RAIL

“Decoys” by V.H. Hatter, CC SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. No endorsement implied.

The Phenomenon

The “fake news” phenomenon plays on highly predictable and prevalent weaknesses in human cognition: confirmation bias, ownership/endowment effects, and belief overkill using messages with high affective valence, usually negative. Emotions of fear, outrage, and suspicion typically are featured, but sometimes positive themes are used too, like appeals to feelings of patriotism or nostalgia for an idealized past. The images selected typically reflect whatever the emotional focus is, or whoever (or whatever, in the case of abstract institutions) is the target of that focus. There is no attempt at truthful communication. Sources are often described rather than named (think pizzagate’s “New York City police detective”, or phrases like “sources close to the Trump family”). Essentially, fake news stories follow the same sort of style as tabloid writing: sensationalistic, unverifiable, and over-the-top claims are made about publicly recognizable figures for money. That’s nothing new. Tabloid journalism has been around since papers started being printed. What’s “new” about fake news is that:

1. Fake news has been “weaponized” by governments in an attempt to attack other countries by de-stablizing them politically, or to attack their own populations by discrediting opponents of the ruling elites and making dissent look evil or ridiculous. It’s unlike propaganda in that it doesn’t try to win assent to a political claim. Instead, fake news does something more insidious: It sews misinformation and distrust, and feeds political polarization. The resulting divisiveness makes the target population ripe for exploitation or further attack. Not all usages of fake news are weaponized, however. Some are just crank websites made for financial gain by people who do not care about the moral or political effects of what they do.
2. Fake news takes place on social media platforms. Unlike traditional print journalism or their corresponding websites, social media contains a blend of information, entertainment, and personal interaction that primes us for casual, uncritical intake of whatever messages we find. In short, our bullshit shields are down because we are interacting with friends, letting our interests and curiosities wander and enjoying ourselves. We don’t have our guard up, and even if we do, the longer we stay on the site, the less vigilant we become. (This is by design by the way—the goal of every social media platform is to sell advertising space. The more effective the ads are (i.e. the more you click on them) the more valuable the platform is. You’re more likely to click on an ad if you’ve been online for a long time. The “novelty” aspect of the scrolling feed encourages this by keeping a steady stream of “new” content flowing, endlessly. Your posts and your friends’ posts, and your interactions in the comments contribute to your engagement and lengthen your time on the site. Fake news, then, not only capitalizes on built-in weaknesses in human cognition in the way that it is written and presented, but is delivered through a medium designed to lower your resistance to advertising. It’s a perfectly designed, perfectly timed attack on your common sense and critical thinking skills.
3. Tabloid journalism is easily recognizable by most modestly reasonable people as being a different sort of animal from real journalism. People might dislike the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but it wouldn’t make sense to call them “tabloids”. By contrast, the phrase, “fake news” is being effectively used by political elites to de-legitimize traditional news media—an institution so vital to the way our democracy works that the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights safeguards it. Tabloids might mimic legitimate journalism, but it isn’t that difficult to tell the difference between, say, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly World News. In the social media environment where our vigilance is deliberately lowered, and where clever designers of fake news incorporate the names of legitimate news organizations in their URLs, it can be difficult to tell whether or not a report is legitimate. (Remember, you’re probably already distracted by the high emotional valence, and you came in with your guard down, so doing something so coldly critical and detail-oriented as paying attention to the domain name for the website that generated the story is probably not even on your radar.)

The Fallacy

What I propose as the “Fake News Fallacy” is simply the application of the label “fake news” to any journalistic institution that doesn’t merit it. That will include pretty much any mainstream press organ like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, etc.. These organizations and the many others like them are not ”fake news” because they are professionally invested in delivering accurate information to their readers, and because when they get it wrong they follow the journalistic ethic of printing corrections.

The distinguishing feature between fake news and legitimate journalism is an evident and verifiable concern for communicating factual information. Full stop.

What many people mean when they say something is “fake news” is that, in their view, the story contains an unfair bias against a position or a person that they consider favorably. This is a different sort of charge than a charge that the story is false or fabricated. It is important to be clear about this. Mainstream journalists are just like anyone else. They have their political and moral opinions. As expressly political organizations protected by the First Amendment, any legitimate journalistic paper or website has not only the right, but the obligation to communicate to it’s readers what it’s editorial staff thinks about the issues of the day. This is what happens on the Editorial Pages. It is certainly not to be confused with the reporting of the news that happens everywhere else in the paper, which is supposed to be as objective and fact-based as is capable for journalists who also happen to be human beings. Journalists who allow their political opinions to interfere with the language they use to report the facts are doing something we can legitimately criticize, but—and this is critically important—this does not mean the facts themselves somehow evaporate from the world. Consider the following examples:

Case 1: Unbiased: According to Precinct spokesman Officer Leon Jackson, last night at 10 PM a driver struck a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The pedestrian is in stable condition at Local Hospital. The driver has been taken into custody.

