Fake News Is Destabilizing But A Lot Of People Find It Just Part Of Life
Michael Hedges September 10, 2018 - Follow on Twitter
Lest we forget, fake news is still with us. It and its purveyors have more than nine lives. And public opinion experts continue to explore each and every one. Fake news has overloaded people’s ability to sort out reality. Complexity is its friend.
 “As information channels multiply, the state, science and traditional media lose sovereignty over information,” wrote Ipsos/Germany director of political and social research Robert Grimm on the results of a multi-country survey about fake news released last week (September 6). “Emotionally-driven opinion creates immediate worlds of experience through which easily accessible bipolar juxtapositions such as victims-perpetrators, elites-regular people, foreigners-residents (provides) a simpler solution than finding the truth among many possible truths. This is where populism begins.”
Very depressing, Dr. Grimm. "The data reveals a resignation to the complexity of the world and the abundance of data in an increasingly digitalized society, where it is difficult to fit politics and economics into different expert systems.” New media, particularly social media, drives people into filter bubbles, safe to follow their “gut.” Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute interviewed nearly 20 thousand people in 27 countries.
About two-thirds (65%) of the total survey respondents believe their fellow countrymen “lives in a bubble on the internet, only connecting with people like themselves and looking for opinions they already agree with,” said the report - The Perils of Perception. Americans (71%), Indians, Malaysians and Swedes are most likely to believe their countrymen live in an information bubble. Japanese (44%) are least likely.
Less than half (41%) of the total sample believe their “average” follow countrymen can distinguish between truth and fake news, definitions predicated on the respondents point of view. People in Sweden (64%), the US (62%), Italy (61%) and South Africa (59%) doubt the judgement of their fellow countrymen. On the other hand, Hungarians (69%), Malaysians (60%), Saudis (60%) and Chinese (58%) believe their countrymen can see the difference between truth and fake news. Ponder that.
A bit more than half (52%) of the total sample believe that people adopt fake news because of they are deceived by politicians. Slightly fewer (49%) see the media as complicit. Serbs (68%), Turks (61%) and British (60%) blame the media “for misleading us.”
A majority (56%) of those surveyed understand the term fake news as “stories where the facts are wrong.” A bit more than one-third (36%) view the term as a political attack strategy “to discredit news they don’t agree with.” Unsurprisingly, 51% of Americans define “fake news” this way.
Separately, the Oxford Internet Institute wants us to stop using the term fake news altogether. “We’re calling it ‘junk news’ rather than fake news because we think that fake news is too contentious a concept that has also been used to weaponize and discredit media on both sides of the spectrum,” said Lisa-Maria Neudert, co-author of a study of Twitter feeds in Sweden prior to the recent parliamentary elections, to Euronews (September 6). Junk news, she explained, is “deliberately publishing and feeding us deceptive information, and purporting to be real news about, for example, politics.”
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Projected as an assault on liberal democracies, the blow-back against fake news has landed squarely at the doors of the internet providers, web portals and social media networks that happen to host the vile transgressions. After putting up quaint resistance, typically citing free speech and such, the masters of the digital universe have found their executives sitting before various government panels explaining how they got so rich being so bad. The message from these meetings has always been the same: there’s a real language barrier between digital technology and elected governments.
It’s been an exciting time for fake news. Designated two months ago the 2017 word of the year, fake news has moved from strength to strength. Not only is everybody talking about it, fake news purveyors are revelling in their dark basements. Being a post-modern cultural icon requires dedication and more, just like bitcoin.
Fake news, investigators far and wide have concluded, is a big problem. Government leaders, generally, agree. Solutions they have proposed are, unfortunately, so analogue. This video game has pivoted to algorithms.
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