News could have shades of truth, half-truth and untruth. Fake news these days have become a catch-all term which discredits even genuine stories. It could be used for anything we do not agree with. Sometimes, there are inadvertent errors. That does not make anything fake. These could be admitted, and corrected.
By definition, fake news is deliberately created, and it is known that it is not true. It is a deliberate lie or a half-truth circulated with the intention to mislead, or worse cause harm to a section of people or a community.
Some fake news is frivolous jokes and nonsense. This is innocuous. But at the other extreme, fake news can take lives. All fake news has side effects.
The misinformation in fake news could be of many types — satire, false connection where headlines or visuals do not support content, misleading content, false content with wrong context, impostor content, manipulated content and fabricated content.
According to Colin Crowell, VP Global Public Policy & Philanthropy, Twitter, what people call fake news requires definition. It could sometimes be equated with the news you disagree with. Maybe, the information is inaccurate, but is mistaken as accurate information. The concern is malicious disinformation where the intent is to deceive. Twitter may not be in a position to decide truth and falsehood. Journalists have a role of being truth tellers and holding public officials accountable.
In 2016 US elections, the foreign interference in social media such as Facebook was largely advertising based. It was not so on Twitter. Automation was used, which was sometimes difficult to detect because of the use of VPNs: virtual private networks, and data centres . They have taken steps to curb malicious automation. Sometimes it is not clear whether an account is automated or not.
They challenge those accounts. They prompt the account holder to type a code or their phone number. If it is a robot, it will hit that like a speed bump.
The accounts are removed from search results. Visibility thus gets down-ranked. Their tweets get diminished visibility. They are then in a mood to respond positively to the challenge posed by Twitter. Every week, they challenge 6.4 million accounts. They are warding off 5.3 lac suspicious logins a day. There are signals of repeat violators. They have removed roughly 9.5 lac accounts over a period of 3 years.
Twitter does not look at the content of the tweets while attacking. They look at the signals associated with the behaviour of the account. A political party could ask its supporters to retweet and spread the message. As long as this is done by genuine people and not by bots, it is not against the Twitter rules. Whether such twitting is paid or not, they never know. Even if paid, it is not against the rules.
The term fake news conceals as much as it reveals. It could range from deliberate disinformation to poor quality of news. Media literacy is not where it should be. The worst of fake news often spreads at such a fast rate on social media. It spreads through chat apps because it often confirms bias, taps into pre-existing social tensions and because users do not verify the information they come across with other more reliable sources.
There should be attempts to invest in media literacy of the audience. Trained staff should visit schools to improve the young audience’s ability to judge the news it sees as real or fake.
Fairness Doctrine
In the hearing of a detamation case, the Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra observed that though media’s freedom is respected, it must act responsibly. The electronic media behaves like Pope. There should be some internal checks on reporting. There is a slide in journalistic standards. For a long time, the Federal Communications Commission in the US upheld what is called a ‘fairness doctrine’. It means all sides of an important issue has to be given a reasonable hearing.
This doctrine was held for decades. It was also upheld by the US judicial system. It was abandoned in 1987 under President Reagan. It resulted in unscrupulous and partisan news media.That led to fake news. India has to learn from this. Either media adopts internally something else to fairness doctrine, or allows such a doctrine to be imposed on it externally, there is going to be a breakdown of democratic norms and the possibility of restrictions on freedom of expression that have nothing to do with fairness. Indian media has already created News Broadcasting Standards Authority but it is not effective. It will have to be replaced by something more effective.