The post-truth onslaught of fake news

NICOLA MILTZ

So said media expert Professor Anton Harber to the Union of Jewish Women this week in a talk titled “Living in the age of fake news”.

In the past week or two, Harber said, Trump had been going on about the caravan of people marching towards America. Trump was “using lies and untruths… saying they are infested with criminals and rapists, and people from the Middle East, none of which has any evidence to back it up”.

“We tend to laugh at Trump… but he is stoking fear around migrants… And worryingly, linking this fear of migrants and ‘the other’ to anti-Semitism by pointing to George Soros as the funder of the caravan.

“It is not surprising, then, when a crazy man so worked up about migrancy goes and kills 11 people at a synagogue. It is a real danger,” Harber said.

Harber discussed this issue in the context of the growing fear that truth is becoming less and less relevant in public discourse.

“Fake news is a deliberate attempt to manipulate citizens through the purposeful creation and dissemination of false information,” he said.

Harber, the Caxton Professor of Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, said people have been known to create false information, but “when it’s deliberate, and it’s for reasons of political or personal gain, that’s what we mean these days by fake news”.

“Politicians using untruths to achieve their aims is not a new thing,” he said reminding the audience of Richard Nixon’s statement, “I’m not a crook”; or Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman”.

“This is the post-truth age,” said Harber, in which emotion and personal beliefs override objective facts. Three things have changed in this era, namely the rise of the internet, the rise of Donald Trump, and most recently, the growing threat of cyber warfare.

To illustrate this, Harber told the story of American college student Cameron Harris, the so-called owner of ChristianTimesNewspaper.com and other fake news sites.

A couple of months before the US election, when it looked like Donald trump could never win, Trump began talking about the election being rigged.

Harris, newly graduated and needing cash, sat down at his kitchen table with his laptop, and wrote a headline which said that tens of thousands of fraudulent Hillary Clinton votes were found in an Ohio warehouse. He published it on the ChristianTimesNewspaper site alongside fake pictures of ballot boxes. He then shared this on social media, and it went viral, eventually being seen by six million people.

“He did it for a simple thing, he needed cash,” said Harber. Every time someone clicked on his site, he earned money. In the end, he earned $100 000 (R1.4 million).

Donald Trump, he said, “has taken the use of fake news, the use of falsity, to a new level, and this has been a critical factor”.

Fact checking operations, particularly in America, have been calculating the extent of his lies. “He has made 5 001 lies in 600 days in office,” said Harber.

Apart from Trump, social media has given so much more scope for fake news to get quick traction. The internet allows anyone to access global communications easily and cheaply. It is also a medium that can be so easily abused and used to spread false and damaging information.

Traditional media is losing its audience, losing advertising, and shrinking newsrooms. “This is opening the space for social media to have more impact,” Harber said.

For example, in the small town of Veles, Macedonia, 140 fake websites were created to deal with American politics during the US election campaign, Harber said. “They aggressively published pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US.”

The people who ran the sites were doing it for money. The best way for their stories to go viral was to publish sensationalist, often false, content that catered to Trump supporters. This played a significant role in propagating false and misleading election information.

At this time, fake news gained traction over factual, sound, investigative pieces, said Harber. The fake sites looked real, but they seldom listed an owner or an editor. They were new sites, and most of them closed a week after the election.

Many fake news sites sprung up in South Africa during the conflict over the ANC presidency and the fight of former President Jacob Zuma and the Guptas to survive. The Gupta family hired public relations company Bell Pottinger, which Harber said was part of a deliberate attempt to influence the political climate through the systematic and deliberate spreading of false information.

Journalists at the time faced a barrage of bots – robots or fake robotic social media sites and personalities – that spread information.

Many were closed by Twitter, but as next year’s elections approach, they might pick up again, Harber cautioned.

He said it was up to individuals themselves to fact check, and deal with fake news by supporting the work of fact checking operators which are being set up around the world. Africa Check, of which Harber is a Director, is one of them.

The internet provides tools to check facts, and journalists are encouraged to use these tools.

Never share anything on social media, Harber warned, unless it comes from a reliable source.

People should learn how to spot a fake site by checking the URL, the name of the site, and by making sure it’s real. If there are names of writers or editors, Google them to see if they are real.

One should also Google to check if the story is on other credible sites like BBC, CNN or the New York Times.

Harber said anonymity is a warning sign. If you can’t see whose site it is, or who has written the content, be careful.

“It requires close scrutiny,” he said, “It is up to us to obey the first rule of journalism, which is to be sceptical.”