Fake News & Fake Facts: Media Literacy Awareness

Forms of Disinformation

• covers a wide range of topics that are purposefully distorted for the purposes of spreading disinformation.
• spread in many areas beyond politics (see the list below)

Junk News, Hoax News, or Pseudo-News

• alternate terms for "fake news"
• may seem plausible or legit
• created to purposefully and deliberately to spread false information
• digital news has dramatically expanded both the spread of and audience for this type of information

The front page of the "Buckeye Reporter," a political mailer that appears to look like a community newspaper.

The Buckeye Reporter is part of a network owned by a company called Metric Media that has caught the interest of disinformation researchers by launching hundreds of local-branded websites across the country that promote Republican candidates and causes during election cycles. - Source: Andrew Tobias,  "Wondering why you got a copy of the ‘Buckeye Reporter’ in the mail? Here’s more about the pseudo news network behind it." August 1, 2023, Cleveland.com/News

Clickbait  

• provide some credible content, but distort it by exaggerating, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images
• deliberately created to attract as many website visitors as possible
  • the more clicks, the more advertising money is made for these websites

Yellow Journalism or Tabloid Journalism

• these are newspapers that present little or no credible or well-researched news
• purpose is to scare people with misleading headlines, altered images, made-up interviews, and fake experts
• target a low-information and vulnerable audience who tend not to question what they are reading, or simply may be entertained by it.
• exist purely to increase sales and revenue for the publisher.

Bothsidesism (False Equivalence)

• the practice in the media of presenting "both sides" of an issue regardless of evidence, facts, or the credibility of sources
• treats issues as equal or equivalent - 50-50 - when they may not be  (facts vs. conspiracy theories 
  •  97 % of scientists agree agree that human behavior are causing global warming and climate change 
  • COVID treatment: fact-based (Remdesivir) vs. conspiracy theories (bleach, hydroxychloroquin)

• an prompt one of three problematic results:

  • creates doubt about what people think they know

  • creates confusion: “I don’t know what’s true, so nothing’s” true.

  • creates reliance: “Someone’s arguing that climate change is not a worry, so that must be a valid idea."

Satire or Parody

• use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, satire, and false information to comment on current events. They 
• purposefully fake news sources to entertain, not to inform or educate

State-Sponsored News

• a form of propaganda that exists under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, which publishes news under strict control
• audience is told what to think about events and ignore what they see or know to be true
• examples - Russia, Hungary, Turkey

Junk Science

•  this type of false information promotes ideas that claim to be science-based (psuedo-science), but are not
  • uses legit sounding "scientific data and facts"
• the belief that if something is "natural" it is good (naturalistic fallacy) 
• purpose is to generate revenue and profit for the creators

Deepfakes / AI

• a form of visual, voice, or textual deception
• created with digital software, machine learning (artificial intelligence),and face swapping technology
• may be combined to create new footage that depicts events, statements or action that never actually happened
• 

Image Source: Raphael Satter, ‘"Experts: Spy used AI-generated face to connect with targets"’, AP News, 14 June 2019, online.

Key Questions

• How do you know?
• What evidence do you have?
• Will it hold up to scrutiny?"

How Civil Society Can Combat Disinformation and Hate Speech Without Making it Worse?

The 3Ds of Disinformation -- Detect, Document, and Debunk

Detect: In the detection phase, we investigate suspicious sources to determine if it is legitimate and representing itself accurately.

Document: In this phase we compile the evidence and document the details that verify the sources is not legitimate or accurate.

Debunk: We assess the impact on the misinformation on specific issues, and demonstrate how it causes harm to individuals, communities, population groups, states, and countries.

An in-depth look at this topic is presented in this 11-page eBook (linked below):