FAKE NEWS… (Is it a social responsibility or up to the individual to determine what is false and what to believe?)

Bruce Bisbey…please follow us at: https://dumbdogproductionsllc.blogspot.com

Is it a social responsibility or up to the individual to determine what is false and what to believe? Should governments, civil groups or corporations be enabled to make a determination on what is fake news? At what point does these determinations cross the lines of censorship and pre-determined political correctness. What perimeters are to be set to consider what is true and false? Who determines this level of censorship?

An example is gambling. When you gamble, well you are gambling. But casinos’, local, regional, national and international laws set a defined perimeter on how to gamble. So is this still gambling or a calculated risk based on policy of one form or another. Take cheating. Is not cheating to win one of the natural aspects of gambling? Is it not cheating, to pre define certain aspects of gambling that controls how the gambling event is played.

In the 2016 United States presidential elections, it is alleged that the Russians spend $150,000 dollars to influence the election. This is considered interfering. The two major American political parties both spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements and attempting to sway the electorate. Both sides would ask a question or state an opinion on a candidate and the candidate would have to respond or defend themselves. Fake or false the question or opinion would entice a response that may or may give insight into the candidate and their beliefs, abilities and values.

Fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often with sensationalist, exaggerated, or patently false headlines that grab attention. Intentionally misleading and deceptive fake news is different from obvious satire or parody which is intended to humor rather than mislead its audience. Fake news often employs eye-catching headlines or entirely fabricated news stories to increase readership, online sharing and Internet click revenue. In the latter case, it is similar to sensational online "clickbait" headlines and relies on advertising revenue generated from this activity, regardless of the veracity of the published stories. Fake news also undermines serious media coverage and makes it more difficult for journalists to cover significant news stories.

Easy access to online advertisement revenue, increased political polarization, and the popularity of social media, primarily the Facebook News Feed, have all been implicated in the spread of fake news, which have come to provide competition for legitimate news stories. Hostile government actors have also been implicated in generating and propagating fake news, particularly during elections. An analysis by Buzzfeed found that the top 20 fake news stories about the 2016 U.S. presidential election received more engagement on Facebook than the top 20 news stories on the election from 19 major media outlets.

Anonymously-hosted fake news websites lacking known publishers have also been credited, because they make it difficult to prosecute sources of fake news for libel. The relevance of fake news has increased in post-truth politics.

With the expansion of technology, the need for views and ratings has been increasingly higher. For media outlets, the ability to attract viewers to their websites is a necessity in order to please advertisers that pay for advertising on their websites. If publishing a story with false content will produce a big caption and attract viewers it may be worthy producing in order to benefit advertisers and ratings.

Fake news is a neologism often used to refer to fabricated news. This type of news, found in traditional news, social media or fake news websites, has no basis in fact, but is presented as being factually accurate. Michael Radutzky, a producer of CBS 60 Minutes, said his show considers fake news to be "stories that are provably false, have enormous traction [popular appeal] in the culture, and are consumed by millions of people". He did not include fake news that is "invoked by politicians against the media for stories that they don't like or for comments that they don't like". Guy Campanile, also a 60 Minutes producer said, "What we are talking about are stories that are fabricated out of thin air. By most measures, deliberately, and by any definition, that's a lie." The intention and purpose behind fake news is important. In some cases, what appears to be fake news may in fact be news satire, which uses exaggeration and introduces non-factual elements, and is intended to amuse or make a point, rather than to deceive. Propaganda can also be fake news.

Claire Wardle of First Draft News identifies seven types of fake news:

• Satire or parody ("no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool")…
• False connection ("when headlines, visuals or captions don't support the content")…
• Misleading content ("misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual")…
• False content ("when genuine content is shared with false contextual information")…
• Imposter content ("when genuine sources are impersonated" with false, made-up sources)…
• Manipulated content ("when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive", as with a "doctored" photo)…

Fabricated content ("new content is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm")…

In the context of the United States of America and its election processes in the 2010s, fake news generated considerable controversy and argument, with some commentators defining concern over it as moral panic or mass hysteria and others worried about damage done to public trust. In January 2017 the United Kingdom house of commons conducted a parliamentary inquiry into the "growing phenomenon of fake news"…

Identifying

Infographic How to spot fake news published by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form (pictured at right) to assist people in recognizing fake news. These points have been corroborated by experts in the cognitive science of information processing. Its main points are:

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

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), launched in 2015, supports international collaborative efforts in fact-checking, provides training and has published a code of principles. In 2017 it introduced an application and vetting process for journalistic organizations’. One of IFCN's verified signatories, the independent, not-for-profit media journal The Conversation, created a short animation explaining its fact checking process, which involves "extra checks and balances, including blind peer review by a second academic expert, additional scrutiny and editorial oversight".

