Fake News Talking Business

Did false stories have an impact on the outcome

Ever since that question came up, fake news has become,

On this week's Talking Business, we examine how fake news is spread

and what, if anything, should be done to rein it in.

Welcome to the programme. I'm Michelle Fleury in Washington, DC.

From politics to the media to technology companies, lately a lot

of people worked up about for the back of the spreading of

lies or news. The problem is made worse

because there is money to be made in the fake news business. This is how

it works. So, who is responsible for the boom,

and the containment of fake news? Here to help me investigate,

we're joined from San Francisco by a web and technology writer

and part-time entrepreneur. In the studio with me

are the director of the museum in Washington,

as well as a Wikipedia editor Gentlemen, thank you

very much joining me. If I could start a question,

Andrew, to you... How should we be

defining fake news? I talked about it

as being about lies It is too broad

a definition in many ways. One of the problems with the term

fake news is it encompasses many different types of news sources,

websites, you find. So, I think, one of the better

pieces written about this, to try to break down the whole

phenomenon of fake news into folks that might be intentionally

creating news for profit, so we saw there were some operations

out of Macedonia that did this You have partisan sites,

who have sites which are not prey A whole bunch of different sites

that fall under this It's important to understand there

are different motivations for these. It is hard to paint everything

as one fake news phenomenon. I think we're only very early

in this news ecosystem where there A lot more people have

their voices heard. But it also opens this up

to the possibility of people deliberately polluting

was sabotaging the news. I think that's a long-term

concern in many ways but it's been brought about,

been highlighted, in recent times because the speed

and velocity of social media. You heard about the speed

and velocity of social media I think fake news, as Andrew

defined, or tried to define, is actually the right way

to think about it. We have fake news coming out

of places like Macedonia, which is essentially no

different from spam. The rest of it is essentially

propaganda and now propaganda I think that is the reality

of the news ecosystem right now, that it works at a much faster pace

and a much larger So, it kind of blurs the boundaries

between real and fake and real and unreal,

and truths and half truths. I think part of the new era

is that there are no It used to be only a generation

ago that you would have Water Kronkyte, and a few

other anchors, and few in the United States very well

respected national newspapers This is likely to be true,

this is likely not to be. Now, for all kinds of good reasons,

those gatekeepers have been torn down and we have a much more vibrant

and dynamic news system. In the early days of this new era,

we don't have the gatekeepers. In many ways, it's going to be up

to the individual now. To be a much more intentional news

consumer than in the past. Aren't you letting off the

platforms, the Facebooks and Googles I think they are now beginning

to acknowledge their new role in this information ecosystem,

that they're just not pipes by which they distribute information

and posts to people, but that they mediate,

they edit, curated the news At the end of the day,

I think that the social media platforms can do a significant

amount that it is really If consumers demand good quality

news, the algorithms and the platforms are

provided to them. One thing that the traditional

gatekeepers have to do is to make themselves relevant in a new age

of technology and social media. As was mentioned, things

are happening faster on social The most important thing

is uncontextualised. These are tweets, these

are Instagram posts, they are Facebook utterances

and they are not 3000-5000 word In isolation, in little bits,

in part of the internet. What you are seeing

are some experiments, like the Washington Post

for example, right It says we are providing a new

plug-in for the Chrome browsers. So, whenever you look

at a tweet from Donald Trump, were going to put a little fact

checked right underneath it saying, Not too many people will

use this, obviously. How many people are using a Chrome

desktop browser and are installing It's kind of interesting

they are experimenting We have also seen that Google

and Facebook have realised that just being a platform,

and just link sharing with no responsibility,

is also not a great thing. They are almost what we call

accidental or unintentional Because they are sharing the news

but they are not doing the fact checking or flagging of content

in a way that we see A lot of the moves we are seeing

from Facebook and Google right now, annotating and flagging trying

to get more information from the reader because readers

are demanding that now. I do believe the new gatekeepers

are the social media platform. They have to make sure that

nefarious information They need to figure out the stuff

coming out of places like Macedonia, the for profit spam sites should be

stopped right away - they have

the infrastructure to do that. The fact they did not do it tells me

they dropped the bar. Even just to kind of say

that we are looking into the fake news, I think it is a lot

of lip service. In their universe, more attention

to whatever people are doing, or reading on their platform,

equals more profit. I want to talk about

