UNDERSTANDING FAKE NEWS - How to assess the value of information?

Understanding fake news How to assess the value of information We live in an age when the access to information has never been easier. Hundreds of pictures, posts and videos pass before our eyes every day. Usually we do not pay too much attention to them, they just seem to be a meaningless part of our daily routine. But what do we really do while scrolling a Facebook wall or checking what is new on our favourite website ? We consume information. Less and more important ones. Of different weight and meaning to the world. True and faked. We select them and consume, sometimes without any moment for reflection. This storm of facts no longer makes us surprised. The more news we see, the less time we spend to verify and think through them. This is a perfect environment for untrue information and fabricated facts otherwise called fake news. They are created for many purposes. Sometimes only for fun, sometimes to make a real damage, but the most dangerous are those that are being used to help influential people achieve their personal goals. It is not a new occurrence, but for the first time it can be seen on such a large scale. How then, can we protect ourselves from fabricated information ? Firstly, we need to understand what the fake news is.

Fake news - the term is known as a type of yellow journalism or just plain old propaganda, consisting of intentional misinformation and hoaxes spread via traditional print, social media and broadcast news media. Usually created to influence political views or as a joke. In fact problem is far way more complex. Claire Wardle of First Draft News identifies seven types of fake news:

Claire Wardle – Seven types on mis- and disinformation.

Source: https://firstdraftnews.org/fake-news-complicated/

Fake news is not always directly designed to do harm. In the Internet era untrue content may be very often made only for the humorous purposes. There are many websites that consists only of fabricated news but it is hard to mistake them with true information because of their grotesque level. Despite this, not every visitor of the page will understand the concept of it. It is especially common among people who do not understand that not everything what they read on the Internet has to be real. This is how fake news that was made only for fun, can fool people and intensify disinformation. The other very common example of indirect spreading of fake news is so called click baits made to attract people's attention, they can often bring false or misleading titles to honestly written articles. The problem is that not everyone will even take a look at the article. We are being flooded by so many news every day that sometimes we do not have enough time to pay attention to the article Solid information that could be learned are replaced by showy title that only supports untrue news dissemination.

“Knowledge is power Information is liberating�

Kofi Annan Examples described above can lead to disinformation but they do not have to.

Spreading fake news is a side effect for which responsible is either ignorance of a reader or deliberate actions of an author. Unfortunately, there are many fabricated facts designed to do harm. One of the most popular way to achieve it is the manipulation of information.

Statements, pictures, interviews, all of them can be easily changed to help author achieve certain effect. Sometimes manipulation can be very deceitful which makes it difficult to notice, but in the same moment it can change the context diametrically. A more brutal way of making fake news is creating 100% false context in order to mislead. This is the most dangerous kind of fake news, because it does not only propagate untruth but also pretends to be a fact. This disinformation is being spread to achieve some bigger goal, very often a political one. It is also the most difficult kind of fake news to protect against. The power of fabricated articles is often not in the quality of fake information but in the range of it. This is the most important reason why everyone should have the knowledge on how to verify news that we read every day and how to protect ourselves from them.

Even though, the studies of the phenomenon of fake news are relatively new or to be more precise- modern- the origins of those studies date back to the ancient times. One of the most famous historical figures that is known of using a strategy of misinformation is Julius Caesar’s stepson Octavian, who right after death of his step-father was made the main contender for the mantle of ‘Caesar’. His main opponent was Marcus Antony, whom Octavian portrayed as a womanizer, a drunkard, and a mere puppet to the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII. The genius of Octavian’s movement relied on presenting the alleged will of Marc Antony in which he claimed that upon his death, his remains ought to be entombed inside the Ptolemaic pharaohs' tomb. Naturally, citizens of Rome were jestingly outraged by such vulgar blasphemy to the Roman Pantheon, which shattered any and all backing in this race to the throne from Roman populace. Marcus Antony ultimately died upon hearing false rumour of Cleopatra’s death, which was propagated by Egyptian Queen herself in an attempt to gain an upper hand in this game of misinformation.

Another more known example of fake news comes from the 19th century or more exactly 25th of August 1835. In a series of six articles published by the New York newspaper ‘The Sun’, a travel companion of Sir John Herschel, one of the best known contemporary astronomers at that time going by the name Dr. Andrew Grant, described a discovery of a very bizarre life and civilization on the Moon. In his articles he described with a great attention to detail and then catalogued fantastic animals such as unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers or humanoid beings with a bat-like wings, whom were christened ‘Vespertilio-homo’ and were known from building temples. Supposedly, this revelations had been made by an immense telescope of an entirely new principle. At the end, the authors announced that the observation had come to the unfortunate end, because of the destruction of the telescope in the fire, that was caused by lenses acting as a giant magnifier of sun’s rays. The author of this article revealed himself in 1840 as Richard Adam Locke in a letter to the weekly paper ‘New World’. He admitted that there were two purposes of the series. First, to create a sensational story and by that increase sales of ‘The Sun’. Second goal was the answer to the theory of Thomas Dick, who was enormously popular in USA back in that times, and who calculated that Solar System consisted of (21.9 trillion) inhabitants. By this count, on Moon alone should live 4,200,000,000 beings. It is said that Edgar Allan Poe claimed that the story was a plagiarism of his earlier work ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’. Even though the story was discovered as a hoax after several weeks, lots of people still believed in life on the Moon.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great-Moon-Hoax-1835-New-York-Sun-lithograph-298px.jpg

A person who uses fake news has to always be prepared the information that is created can be used against them in the future. This is the price for wielding a double- edged sword.

