Fake News. Whether it is President Trump using the term 212 times in his tweets since taking office or the ease with which any Twitter user can post fake news, the term has become very popular in today's media.
As a young journalist preparing to graduate and head out into the real world in a year, fake news is a concerning topic. Truth is the primary principle of journalism, and false news directly contradicts this principle. A 2017 Gallup Poll found that the percentage of Americans that have "high confidence in news on the internet" is 16%. I know COM is jokingly called the "College of Optional Math," but that statistic doesn't look too promising. The spread of fake news is a challenge journalists have been facing since before the 2016 election, and a clear solution has yet to be found.
In a study published in 2018 by Science, researchers used 126,000 news items that were collected from 2006 on to compare the spread of fake versus real news. These researchers found that fake news spreads much faster than accurate news. The results concluded that the reason this news spreads faster is that actual people share the fake news more frequently, not Twitter bots.
The researchers in this study found that after eliminating shares from Twitter bots, "the results didn't change: False news still spread at roughly the same rate and to the same number of people." The reason they cite for this rapid spread? The wow-factor.
"As it turned out, tweets containing false information were more novel—they contained new information that a Twitter user hadn't seen before—than those containing true information. And they elicited different emotional reactions, with people expressing greater surprise and disgust. That novelty and emotional charge seem to be what’s generating more retweets. 'If something sounds crazy stupid you wouldn’t think it would get that much traction,' says Alex Kasprak, a fact-checking journalist at Snopes in Pasadena, California. 'But those are the ones that go massively viral.'" - Katie Langin, Science 2018
For the first example of spreading false news on Twitter, let's take a look at this image:
It cites the Crime Statistics Bureau - San Francisco (which doesn't even exist) as the source. Trump retweeted this image in 2015, and the tweet has since received 7,408 retweets and 9,741 likes.
The figures presented in the graphic have since been proven to be completely false. Politifact.com was just one of the sites to debunk this graphic, using FBI data from 2014 to compare the actual crime statistics with the figures posted on the image.
According to an article on factcheck.org, "Trump was confronted about the tweet by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News on Nov. 23. Trump confirmed that he retweeted the graphic himself. He said that he did not check the statistics, but that the graphic came 'from sources that are very credible.'"
Accuracy matters. We'll get to more on the importance of being accurate, but for now, here is another more light-hearted example of how easy it is for users to spread fake news on Twitter:
The New Jersey Devils Utilize Twitter on April Fool's Day
The New Jersey Devils took to Twitter on April Fool's Day in 2016 to announce a name change for the team.
The tweet was a quote retweet of the Devils' president Hugh Weber's announcement that the team was changing its name the following season. Weber also posted a tweet showing business cards that contained the brand new logo, and an image of the team was edited to show what their 'new' jerseys would look like.
Of course, this was all an act to try to prank fans, but the tweets were still retweeted hundreds of times, spreading false information that, while yes, was recognized as a joke by many, may not have been so obvious for those that did not check the calendar.
BU professor, student weigh in on fake news
Professor Frank Shorr is the former executive sports producer for WHDH Channel 7 News. He is currently a professor at BU, teaching a variety of sports journalism classes. Rachel Kelly is currently a junior at BU studying journalism. Both Shorr and Kelly contribute their thoughts on the spread of fake news and how journalists can combat it in the video below.
How do we overcome this challenge?
Fake news on social media is an issue that journalists do not have much control over. It would be impossible to monitor every single Twitter user's activity in hopes of combatting fake news as soon as it is published. Journalists also can't control who shares what content on Twitter.
But, journalists can control the content that they create.
Accuracy is still paramount in journalism, so it is the job of journalists to continue to publish material that is fair and factual. There will always be the need for real, accurate news, and journalists need to continue to supply this news.
One way to combat the rapid spread of fake news is to educate users on how to spot fake news. Two ways users can increase their awareness of real versus fake news would be to follow accounts that are verified news sources(not just verified as in having the blue check mark, but verified in the sense that they are known to regularly produce accurate news stories), as well as to check to see if the news on a feed can be proven accurate by another source.
Professor Shorr believes that fake news just "isn't worth it" for young journalists to get involved in because it can ruin a journalists career. As for the 'journalists' that do spread fake news? Listen to his prediction of their fate:
