Fake news is certainly a hot topic in the media today. But what is ‘fake news’? Is it a novel phenomenon or an old issue that has gained new life with the spread of social media? Can disinformation weaken our democracies or undermine our efforts to cope with emergencies such as the COVID pandemic? Some COST Actions are already on the case; examining sources of disinformation, how they propagate their content and how the phenomenon can be challenged.
A simple definition of ‘fake news’ is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news might seek to damage the reputation of a person or an organisation or may seek to generate income through advertising.
It could be argued that fake news is as old as communication itself: whoever tells the story, constructs the history. And each time communication technologies have advanced fake news has also developed. For example, the invention of the printing press allowed anonymous, often scurrilous, pamphleteers to rapidly spread their version of news across communities.
Today the rapid rise of social media technologies that enable anyone with a smartphone to broadcast to the world has facilitated a new wave of fake news. The sheer volume of news available to access combined with social media algorithms that often accentuate our tendency towards confirmation bias make it increasingly difficult for the ordinary citizens to distinguish fact from fiction.
Digital narratives
Building a network to study interactive digital narratives to address and understand societal complexity and therefore address the issue of fake news is the aim of COST Action ‘Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations (INDCOR)’. Interactive narrative design has been used to develop many digital game formats and INDCOR is looking to broaden its use by analysing and generalising design and production methods for some of the best examples with a view to using the methodology to help represent and initiate discussion of complex issues.
One of these complex phenomena is fake news and some of the Action’s members are involved in a two-year Spanish project on ‘Intelligent characterization of the veracity of the information related to COVID–19’ (CIVIC). The project is led by Alejandro Martín García of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and involves contributions from 14 universities and research centres from Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, China and Korea researching in fields from data mining and artificial intelligence to journalism and law.
Dissemination of uncontrolled fake news or news without a sound scientific basis, especially on subjects relating to health, can cause widespread disruption, creating fear among populations or promoting unproven or unsafe methods as cures or preventatives. During the COVID pandemic various potential remedies, such as drinking bleach or taking large doses of Vitamin D, and other conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that the COVID vaccinations contain a 5G microchip, have been circulated widely on social media.
The CIVIC project is all about the immediate detection of fake news related to COVID-19. The project will compile a vast amount of information on COVID-19, codify and tag the data and develop an engine that can be built into browsers and social networking sites to evaluate newsfeeds.
This new browser tool will benefit from a unique combination of expertise in communication and journalism with Artificial Intelligence techniques to provide a plug-in application that can automatically characterise information related to COVID-19. The tool will show if a piece of information is potentially false and, crucially, the reasons behind that decision, helping to demystify news considered as false and building trust in truth. The tool could also be easily extended to other controversial topics allowing citizens to verify information immediately in a practical way.
Digital human rights
Another initiative directly involved in the fake news issue is COST Action ‘Global Digital Human Rights Network (GDHRNet)’. GDHRNet is systematically exploring the theoretical and practical challenges to the protection of human rights in digital domains. It is evaluating how national governments are developing regulatory frameworks for online companies and how these companies are meeting their obligations to protect human rights and combat hate speech and other abuses online.
One of the first studies undertaken by the Action, which only started work in late 2020, was a rapid study on COVID-related disinformation. Questionnaires were sent out and responses received from more than 40 researchers in 20 countries within the network and the study provided an important overview of how states and platforms have dealt with COVID-related disinformation.
A key finding was that all companies have developed compliance policies against COVID disinformation. This is a new phenomenon as previously, pre-COVID, deleting, demonetarizing and/ or deamplifying disinformation had not featured heavily in the regulatory arsenal of the online companies as this tended to reduce traffic and therefore revenue potential. However, the emergence of COVID has highlighted to the online companies that disinformation can have substantial negative effects, both on individual rights and on social cohesion, and their vigilance has increased since the start of the pandemic. “We were able to show that throughout the world platforms have put increased effort into factchecking and, where appropriate, removal of content,” says Dr Matthias Kettemann of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research who led the study.
Problematic use
Problematic use of the internet and its impact on the health and wellbeing of European citizens represents an emerging challenge for mental health research. The COST Action ‘European Network for Problematic Usage of the Internet’ brings together a diverse group of expertise to advance understanding of these issues from a bio-psycho-social perspective, clarify the brain-based basis of the problem and develop effective interventions.
The Action has recently produced a book for the public entitled ‘Learning to deal with Problematic Usage of the Internet’ in collaboration with organisations involved with the study of obsessive-compulsive spectrum and related disorders. The book presents a concise explanation of issues around problematic use of the internet, including misinformation, describes how to recognise the most common types of problem, current scientific theories about the causes of problematic Internet usage, and gives suggestions on how those struggling to control their internet use could deal with these issues. The publication can be downloaded as a pdf for free.
On 28 April, the Action is organising an online event dedicated at raising the public voice on problematic use of internet. Find all information here.
Scientists who urged Internet giants to help them tackle problematic online behaviour are now seeking public consultation for new research-oriented projects aiming at overcoming Internet addiction.
Another negative impact of internet usage is radicalisation and COST Action ‘European Cooperation for Statistics of Network Data Science (COSTNET)’ has produced a video explaining the importance of social interaction, including virtual interactions, in radicalisation and how to challenge it.
Read more about COST Action ‘Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations’
Read more about COST Action ‘Global Digital Human Rights Network’
Read more about COST Action ‘European Network for Problematic Usage of the Internet’
Read more about COST Action ‘European Cooperation for Statistics of Network Data Science’