Beginning in the 2017 school year, children in Taiwan study a new curriculum designed to teach critical reading of propaganda and the evaluation of sources. Called "media literacy", the course provides training in journalism in the new information society.

Ancient

Stone sculpture of a man's head and neck Roman politician and General Mark Antony killed himself because of misinformation. In the 13th century BC, Rameses the Great spread lies and propaganda portraying the Battle of Kadesh as a stunning victory for the Egyptians; he depicted scenes of him smiting his foes during the battle on the walls of nearly all his temples. The treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites, however, reveals that the battle was actually a stalemate.

During the first century BC, Octavian ran a campaign of misinformation against his rival Mark Antony, portraying him as a drunkard, a womanizer, and a mere puppet of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII. He published a document purporting to be Marc Antony's will, which claimed that Marc Antony, upon his death, wished to be entombed in the mausoleum of the Ptolemaic pharaohs. Although the document may have been forged, it invoked outrage from the Roman populace. Marc Antony ultimately killed himself after his defeat in the Battle of Actium upon hearing false rumors propagated by Cleopatra herself claiming that she had committed suicide.

During the second and third centuries AD, false rumors were spread about Christians claiming that they engaged in ritual cannibalism and incest. In the late third century AD, the Christian apologist Lactantius invented and exaggerated stories about pagans engaging in acts of immorality and cruelty, while the anti-Christian writer Porphyry invented similar stories about Christians.

Medieval

In 1475, a fake news story in Trent, Italy claimed that the Jewish community had murdered a two-and-a-half-year-old Christian infant named Simonino. The story resulted in all the Jews in the city being arrested and tortured; fifteen of them were burned at the stake. Pope Sixtus IV himself attempted to stamp out the story, but, by that point, it had already spread beyond anyone's control. Stories of this kind were known as "blood libel"; they claimed that Jews purposely killed Christians, especially Christian children, and used their blood for religious or ritual purposes.

Early modern period

After the invention of the printing press in 1439, publications became widespread but there was no standard of journalistic ethics to follow. By the 17th century, historians began the practice of citing their sources in footnotes. In 1610 when Galileo went on trial, the demand for verifiable news increased.

During the 18th century publishers of fake news were fined and banned in the Netherlands; one man, Gerard Lodewijk van der Macht, was banned four times by Dutch authorities—and four times he moved and restarted his press. In the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin wrote fake news about murderous "scalping" Indians working with King George III in an effort to sway public opinion in favor of the American Revolution.

Canards, the successors of the 16th century pasquinade, were sold in Paris on the street for two centuries, starting in the 17th century. In 1793, Marie Antoinette was executed in part because of popular hatred engendered by a canard on which her face had been printed.

During the era of slave-owning in the United States, supporters of slavery propagated fake news stories about African Americans, whom white people considered to have lower status. Violence occurred in reaction to the spread of some fake news events. In one instance, stories of African Americans spontaneously turning white spread through the south and struck fear into the hearts of many people.

Other rumors and anxieties about slave rebellions filled many in Virginia all the way back to colonial times, despite the only major uprising occurring in 19th century. One particular fake news instance regarding revolts occurred in 1730. The serving governor of Virginia at the time, Governor William Gooch, reported that a slave rebellion had occurred but was effectively put down – although this never happened. After Gooch discovered the falsehood, he ordered slaves found off plantations to be punished, tortured, and made prisoners.

19th century

B&W drawing of a man with large bat-wings reaching from over his head to mid-thigh a "lunar animal" said to have been discovered by John Herschel on the Moon. One instance of fake news was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. The New York Sun published articles about a real-life astronomer and a made-up colleague who, according to the hoax, had observed bizarre life on the moon. The fictionalized articles successfully attracted new subscribers, and the penny paper suffered very little backlash after it admitted the next month that the series had been a hoax. Such stories were intended to entertain readers, and not to mislead them.

In the late 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer and other yellow journalism publishers goaded the United States into the Spanish–American War, which was precipitated when the U.S.S. Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. Two men dressed as the Yellow Kid pushing on opposite sides of oversize building blocks bearing the letters W A R". Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst caricatured as they urged the U.S. into the Spanish–American War.

