Fake news and how to spot it

Trump has fake Time magazine covers of himself at his golf courses. Image / Rod Emmerson

As with so many things we once held precious, US President Donald Trump has debased the phrase "fake news" to the extent many people prefer not to use it. This includes the British government, which officially abandoned the term two years ago. The American leader uses it to mean anything that is detrimental to him, whether it's true or not. Others use it to mean anything in the news that is wrong. So now we have to distinguish between real fake news as traditionally known and fake fake news as the president sees it.

Internet New Zealand's policy director Kim Connolly-Stone says her organisation prefers the terms misinformation (mistakes) and disinformation (lies).

Fake news is not just propaganda or misleading advertising or lies told in public. But given that social media is now the means by which so many people get so much of their news, Facebook, Twitter and the rest are definitely sources of fake news.

"My definition is information that is made to look like bona fide news but is purposely made for some financial gain," says Cathy Strong, senior lecturer in journalism at Massey University. "Political gain is financial gain - some organisation wants to maximise profit or wants power for the same reason.

"Our 2017 internet users survey showed us that 64 per cent of New Zealanders are concerned about the amount of misleading or wrong information available online," says Connolly-Stone. "This is something New Zealanders care about, and may not know what to do about."

Most locally produced fake news has been the work of outliers, but not all. Nor is it necessarily aimed at the local market. Strong describes a large amount of fake news generated by the multibillion-dollar US gun lobby "which perpetrated wide and far that the New Zealand gun buyback system was a failure - 10 days before it started. We were pawns because they wanted to use us as an example with their own campaign back in their own country."

With an election and two referenda on the calendar, expect to see fake news tailored to local audiences to ramp up this year.

How easy is it to spot fake news? Photo / 123RF

The Electoral Commission is bracing itself. It "will ensure that voters have clear information about the conduct of the election and referendums", says chief electoral officer Alicia Wright. "If inaccurate information appeared on these matters, we would seek to correct it. New Zealanders are good at picking up things that just don't look right. We'll be reminding voters to check the source of any election information they see."

"I have not seen any commitment by political parties to refrain from using manipulated imagery or video," says Tom Barraclough, co-director and researcher at Brainbox, which has been awarded Netsafe funding to research deep fake detection in New Zealand. "All parties and candidates will be using Photoshop, I'm sure. That doesn't make the content misleading."

But it is likely to get worse.

There seems to be a direct correlation between the strength of emotion around an issue and the amount of fake news it generates: the gun buyback, 1080, vaccination, voluntary euthanasia and marijuana have all been victims. Oddly they are not particularly abstract issues – sound science is there for all of them. Paradoxically that means it is easier to make your fake news look authentic; you just have to misuse the science wisely.

"Cannabis is an interesting example," says Strong. "Worldwide this is a big market. Having a country like New Zealand legalise it doesn't just open up another market, it adds to their campaign to get other countries to legalise it. 'Look at wonderful New Zealand - even they have legalised it.'

"We will see a lot of sob stories about people whose lives have been changed by having cannabis and so much more about it being safer than alcohol and that you drive safer with cannabis - that myth keeps getting perpetrated."

Fake news is also flourishing in part "because the accountability mechanism has broken down", according to Neale Jones, former Labour chief of staff and director of consultancy Capital GR. "It used to be that if you were a politician thinking about lying, you realised it wasn't worth your while. But a story probably won't get covered by journalists if it is on social media. You won't have to spend a week explaining your lie."

The old system, with its priorities of integrity and accuracy, has also been damaged because, says Barraclough's partner Curtis Barnes, the "real goal of modern disinformation is not to convince an audience to believe an unfeasible truth but to make them untrusting of reliable sources of information or uninterested in finding out what is correct".

Technology drives fake news. At the dawn of the internet the promise of a customised news supply – where we only get news tailored to our interests – was beguiling. And it has materialised, but has led to people only hearing, watching or reading what they want to.

Despite its seeming power and widespread presence, experts agree, there are things you can do to protect yourself and those around you from fake news. First, run though the fake-checklist before sharing that amazing piece of news with anyone. Then, just don't.

"It can be really tempting," says Connolly-Stone. "People share something that's not right in order to negate it or argue with it, but that gives it free exposure."

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook. The social media giant has announced measures to fight fake news over the coronavirus pandemic.

Internet New Zealand wants the law updated. "We would like to see more regulation to prevent fake news - last year the Prime Minister, when announcing the government response to the mosque attacks announced a review of media regulations."

Curtis Barnes says, "There is a real need for some leadership and ownership of this problem. Currently, that does not seem to be forthcoming."

Finland, perhaps keener than most nations to fight fake news because it has net fake news exporter Russia as a neighbour, is starting young with the subject incorporated into its school curriculum. "In maths lessons, pupils learn how easy it is to lie with statistics. In art, they see how an image's meaning can be manipulated," reports The Guardian.

Researcher Marianne Elliott, in a Lawtalk article, raises the possibility of greater regulation of social media to control fake news. She says there is a long history of regulating media to promote accuracy and fairness, and of constraining free speech to protect human rights. Digital media should meet the same standards as traditional forms, but it is much more difficult to regulate.

"Any functional regulatory framework has to be a global one," she says. " It won't work as a whole series of national frameworks."

That's a possibility in the long-term future. In the short-term, as long as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg isn't prepared to do anything about it – and he's not – fake news is here to stay. "They are not really doing anything about it because it makes them money," says Strong. "Fake news gets lots of sharing and they can sell ads around it."

And it's going to get worse before it gets better. Barraclough and Barnes say the technology by which fake news can be created and spread is becoming more sophisticated.