Case 2: Biased: Last night another careless driver nearly killed a harmless pedestrian in an horrific accident. Thankfully, according to Precinct spokesman Officer Jackson, the pedestrian survived and is recovering a Local Hospital. The reckless driver is behind bars where violent fiends like that belong.

Case 3: Distorted: Another tragic hit and run accident last night, as an innocent child is nearly mowed down by a racially motivated driver bent on vehicular homicide. The child is clinging to life at Local Hospital, where she is surrounded by friends and family. The would-be murderer is under police protection at the county jail. When will we learn? These crimes must stop, and our police have to stop protecting the attackers!

Case 4: Fake News: An Assassination in the Crosswalk? Last night agents of a yet-to-be identified power made their hand known in the city again. A highly-placed source in the Mayor’s office declined comment, fearing for his own safety. It’s time for all of us to be prepared, people, but more than that it’s time to take our country back. We’ve let these foreign agents terrorize our streets for too long.

In traditional journalism, the objective is to produce news stories like the first case. Sometimes they wind up writing stories more like the second case, but notice that the facts remain the same. Even if you find case 2 to be biased, you cannot reject the factual content on those grounds. You can, however, object to the manner in which that content is presented.

In Case 3 we still have some connection with the facts but a lot of exaggeration and outrage language too. In an editorial this would be disappointing but still mostly unobjectionable—it would be an accurate representation of how the writer sees the situation, which is all an editorial column is supposed to be. If Case 3 were put forward as a news report, however, any editor worth his keyboard would send it back. There’s just too much in it that isn’t factual.

Case 4, the fake news case, is where we truly leave the rails. It’s virtually all fabrication with just a scintilla’s worth of connection to the event being reported. It also has the unverifiable source and the negative affective valence so common in these cases. Like many instances of fake news, notice that this one also ends with a call to action. What action? Against whom, exactly? To achieve what, again? To the writer of weaponized fake news it doesn’t matter. If it gets you out there in the streets screaming at people then it’s mission accomplished, and you’ve been had.

If anyone were to criticize Cases 1-3 as “fake news” they would be committing what I’m calling the “Fake News Fallacy”. Cases 2 and 3 have problems but they’re not fake. The basic facts (e.g. pedestrian hit by car, driver in custody, etc.) are still there. These are cases of Bias and Distortion respectively—sins of a different sort than fake news. If they called Case 4 fake news, then they’d be right. That’s what it is.

So what do we do about it?

Let us begin by acknowledging that technological changes won’t be the cure—they only last until more clever code outruns them, and it *always* does in the end. Nor will the business model that runs the online environment change anytime soon. But the stakes are high, and foreign governments are using the technique of fake news against each other now, trying to turn the people against the fundamental institutions of their own democracies. The future contains more fake news, not less. So if the supply is going to churn along and social media can’t or won’t be able to make sure that our feeds are free of fake news, in the end it’s down to us. You could leave social media yourself (I’ve tried it) but that will only address what’s in your head. The problem, sadly, is much larger in scope. Even if you delete your Facebook and twitter accounts, millions of other people are still in there with the fake news. You can stand on the streets with a sandwich board and a bell proclaiming the emptiness of social media, but you’re only gonna get instagrammed. If you want to do any good then, much like Socrates’s wise person in Book VII of the Republic, you’re gonna have to learn to operate in a crappy epistemic environment with other people who don’t know or care what’s real and what’s fake—without er…suffering the consequences.

Yeah, you. You can’t sit this one out.

This is bigger than not wanting to be embarrassed for sharing something fake or false. This is bigger than the virtuous desire to have beliefs that at least stand a chance of being mostly true. The effect of fake news stories on social media, whether intentional or accidental, literally is the destruction of your country by induced political cancer. You live here.

So here are some of the recommendations I’ve come up with to help us deal with fake news on social media.

1. 1. Keep your own feed healthy.

• Keep your feed “P3”: positive, professional, and polite and
• Don’t propagate fake news.

Not sure you can spot it? No worries. Here are some pointers.

Do not repost if:

1. • The website is on this list of fake news websites.
   • It fails a fact check.Try http://factcheck.org/, Snopes, or use the very helpful “Real or Fake” quiz at PolitiFact.
2. Call out fake news when you see it. Be polite. It’s not personal, it’s about all of us. Informed, well-meaning people can make mistakes—especially in an environment that’s engineered to get us to not think critically. It’s like telling someone their fly’s open or that they have spinach in their teeth.
3.  Be a white blood cell. Informed people of conscience are the immune system of social media. Flag and report fake news as inappropriate every time you see it. This will help “teach” the algorithms that generate everybody’s news feeds that the IPs spamming this crap out are part of the problem.
4. Avoid the “Fake News Fallacy”. Remember the difference between bias and fake news, and DON’T confuse the two. Definitely don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because a story doesn’t favor your side, it must be false.
5. Become a better critical thinker, and encourage others to do so too. Use the Resources page here at RAIL to get started, or do a free, online course. There are many of these.