20th century

During the First World War, one of the most notorious forms of anti-German atrocity propaganda was that of an alleged "German Corpse Factory" in which the German battlefield dead were rendered down for fats used to make nitroglycerine, candles, lubricants, human soap, and boot dubbing. Unfounded rumors regarding such a factory circulated in the Allied press starting in 1915, and by 1917 the English-language publication North China Daily News presented these allegations as true at a time when Britain was trying to convince China to join the Allied war effort; this was based on new, allegedly true stories from The Times and The Daily Mail that turned out to be forgeries. These false allegations became known as such after the war, and in the Second World War Joseph Goebbels used the story in order to deny the ongoing massacre of Jews as British propaganda. According to Joachim Neander and Randal Marlin, the story also "encouraged later disbelief" when reports about the Holocaust surfaced after the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

Writing for The New York Times, Walter Duranty denied the great famine in Ukraine known as the Holodomor.

After Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany in 1933, they established the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under the control of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis used both print and broadcast journalism to promote their agendas, either by obtaining ownership of those media or exerting political influence. Throughout World War II, both the Axis and the Allies employed fake news in the form of propaganda to persuade publics at home and in enemy countries. The British Political Warfare Executive used radio broadcasts and distributed leaflets to discourage German troops.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has published that The New York Times printed fake news "depicting Russia as a socialist paradise." During 1932–1933, The New York Times published numerous articles by its Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for false reports denying that the Soviet Union at that time starved to death between 2.4 and 7.5 million of its own citizens in the Holodomor. The New York Times now claims this was some of "its worst" reporting.

21st century

In the 21st century, the impact of fake news became widespread, as well as the usage of the term. Besides referring to made-up stories designed to deceive readers into clicking on links, maximizing traffic and profit, the term has also referred to satirical news, whose purpose is not to mislead but rather to inform viewers and share humorous commentary about real news and the mainstream media. United States examples of satire (as opposed to fake news) include the television show Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Onion newspaper.

21st century fake news is often intended to increase the financial profits of the news outlet. In an interview with NPR, Jestin Coler, former CEO of the fake media conglomerate Disinfomedia, said who writes fake news articles, who funds these articles, and why news creators create and distribute false information fake. Coler, who has since left his role as a fake news creator, said that his company employed 20 to 25 writers at a time and made $10,000 to $30,000 monthly from advertisements. Coler began his career in journalism as a magazine salesman before working as a freelance writer. He said he entered the fake news industry to prove to himself and others just how rapidly fake news can spread. Disinfomedia is not the only outlet responsible for the distribution of fake news; Facebook users play a major role in feeding into fake news stories by making sensationalized stories "trend", according to BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman, and the individuals behind Google AdSense basically fund fake news websites and their content. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said, "I think the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea", and then a few days later he blogged that Facebook was looking for ways to flag fake news stories.

Many online pro-Trump fake news stories are being sourced out of a small city in Macedonia, where approximately seven different fake news organizations are employing hundreds of teenagers to rapidly produce and plagiarize sensationalist stories for different U.S. based companies and parties.

One fake news writer, Paul Horner, was behind the widespread hoax that he was the graffiti artist Banksy and had been arrested; that a man stopped a robbery in a diner by quoting Pulp Fiction; and that he had an "enormous impact" on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to CBS News. These stories consistently appeared in Google's top news search results, were shared widely on Facebook, were taken seriously, and shared by third parties such as Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News, and the Fox News Channel. Horner later claimed that his work during this period was intended "to make Trump's supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories".

In a November 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Horner expressed regret for the role his fake news stories played in the election and surprise at how gullible people were in treating his stories as news. In February 2017 Horner said, "I truly regret my comment about saying that I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me. I know all I did was attack him and his supporters and got people not to vote for him. When I said that comment it was because I was confused how this evil got elected President and I thought maybe instead of hurting his campaign, maybe I had helped it. My intention was to get his supporters NOT to vote for him and I know for a fact that I accomplished that goal. The far right, a lot of the Bible thumpers and alt-right were going to vote him regardless, but I know I swayed so many that were on the fence."

In December 2016, while speaking on Anderson Cooper 360, Horner said that all news is fake news and said CNN "spread misinformation", which was one month before Donald Trump leveled the same criticism at that network.