During The First World War, as a part of Anti-German atrocity propaganda that was led by the USA, there was presented an alleged ‘German Corpse Factory’ where surpassingly dead German soldiers were rendered down to fats, that were next used in production of nitroglycerine, candles, soaps and lubricants. This unfounded rumour was in the circle of Allied press from 1915 to 1917 when the newspaper ‘ North China Daily News’ was used as a tool to help sway China to the side of Alliance war efforts. Only after the war it became clear that such allegations were false in their nature.

But the person who noticed and explored the attribute of the dichotomy that accompanies such dangerous weapon as misinformation was Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich Joseph Goebbels. The author of the iconic: ‘Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth’ used the earlier hoax campaign to present Nazi’s Final Solution as a British propaganda. The move used by Goebbels was working even after the discovery and liberation of Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps. Until this day Third Reich is considered one of the best users of propaganda and misinformation on a wide-world scale.

Source:https://images.booklooker.de/x/00R6Pj/Joseph-Goebbels+Drei%C3%9Fig-Kriegsartikel-f%C3%BCr-das-deutscheVolk.jpg

Nowadays, the impact that fake news has on us, either by absorbing them or creating, is widespread and well known. It cannot be denied, how big role has Facebook in feeding and cultivating ‘ake news by making them ‘trend’. Even Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has said: "I think the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way - I think is a pretty crazy idea". It only helps to show how huge impact on creating and sustaining modern reality 'fake news' has. We can only try to guess just how much impact our reality and society will have on the future hoaxes.

Paul Horner, a well known person in Internet circles, who is called 'Hoax Artist' is a person whose disinformation stories influenced the 2016 U.S President Election. The most humorous thing about the whole situation is the fact that Horner’s solitary purpose was to, as he said: " to make Trump's supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories".

Thanks to the study from 2018, that was carried out by Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Exeter, we now know that people over 60 and under adulthood are more prone to the influence of 'fake news', the same as people who believe in more conservative way of thinking. To help illustrate this one should compare consumption of fake news stories- Trump supporters (6,2%) to Clinton supporters (0,8%). Despite having nearly 600% difference in data trump’s administration won elections, even though majority of election hoaxes were negative for Trump’s image.

“Information is not knowledge” Albert Einstein Understanding fake news is a first step that needs to be taken to be able to protect yourself from them. One needs to know what the fake news is and how does it work. Having knowledge on what is going on in the world and being a little sceptic also helps to verify the information instead of believing in everything we hear, see or read. There are also some steps that we can take in order to recognize if the information is true or fake.

Step 1 – Diversify your sources of information.

Situation in which the probability of being cheated by the fake news is higher when all of our information come from one source. It is like living in a house with thousands windows but looking through only one of them and ignoring the rest. But fact that you cannot see something does not mean that it does not exist. By relying only on one source of information you may become an easy target for fake news even if the journalist did not mean to mislead you but simply made a mistake. This situation is even more dangerous when source of your information supports only one political party. In that case, you may not even know when you will start supporting politicians only because you are being "feeded" by the news that they create. The best way to protect yourself from it is to diversify your sources of information. In a perfect situation one should learn about the world from newspapers and websites that support different political parties and represent various worldviews.

Step 2 – Verify the news you read.

In the era of the Internet it is not a difficult task to find some information but verifying one is much more complicated. It demands to stop that thoughtless consumption of news and to start thinking what exactly we read about. Next time when you hear or read an information that seems to be even a little bit incredible – try to check it. Read something more about it, try to look for some information in alternative sources or talk to someone who.

Step 3 - Talk to people connected with the place you read about It is strange how rarely we try to verify news by talking to people from different parts of the globe about it. If you read about something that happened in Spain, France, Scotland etc.

- try to talk with someone from one of those countries. With the access to the Internet it is easier to contact with whoever you want to, even if he or she is thousand miles away from you.

What is more, there is no better way to know what a casual citizens, not journalist or politics, think about some issue.

Fake news is very dangerous phenomenon if you have no idea how to protect yourself from them and how to verify them. They may mislead and spread disinformation but they can also hurt their authors. Fortunately or not, the power of fake news depends on us and our willingness to know the truth.

Sources: https://www.philasearch.com/en/lot_archive/orderNo/9270-A36-1429?breadcrumbId=-1 https://firstdraftnews.org/fake-news-complicated/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/the-cure-for-fake-news-is-worse-than-the-disease-214477

About the authors: Maria Czernik – student of journalism at the Jagiellonian University wit a passios for writing and film, also known as a big fan of good laugh. Hopelessly romantic with a penchant for drama and love for people. Apiring cook and a lover of travels through as many countries as possible. Admirer of art & everything that's ephemeral in reception and eternal in the transmission.

Konrad Łącki – Student of journalism at the Jagiellonian University. His hobbies include playing the guitar, all kinds of books and music. One day he would like to travel around the globe and visit as many countries as possible especially Argentina and Armenia.

Edited by: Barbara Drewniak