RescueRanger
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"Misinformation can feel like an insurmountable problem, something that only tech giants and social media platforms can solve. But actually, we can each take steps to help stop it spreading, and these actions will have a direct impact on our own communities, friends and family.” – Jen Thomas, Creative Producer, Verified."
Misinformation should not be confused with quality journalism and the circulation of trustworthy information which complies with professional standards and ethics.Misinformation and its ilk are not new but rather have become increasingly more powerful as they are fuelled by new technologies and rapid online dissemination. The consequence is that digitally‑driven misinformation, in contexts of polarisation, risks eclipsing quality journalism, and the truth.
Increasingly, strategies to combat misinformation should be more social and educational in their character in order to ensure that the right to freedom of expression is not violated by over-broad legislative provisions which criminalise or chill expression. The current misinformation ecosystem, therefore, requires a critical assessment of the reasons for the dissemination of misinformation and the establishment of MIL (Media Information Literarcy) campaigns. In effect, combatting misinformation should fall more within the realm of advocacy and education.
| Defining false information (4) | |
|---|---|
| Disinformation | Disinformation is information that is false, and the person who is disseminating it knows it is false. “It is a deliberate, intentional lie, and points to people being actively disinformed by malicious actors”. |
| Misinformation | Misinformation is information that is false, but the person who is disseminating it believes that it is true. |
| Mal-information | Mal-information is information that is based on reality but is used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country. |
Causes of misinformation
To understand how to combat misinformation, it is useful to first understand how it spreads. With the advent of the information age and the internet, information is spread more rapidly and often with the click of a mouse. Equally, the speed at which information is transmitted and the instant access to information which the internet provides has caused a rush to publish and be the first to transit information. This, alongside more insidious practices such as the intentional distribution for disinformation for economic or political gain, has created what the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) refers to as a “perfect storm”.UNESCO identifies three causes enabling the spread of misinformation:
- Collapsing traditional business models. As a result of the rapid decline in advertising revenue and the failure of digital advertising to generate profit, traditional newsrooms are bleeding audiences, with media consumers moving to “peer-to-peer” news products offering “on demand-access”. These decreasing budgets lead to reduced quality control and less time for “checks and balances”. They also promote “click-bait” journalism. Importantly, peer-to-peer news has no agreed-upon ethics and standards.
- Digital transformation of newsrooms and storytelling. As the information age develops, there is a discernible digital transformation in the news industry. This transformation causes journalists to prepare content for multiple platforms, limiting their ability to properly interrogate facts. Often, journalists apply a principle of “social-first publishing” whereby their stories are posted directly to social media to meet audience demand in real-time. This, in turn, promotes click-bait practices and the pursuit of “virality” as opposed to quality and accuracy.
- The creation of new news ecosystems. With increasing access to online audiences as a result of the advent of social media platforms, users of these platforms can curate their own content streams and create their own “trust network” or “echo chambers” within which inaccurate, false, malicious, and propagandistic content can spread. These new ecosystems allow misinformation to flourish as users are more likely to share sensationalists stories and are far less likely to properly assess sources or facts. Importantly, once published, a user who becomes aware that a publication may constitute misinformation is largely unable to “pull back” or correct the publication.
These causes continue to pose difficulties for newsrooms, journalists, and social media users as new news ecosystems, in particular, enable malicious practices and actors to flourish. However, as discussed, there is a fine line between seeking to combat the spread of misinformation online and violating the right to freedom of expression.
Content moderation by private actors
As private technology platforms have grown their audiences around the world and become increasingly powerful, the decisions they make internally as to how to moderate the content appearing on their platforms have become increasingly consequential for the protection of freedom of expression and access to information in the digital age. How these platforms make decisions about removing or downgrading content they classify as mis- or disinformation requires transparency and accountability in order to ensure the protection of rights and the creation of an enabling information eco-system. Even decisions about which content is shown to users and how (for example, ranking and curating of feeds) has the potential to affect freedom of expression and access to information.
Rarely do the community standards enforced by these companies accord with domestic legal provisions that regulate, for example, hate speech or propaganda. Research has also found that untargeted or disproportionate content moderation disproportionately impacts marginalised persons, mainly through disregarding their experiences on social media.
While it is important to ensure that states do not approach intermediaries such as social media platforms to attempt to remove online content outside the bounds of the law, it is increasingly apparent that there is a need for greater oversight over the decisions these companies make that affect fundamental rights.
How to combat misinformation
Effectively combatting misinformation remains a pressing contemporary issue, with various remedies posited by jurists, academics, and activists. Notably, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Anthony Kennedy, in his majority decision in United States v Alvarez(16) held that “[t]he remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight‑out lie, the simple truth.”(17) MIL strategies and campaigns proposed by UNESCO seek to operationalise the position proposed by Justice Kennedy and provide a holistic approach to combating misinformation, without limiting the right to freedom of expression.
Media and Information Literacy (MIL) strategies and campaigns
As a point of departure, MIL strategies and campaigns are a process which enables the detection of misinformation and a means to combat its spread, particularly online.MIL is an umbrella and inter-related concept which is divided into:- Human rights literacy which relates to the fundamental rights afforded to all persons, particularly the right to freedom of expression, and the promotion and protection of these fundamental rights
- News literacy which refers to literacy about the news media, including journalistic standards and ethics. This includes, for example, the specific ability to understand the “language and conventions of news as a genre and to recognise how these features can be exploited with malicious intent.”
- Advertising literacy which relates to understanding how online advertising works and how profits are driven in the online economy.
- Computer literacy which refers to basic IT usage and understanding the easy manner in which headlines, images, and, increasingly, videos can be manipulated to promote a particular narrative.
- Understanding the “attention economy” which relates to one of the causes of misinformation and the need for journalists and editors to focus on click-bait headlines and misleading imagery to grab the attention of users and, in turn, drive online advertising revenue.
- Privacy and intercultural literacy which relatesto developing standards on the right to privacy and a broader understanding of how communications interact with individual identity and social developments.
Project Real has set up an very effective online course on learning how to identify and combat fake-news and misinformation, you can access the online course here:
Project Real
Using domain experts and co-creation to combat misinformation online and in person. Shared under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA licence.
www.projectreal.co.uk
Another good source for academic papers on countering misinformation can be found on this online database compiled by Mozilla Foundation:
Misinformation Research - Airtable Universe
This is an open article database for information pollution researchers. The purpose of this database is to support community and platform research to fight...
www.airtable.com
Deloitte have published an excellent blog on combatting weaponised misinformation and fake news:
Combating weaponized misinformation
A large-scale spread of misinformation, enabled by advanced information manipulation tools and online platforms, is driving new types of information warfare.
TLDR:
@LeGenD bro can you please add your post here with countering misinformation, it was an excellent post.