the decentralisation of news. From rolling news, two

technology companies becoming How much of a role has that played

in what we have seen today? I think we see the

abundance of news sites. In many ways this is

the golden age of news. More people have access

to more sites and more information than ever before,

if they are willing to undertake If they just want to be passive

and have things come at them, I agree that the technology

companies have a role. I don't want teenagers

in Macedonia flooding our news I don't want to assign too much

authority to Facebook and Google. They are doing what's best

for their shareholders. But the algorithmically-derived

results they produce are not particularly transparent and no one

elected them to become the I don't think you can mitigate

the responsibility that individuals have with all this access,

we're now going to have to pay Later in the programme, can

algorithms help wipe out fake news? Algorithms help determine

which stories take precedence over Our comedy consultant has been

taking a closer look. In this week's Talking Point,

he examines the role played You've probably seen it written more

than you heard it said. Usually written by someone

on Facebook shouting virtually Now, sometimes people shout fake

news in a Facebook comment purely because they disagree

with the previous Facebook comment. But, real fake news,

if you know what I mean, that's where a company,

or just two guys with a laptop, set up a website that looks

like a plausible news website and churn out stories that

looks sort of possible. How does that fake news

and those made up stories get A former vice president at Intel

here in Ireland and something of a tech and start-up guru tells me

it's something to do The beauty of algorithms

is they neither know, nor care, Likewise, in the news space,

if there are news articles which are being clicked on out

there and people with interests like mine are looking at real news

items, they are looking at false news items that they are looking

at who knows what news items. As far as the algorithm is

concerned, this is a high hit rate. For somebody like Philip,

so I'm going to present that to him. Wouldn't you think though that

rational thinking human beings will do little bit of verification

on the stories that they are served The problem is, we don't

do that verification. We're too happy to have our vices

confirmed so when we see something plausible on our phones

we just share it. So, controlling fake news

is going to have to be Fact Matter is a Google-backed

project for automated fact checking. Our mission is to solve

misinformation in online content. Solving online misinformation

sounds like a noble cause, We're focusing on sentence

level fact checking. This is identifying claims

that appear in text Machine intelligence

comes in using natural language processing,

to understand effectively What are the sources that

you could use to check that claim - what that claim is

about and the hardest part, which is linking

that claim to a fact. It will be a browser extension

which allows you to see highlighted sentence level claims

about statistics and it will link them to sources that,

for example, the World Bank, it will enable them to verify

those claims immediately. Our extension could basically look

at a piece of content and say this is likely to be misleading because,

overall, this piece of news contains The only problem with this solution

is it may not be able to tell the difference between fake news

and when someone is just trying to be funny, which is a problem

I face myself quite often. Touching on the role of algorithms

in fake news for that you can see more of his short films

on our website. Back here in Washington,

in the rapid and seemingly uncontrollable spread of fake news,

modern technology as Could it also turn out to be

part of the solution? Doctor Geoffrey from the Museum,

Professor Andrew Lee of Wikipedia and the technology writer

from San Francisco. Are we right to blame algorithms

for the problem of fake news? You know, algorithms only do what we

specified. They are just a set of instructions we have written.

Hopefully got up with machine learning there are all types of

things happening we may not know of. It is about the machine making

determinations without human eyeballs double-checking them or

steering them. We had a problem recently where Google was giving

search results for, did the Holocaust happen with some very

unsavoury sites at the top of those rankings? Google has repeatedly over

the years said, sorry, that is our algorithm. If you want to see

something different at the top, they're going to have to go on the

internet and make it happen on the internet. Google did tweet the

algorithm at the end of the day so Holocaust the Mars were not at the

top of the search results. I'm sympathetic to the companies. They

have to recognises his very early on. Three or four macro years ago I

do not think Facebook was thinking, we are going to become the platform

by which most millennial is get the news was that I do not think that

was in their heads. It has happened at such a speed and has caused a

significant change in demands facing the to respond. We also have to

recognise these are companies unlike any we have ever seen in that they

are truly global. The next million customers of Facebook weather will

probably be in south Asia, Africa and East Asia. They have to be

responsive to all of that but also. We rightly demand more of the

companies. I am quite sympathetic. I respectfully disagree with you.

