Fighting fake news: History professor explains how to curb disinformation

It looks like news. It reads like news. It sounds like news. But it’s as fake as it gets.

Thomas Haigh is exploring options to fight back.’

Haigh is a professor in UWM’s history department who focuses on the history of technology. His wife, Maria Haigh, is an associate professor in UWM’s School of Information Studies. The two recently co-authored a chapter for the Sage Handbook of Propaganda detailing the latest threat to American democracy: Fake news.

It became a familiar rallying cry during the 2016 election as politicians on both sides of the aisle were targeted, or bolstered, by news stories that were completely false. And that is what fake news is, Haigh said - information that is disguised as legitimate journalism disseminated in order to deceive those who consume it.

“These are documents that were posted on things that looked like news websites, and looked like news stories, and claimed to have reporting, and were mimicking the form of a news story, but were just completely made up,” Haigh added.

Thomas Haigh

Framing fake news

In order to fight fake news, Haigh said, you first have to give it context. He and Maria Haigh use the chapter to frame fake news in seven different ways, including as 1) a weapon of war; 2) online dishonesty; 3) a form of state propaganda; 4) profitable business; 5) extreme form of media bias; 6) a plot to delegitimize alternative media; and 7) part of a “post-truth” society.

Of these, online fake news originally rose to prominence as a weapon of war. In 2014, Russian troops marched into Crimea and occupied the Ukrainian territory – all while denying any sort of involvement.

“One of things that was apparent in Ukraine was that what were clearly Russian troops had left their bases in Crimea, surrounded the Parliament, seized the airports, taken control of the key positions. But they were denying that they were Russian,” Haigh said.

“It was clearly not plausible, but they were relying on the norms of journalism being that the story gets reported as ‘unidentified troops. Some people claim they’re Russian, but Russia says they’re not.’”

Fake news evolved from there.

“When reporters looked into Russian influence campaign in the 2016 election, they discovered the Internet Research Institute in the St. Petersburg area. It was clear that what appeared to be a statesponsored fake news campaign when it appeared in Ukraine was a concerted effort to push the fake story of the day into the broader media ecosystem,” Haigh said. “Suddenly ‘fake news’ wasn’t this weird thing that happens in Ukraine; it was the biggest thing that everybody was talking about for quite a while after the 2016 election.”

But Russia wasn’t the only bad actor. Fake news, as Haigh noted in one of the frames, is a profitable business. Some foreign entrepreneurs began to craft websites mimicking actual journalistic news sites pushing false pro-Donald Trump stories in order to generate website clicks and advertising revenue.

Fighting fake news

This kind of disinformation is difficult to fight because it spreads so quickly. In the early days of fake news in Ukraine, the StopFake organization, a composed mostly of newly-graduated journalism students, made it their mission to combat the lies.

The 2014 pro-Russian protests and unrest in Ukraine. Map courtesy of https://bit.ly/2TuewSr.

“The methodology that they adopted was to have a group of volunteers identify these fake stories that were circulating and attempt to debunk it,” Haigh said. He and Maria Haigh, who is Ukrainian and followed the events of the 2014 invasion closely, invited members of the group to UWM to share their methods.

The group ran obviously false and doctored photos through Google image searches to find their true origins. They tracked down original quotes that had been misattributed or taken out of context. When they definitively proved a story false, they posted it to their website and hoped the post would achieve the same viral reach that the fake news story did.

“We realized that this was different from traditional fact-checking, which assumes that what the politician said has been accurately reported,” Haigh said. “(StopFake) was taking something that appeared to be journalism and saying, ‘Is this real reporting or does it contain things that are factually incorrect?’”

But, Haigh noted, as fake news grew more complex, more solutions were needed.

“If we have these many different conceptions of what fake news is, obviously there’s not a one-sizefits-all solution,” he said, noting the many frames he and Maria Haigh identified in their chapter.

For instance, combatting fake news as a weapon of war might require anti-propaganda efforts from major world powers. Viewing it as online dishonesty might require legislation that requires social media sites to curb the spread of misinformation on their platforms.

“But one of the things we found studying fake news was that there’s a fundamental asymmetry there. It’s very easy to make a fake story and it takes a lot more in the way of resources to debunk it,” Haigh noted.

The best solution, he said, seems to be teaching media literacy at a broad, societal level. Teach people to determine whether their source of information is reliable, to differentiate between fact and opinion, and to be wary of trusting articles that seem to confirm their personal bias.

But even that solution has its problems.

The future of fake news

One of the main problems to combatting fake news, Haigh noted, is that certain factions of American society do not want to curb its influence.

“We’re seeing a lot of indications that impartiality, due process, and the separation of government and media from personal interests are not something that there is a broad, bipartisan consensus anymore,” he said. “It seems that a large portion of the population is just not interested in whether news is fake or not.

“Unless and until that changes, it’s hard to see fake news becoming less pervasive.”

In that vein, Haigh expects to see more fake news in 2020 as the presidential election draws closer.

But, he warns, don’t give into despair, even though fake news has attacked Americans’ ability to be an informed electorate.

“We tend to assume that whatever is happening now, the future is going to consist of more and more of that forever. History doesn’t tend to move in a straight line,” Haigh said.

“It’s at least possible that in the future, things will swing back in the direction of thinking that there’s a shared interest in treating trustworthy, professional reporting as something deserving a special place in society.”

By Sarah Vickery College of Letters & Science