Horner spoke at the European Parliament in March, speaking about fake news and the importance of fact checking. According to a 2017 BuzzFeed article, Horner stated that a story of his about a rape festival in India helped generate over $250,000 in donations to Give India, a site that helps rape victims in India. Horner said he dislikes being grouped with people who write fake news solely to be misleading. "They just write it just to write fake news, like there's no purpose, there's no satire, there's nothing clever. All the stories I wrote were to make Trump's supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories." The Huffington Post called Horner a "Performance Artist". Horner has been referred to as a "hoax artist" by outlets such as the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune.

Kim LaCapria of the fact checking website Snopes.com has stated that, in America, fake news is a bipartisan phenomenon, saying that "[t]here has always been a sincerely held yet erroneous belief misinformation is more red than blue in America, and that has never been true." Jeff Green of Trade Desk agrees the phenomenon affects both sides. Green's company found that affluent and well-educated persons in their 40s and 50s are the primary consumers of fake news. He told Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes that this audience tends to live in an "echo chamber" and that these are the people who vote.

In 2014, the Russian Government used disinformation via networks such as RT to create a counter-narrative after Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. In 2016, NATO claimed it had seen a significant rise in Russian propaganda and fake news stories since the invasion of Crimea in 2014. Fake news stories originated from the Russian government officials were also circulated internationally by Reuters news agency and published in the most popular news websites in the United States.

IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Orson Welles explaining to reporters about his radio drama "War of the Worlds" on Sunday, October 30, 1938, the day after the broadcast "The War of the Worlds" is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Directed and narrated by actor and filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898), presented as a series of simulated news bulletins. Although preceded by a clear introduction that the show was a drama, it became famous for allegedly causing mass panic, although the reality of the panic is disputed as the program had relatively few listeners. An investigation was run by The Federal Communications Commission to examine the mass hysteria produced by this radio programming; no law was found broken. This event was an example the early stages of society's dependency on information from print to radio and other mediums. Fake news can even be found within this example, the true extent of the "hysteria" from the radio broadcast has also been falsely recorded. The most extreme case and reaction after the radio broadcast was a group of Grover Mill locals attacking a water tower because they falsely identified it as an alien.

President Trump's frequent claims that the mainstream American media regularly reports fake news has increased distrust of the American media globally, particularly in Russia. His claims have given credibility to the stories in the Russian media that label American news, especially news about atrocities committed by the Syrian regime against its own people where it was quoted that "munitions at the air base had as much to do with chemical weapons as the test tube in the hands of Colin Powell had to do with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”, as just more fake American news.

According to Jeff Hemsley, a Syracuse University professor who studies social media, Trump uses this term for any news that is not favorable to him or which he simply dislikes. Because of the manner in which he has co-opted the term, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan has warned fellow journalists that "It's time to retire the tainted term 'fake news'. Though the term hasn't been around long, its meaning already is lost."

Another issue in mainstream media is the usage of the filter bubble, a "bubble" that has been created that gives the viewer, on social media platforms, a specific piece of the information knowing they will like it. Thus creating fake news and biased news because only half the story is being shared, the portion the viewer liked. "In 1996, Nicolas Negroponte predicted a world where information technologies become increasingly customizable." Decades ago people predicted that customized news would become a reality. This becomes a problem in today's society because people are seeing only bits and pieces and not the whole issues making it much harder to solve the issues or talk about it worldwide.

IN WEBSITES

The impact of fake news has become a worldwide phenomenon. Fake news is often spread through the use of fake news websites, which, in order to gain credibility, specialize in creating attention-grabbing news, which often impersonate well-known news sources. Jestin Coler, who said he does it for "fun", also said he earned US$10,000 per month from advertising on his fake news websites. In 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee claimed that fake news was one of the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends that must first be resolved, if the Internet is to be capable of truly "serving humanity." The other two new disturbing trends that Berners-Lee described as threatening the Internet were the recent surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen-surveillance purposes, and for cyber-warfare purposes.

BOTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

In the mid-1990s, Nicolas Negroponte anticipated a world where news through technology become progressively personalized. In his 1996 book Being Digital he predicted a digital life where news consumption becomes an extremely personalized experience and newspapers adapted content to reader preferences. This prediction has since been reflected in news and social media feeds of modern day.

In the 21st century, the capacity to mislead was enhanced by the widespread use of social media. For example, one 21st century website that enabled fake news' proliferation was the Facebook newsfeed. In late 2016 fake news gained notoriety following the uptick in news content by this means, and its prevalence on the micro-blogging site Twitter. In the United States, 62% of Americans use social media to receive news. This, in combination with increased political polarization and filter bubbles, led to a tendency for readers to mainly read headlines.