Facebook had specifically targeted the media, the news business. They

replicated the idea of Twitter because they knew that is how people

keep coming back to the Facebook platform. News is one of the most

addictive things for people to come back to a platform or a service or a

brand. They intentionally went ahead and targeted the news business.

Between Google and Facebook, 85% of the online advertising are going to

these two companies. These are not, Babes in the woods. They are private

equities. Private entities have responsibilities. It is not just

Facebook. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, which owns the Being said

engine and other entities like them need to sit down and figure out what

is the right answer. I don't think the individual should bear the

burden of trying to make decisions on every single piece of information

they access on Facebook or any other service. I want to bring in Andrew.

Wikipedia was mentioned. You are keen to jump in. What is the role

for Wikipedia and the role free humans? Wikipedia has been around

for 16 years when it first started in 2001. It was seen as an odd

experiment on the side of the internet. You are not sure if you

could trust it. It has been in the top ten most visited website in the

world. Wikipedia has stayed at the top. There are debates of how much

you should trust it that we have found that over the years it is

still the go to place, including folks like Google whom I knit for

information. Every time you do a Google search you will find

references to Wikipedia. Facebook and Google are employing people who

are learning from Wikipedia lesson. When you read an article will see a

warning or the neutrality of a section is disputed. We need morsels

is to verify this. Wikipedia has said, this is the best we know of

this topic. We could use better sourcing and better facts. Facebook

in Germany is trying out this experiment of annotating and putting

warnings around content. Not necessarily saying this is true or

untrue but to give more guidance to the reader. What do you think of the

idea of crowd sourcing? All of these things should be implied. This is so

compensated and it is so early, frankly, in the new ecosystem that

we should be testing all of these things out. On the supply side, I

think the platforms should do more. I think the responsibility of

citizens also has to be explored. The Wikipedia example is a good one.

The point it has lasted more than most tech start-ups or most tech

company shows that people who provide a service with the public

respect and demand that there is a market out there. Wikipedia is a

financial model. I think we will have to explore all of these things.

What we have seen in two or three years if there will become more

clashes that they will become more sophisticated. What do you think

about sites who debunk fake news? It is like racing a human against a jet

plane. That is what we are dealing with. Fake news is happening at that

scale and fact checking at human scale. We will always have that

problem. I am all for it. If we find ourselves here a year from now

having this conversation, what do you think would be talking about

when it comes to this issue? I would say we will be talking about the

same issue. The problem is much bigger. Other platforms are still

dragging their feet. I agree we will still be talking about the problems.

I think we will be a little bit more focused on crises and how public

opinion can be manipulated in short duration, high stake crises where

many of the safeguards we are talking about which may work over a

few days and weeks will be useless when there is an issue like this was

the back is what concerns me the most. Can we, as a society, or other

societies be played in an economic crisis? All the things we have been

talking about work better with time. We're not there yet in terms of an

immediate response to a deliberate destabilisation. Can you get this to

work at scale? We know that the classic quote, I could go halfway

around the world before the truth gets its shoes on foot or can you

make networks of annotation that fact checking, that get the good

signal to consumers quicker and in a more useful way question what it is

a big challenge. Twitter is a platform that is proprietary closed,

Facebook is closed. Will they work together to combat fake and

inaccurate information question about right now Wikipedia does it.

That is where things end. There are little things going on like the

Washington Post but are they going to work together? I am not so sure.

I look forward to revisiting this at another time. Goodbye from all of us

here in the studio. That is it from this edition of Talking Business.

Next week Tania Beckett will be in London talking about how Browns can

survive in an Iraq of algorithms and fake content. For now, it is

goodbye. If you are fed up with this cold

weather, there is a hint at the end of this broadcast that something

more spring light might be on the horizon. Some sunshine today but you

had to go quite a way to find it. For many of us