2013, in the run up to the 2014 elections. While elections often see feverish media activity, use and misuse of publicity incentivised by unaccounted for finances from political players, it is the post-election scenario that is alarming.

Several major news entities have become the mouthpieces of the newly elected governments, trumpeting their non-achievements and spinning falsehoods based on political claims made publicly, but without any fact-checking of ground realities.

In 2016, we saw several news channels transmit doctored tapes of JNU students supposedly shouting anti-national slogans. So far, no regulatory authority or the courts showed the courage to hold the media houses to account for manufacturing the patently fake story that whipped up a nation-wide antagonism against the students. Endangering the lives and safety of their families.

That lack of accountability led to another fake story about Najeeb, the missing student from JNU, being accused of having ISIS connections by the same media houses. Manufacturing public hysteria against a community and milking TRPs by pandering to majoritarian jingoism has been quite lucrative for the media houses.

More or less the same bunch of channels went hysterical again last week claiming that the Indian army destroyed two posts across the border in Pakistan, even as two of our soldiers have been killed and decapitated. They were ably supported by the spokesperson of the ruling party on at least two of the channels, repeating a completely false story.

The army had to issue a denial saying that they will choose a time and place for retaliation, but as of now, nothing has happened across the border. Neither the spokesperson nor any of the channels corrected their information prominently nor issued a public apology for misleading the viewers.

It can be safely presumed that individual journalists and the media houses are likely beneficiaries of state largesse in various ways, in return for such loyalty. From status symbols like Z category security, Padma awards, lucrative contracts, to Rajya Sabha seats; fake news appears to yield a host of benefits.

Cyber skirmishes
Some of the mainstream media have been quite vocal in calling for regulation and/or censorship of social media. The New York Times has called for blocking “misinformation” on social media.

The conservative sites like townhall.com(https://townhall.com/ columnists/johnhawkins/2016/12/10/the-7-worst-examples-of-fake-news-from-the-mainstream-media-n2257896) claim that the liberal social media sites want to get them to shut down, and have called some of the liberal sites like 21st Century Wire, Activistpost.com, Globalresearch.ca, Lewrockwell.com, Naturalnews.com, and Project Veritas (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-lie-of-the-21st-century-how-mainstream-media-fake-news-led-to-the-u-s-invasion-of-iraq/5558813) as fake news sites.

Both the liberal and conservative news sites see themselves as alternative sources of news and both attack mainstream media for their lack of credibility. But they also fight each other as they are ideologically polar opposites and the battle to win the minds of the viewers, readers and netizens are well and truly on.

The liberal sites on the net have their work cut out for them as ideologically they are at loggerheads with both the conservative mainstream media and the conservative websites, which are now emboldened to use fake news freely to manipulate public opinion in a flash, a WhatsApp video here, a twitter storm here, and a fake post on Facebook there.

Referring to The New York Time’s concerns about the social media, globalresearch.ca says, “Now they want to stop the alternative media from becoming a credible source for news. The New York Times is calling for the censorship of the alternative and social media by blocking “misinformation” …Just to be clear, there are a number of websites that do spread misinformation including those in the alternative media, but it is fair to say that they have never caused the deaths of millions of people like The New York Times when it comes to the US foreign policy.”

In India too, a similar battle is on between Facebook pages of ‘Unofficial: Subramaniam Swamy’, versus ‘The Frustrated Indian’, ‘Shankhnaad’ and other conservative pages. A fact-checking page, Alt News, has been launched to thoroughly research and expose the fake news circulating on Facebook, Twitter, other social media and mainstream media.

But as some wise one said, “A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.” There are not as many efforts like Unofficial: Subramaniam Swamy or Alt News, as there ought to have been.

We have also seen the use of stringent laws to silence liberal voices and those who question the policies of the state on social media, but no existing laws seem to be available to punish rape and death threats, or the defamatory false information spread against political opponents.

To conclude, social media are not alone in their efforts to falsify information and to manipulate public perceptions. We need to recognise that there are the same forces ranged against each other, merely deploying newer platforms to achieve their objectives. Social media are just instruments as are mainstream media. Lack of integrity produces similar outcomes in all.

By: Padmaja Shaw