"We've done a lot of work on new technologies that use AI," says Barnes. "There are things like synthetic voices coming down the pipe. The easiest way to think about it is that anything you can imagine in terms of video or audio will be possible in the next half a dozen years. You will be able to make it look like things happened that never happened."

There's fake news doing its job of making people lose trust in traditional sources of information. And "in the same way that powerful people might be able to respond to allegations of wrongdoing by saying 'fake news' they might also be able to respond to audio-visual evidence of wrongdoing by saying it is fake".

Which suggests that the less scrupulous operators will have all the advantages, but Barraclough and Barnes don't agree.

"Very few systems that rely on wrong information do well," says Barraclough. "Ultimately there is still an incentive to have correct information and scrutinise it correctly before you act on it."

It just might take a little more effort and critical thinking on our part.

Real fake news?

Fake news can be easy to identify if you ask some basic questions about what you are looking at.

Kim Connolly-Stone advises the suspicious to ask: "Where is the story hosted? Is it a news site you haven't heard of? See if you can see a date on it. Old stories are republished but the whole context has changed."

This occurred after the 2019 Notre Dame fires in Paris when some media reprinted a 2016 story reporting an abandoned car containing Arabic documents and gas tanks had been found near the cathedral.

Fake news even surrounded the fire at Notre Dame in Paris. Photo / AP

"Also ask, is it a lone wolf?" says Connolly-Stone. "Can you find other stories on the same topic perhaps in official channels?"

And get in touch with your feelings. "Does that piece of information make you feel very happy or outraged? That can be a sign it has been developed to influence people in a certain way."

Look at the URL says Cathy Strong. The address may not look dodgy, but if the address is nzheradl.co.nz instead of nzherald.co.nz you have a problem. "Addresses ending in .co, rather than .com, for instance, are from Colombia and can be purchased really easily."

Anything beginning: "You won't see this in the mainstream media" also has a high chance of being fake.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (a real organisation, not a Russian front – I looked it up) has published a checklist which will catch most examples:

• Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose).

• Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story).

• Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible).

• Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims).

• Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date) Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire).

• Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgment).

• Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).

A secret history

13th-century BC Egyptian pharaoh Rameses the Great had scenes proclaiming that the result of a battle with the Hittites was a victory carved into numerous monuments. The result had actually been a stalemate.

c1770 Pamphlets depicting Marie Antoinette as a promiscuous traitor to the French people are widely circulated and believed, adding to popular discontent that drove the French Revolution.

c1790 Benjamin Franklin published fake news stories claiming that Native Americans were being employed by George III to scalp innocent colonists.

1890s Rival US newspaper publishers William Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer printed increasingly lurid and fake stories in a circulation war. Hearst's accounts of atrocities committed against Americans ultimately lead to the Spanish American War in 1898.

1891 The term "fake news" appears for what is believed to be the first time in the Buffalo Commercial newspaper.

1917 The Times of London prints reports that Germans, suffering the effects of a British blockade, were melting down corpses to obtain fat for cooking. The exposure of this as false is credited by some as leading to scepticism over reports of Nazi atrocities in World War II.

1968 Erich von Daniken publishes Chariots of the Gods, a book claiming many ancient monuments are actually the relics of visits by extra-terrestrial beings. Millions fell for it.

2016 Edgar Welch, armed with a rifle and handgun, turned up at the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in Washington DC to rescue children he believed, on the basis of fake news reports on Facebook and elsewhere, were the victims of a paedophile sex ring.

2017 In a White House briefing, press secretary Sean Spicer describes the paltry attendance at Donald Trump's inauguration as "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe".

2018 A House of Commons report makes 42 recommendations to the UK government to combat misinformation. Three are accepted.

2019 Mark Zuckerberg confirms Facebook will not fact-check political ads on its site.

Kiwi as

How many, if any, fake news sites are there in New Zealand? Probably more than you might think; certainly more than you would want. Video essayist Byron C Clark specialises in hunting out such sites and working to counter their claims. He has predictably attracted a torrent of violent and obscene online abuse for his work from those it exposes.

"I've seen various disinformation campaigns," says Clark. "The biggest one was the campaign against the UN Migration Compact which began with the far-right in Europe but made its way here and even had influence in mainstream politics."

Alt-right activists such as video blogger Carol Sakey falsely claimed we would be ceding our sovereignty to the UN and giving up our right to decide who could migrate here if we signed up for the compact. The idea gained enough public traction that Simon Bridges announced National would withdraw from the compact if it became government law.

"Islamic State Watch New Zealand has a couple of thousand followers on Facebook," says Clark, "and also has a website. They traffic in a mix of real and fake news about Islam. 'Make Ardern Go Away' and another just called 'WTF' were two of the most active far-right pages, before being removed by Facebook in March."

Christchurch businessman Mike Allen, according to newsroom.co.nz, has been operating a "network of far-right Facebook pages". A post he made advocating destruction of mosques was removed last year.

Allen created two new pages to replace those Facebook deleted.

The Otago Daily Times has reported on the activities of the South Island Independence Movement which shares fake news to its followers.

"There's also a number of Facebook pages run by an activist who pretends to be a leftist or Muslim, in order to discredit them," says Clark. The person behind the page has boasted on the ConservativeKiwi reddit about his activities. His pages have such left-friendly names as NZ - Racism Is Not Ok and Expose Hatred in New Zealand.

There are also New Zealand-based YouTube channels spreading fake news. "One called Cross the Rubicon has over 9000 subscribers," says Clark. "The channel got popular after American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones talked about one of the videos on his show. It promotes anti-Islam and anti-UN conspiracy theory, such as the belief that the UN is run by an 'unholy alliance' of Muslims and 'cultural Marxists' who have a plan to emasculate white men so that the West can be taken over."