Numerous individuals and news outlets have stated that fake news may have influenced the outcome of the 2016 American Presidential Election. Fake news saw higher sharing on Facebook than legitimate news stories, which analysts explained was because fake news often panders to expectations or is otherwise more exciting than legitimate news. Facebook itself initially denied this characterization. A Pew Research poll conducted in December 2016 found that 64% of U.S. adults believed completely made-up news had caused "a great deal of confusion" about the basic facts of current events, while 24% claimed it had caused "some confusion" and 11% said it had caused "not much or no confusion". Additionally, 23% of those polled admitted they had personally shared fake news, whether knowingly or not. Researchers from Stanford assessed that only 8% of readers of fake news recalled and believed in the content they were reading, though the same share of readers also recalled and believed in "placebos" – stories they did not actually read, but that were produced by the authors of the study. In comparison, over 50% of the participants recalled reading and believed in true news stories.

By August 2017 Facebook stopped using the term "fake news" and used "false news" in its place instead. Will Oremus of Slate wrote that because supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump had redefined the word "fake news" to refer to mainstream media opposed to them, "it makes sense for Facebook—and others—to cede the term to the right-wing trolls who have claimed it as their own."

Research from Northwestern University concluded that 30% of all fake news traffic, as opposed to only 8% of real news traffic, could be linked back to Facebook. Fake news consumers, they concluded, do not exist in a filter bubble; many of them also consume real news from established news sources. The fake news audience is only 10 percent of the real news audience, and most fake news consumers spent a relatively similar amount of time on fake news compared with real news consumers—with the exception of Drudge Report readers, who spent more than 11 times longer reading the website than other users.

In China, fake news items have occasionally spread from such sites to more well-established news-sites resulting in scandals including "Pizzagate". In the wake of western events, China's Ren Xianling of the Cyberspace Administration of China suggested a "reward and punish" system be implemented to avoid fake news.

Internet trolls

In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or off-topic discussion, often for the troll's amusement. When interacting with each other, trolls often share misleading information that contributes to the fake news circulated on sites like Twitter and Facebook. In the 2016 American election, Russia paid over 1,000 internet trolls to circulate fake news and information about Hillary Clinton.

Response

During the 2016 United States presidential election, the creation and coverage of fake news increased substantially. This resulted in a widespread response to combat the spread of fake news. The volume and reluctance of fake news websites to respond to fact-checking organizations has posed a problem to inhibiting the spread of fake news through fact checking alone. In an effort to reduce the effects of fake news, fact-checking websites, including Snopes.com and FactCheck.org, have posted guides to spotting and avoiding fake news websites. New critical readings of media events and news with an emphasis on literalism and logic have also emerged. Social media sites and search engines, such as Facebook and Google, received criticism for facilitating the spread of fake news. Both of these corporations have taken measures to explicitly prevent the spread of fake news; critics, however, believe more action is needed.

After the 2016 American election and the run-up to the German election, Facebook began labeling and warning of inaccurate news and partnered with independent fact-checkers to label inaccurate news, warning readers before sharing it. After a story is flagged as disputed, it will be reviewed by the third-party fact-checkers. Then, if it has been proven to be a fake news story, the post cannot be turned into an ad or promoted. Artificial intelligence is one of the more recent technologies being developed in the United States and Europe to recognize and eliminate fake news through algorithms. In 2017, Facebook targeted 30,000 accounts related to the spread of misinformation regarding the French presidential election.

Sources, References & Credits: Google, Wikipedia, Wikihow, Pinterest, IMDB, Linked In, Indie Wire, The New York Times, CNN, Drudge Report, Claire Wardle, Nicolas Negroponte, Snopes, Kim LaCapria, Jeff Green, Trade Desk, Cinema Blend, Variety, Creative Skill Set, Merriam-Webster, Cinema Blend, Guy Campanile, Scott Pelly, 60 Minutes, Reddit, Business Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, , Collins English Dictionary, Investopedia, Study, English Oxford Dictionaries, Hollywood Branded, James Combs, Michael Radutzky, Business Weekly, Valve, Jeff Hemsley, Syracuse University, Film Maker Magazine, The Guardian, Nightline, Washington Post, Anderson Cooper, Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News, CBS New, Fox News Network,

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