What is the future for fake news? How media organizations like BuzzFeed are tackling and debunking misleading content.
BY NATHAN SING
Craig Silverman, media editor for BuzzFeed News, at the BuzzFeed Canada office in Toronto, Ontario on Feb. 1, 2017. (Photo by Nathan Sing)
Media organizations including BuzzFeed are working to stop the spread of fake news by teaching their reporters the skills to debunk a fake news story, how the misinformation is spreading and why.
Craig Silverman, the media editor for BuzzFeed News, has been doing work on fake news for years and recently published an analysis on how fake news outperformed real news on Facebook during the U.S. presidential race.
To Silverman, fake news is something that is “one hundred per cent false, and consciously created by somebody knowing that is false, usually for financial reasons, but sometimes for ideological reasons.”
For years, fake news has been making its way around social media outlets. However, it gained prominence in 2016 for its alleged influence in the U.S. presidential race, which made media corporations rethink how they structure their content.
“Constant exposure [to fake news] over time will eventually affect people & change what they believe in,” said Silverman while speaking at the Atkinson Lecture at the Ryerson School of Journalism. “One fake story is all you need to plant the seed in reader's mind and make them more likely to believe others.”
BuzzFeed News employed Silverman and reporter Jane Lytvynenko to investigate fake news stories and train people within BuzzFeed to quickly find and debunk these stories.
Silverman and Lytvynenko hope to spread the skills of debunking to everyone throughout the organization. “Since [BuzzFeed] is a digitally native organization, and since we really do care about the internet, it’s important that we are leaders in this area,” said Lytvynenko.
BuzzFeed News plans to focus more time on creating more content dedicated to debunking fake news stories. “We are translating and adapting stories that are done elsewhere, including Japan or France and into English, so people can understand fake news in all parts of the world,” says Silverman.
“One thing we have to worry about is on social media, all of the content looks the same.” said Elamin Abdelmahmoud, the social media editor for BuzzFeed Canada.
Currently, there is no way to filter links to fake news articles and real news articles from legitimate media organizations on social media sites including Twitter and Facebook, which according to Abdelmahmoud has made it hard for people to differentiate what is legitimate and what is not.
“When I post something using the BuzzFeed account, versus when someone posts a fake news story on Facebook, your feed will make it look the same. Therefore, it reduces the validity of whatever news work has gone into any of these stories,” says Abdelmahmoud.
As for the future of fake news, Silverman suspects that there will be more fake news that is video driven because more advertising revenue can be made compared to print. “It is also becoming easier to manipulate a voice or a video to make a famous person say something that they haven’t, so I think we’ll see some technological advancement as well,” says Silverman.
The most effective way to stop fake news is to shut off the financial incentives from it, according to Silverman. “If it wasn’t so easy for these sites to get ads on them, or for their content to be spread on Facebook, that would shut off a lot of the incentives for a lot of people to do it.”
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, the social media editor for BuzzFeed Canada, at the BuzzFeed Canada office in Toronto, Ontario on Feb. 1, 2017. (Photo by Nathan Sing)
Craig Silverman, media editor for BuzzFeed News, at the BuzzFeed Canada office in Toronto, Ontario on Feb. 1, 2017. (Photo by Nathan Sing)
BuzzFeed News reporter Jane Lytvynenko at the BuzzFeed Canada office in Toronto, Ontario on Feb. 1, 2017. (Photo by Nathan Sing)