Maybe it's just all the fault of the Internet. By now it has become impossible to keep track of the hoaxes put out there. And indeed, for some time now, it has become commonplace to see the web and social media flooded with fake news or distorted news. And, as if this were not enough, more and more often the scientific community is being targeted, branded as unreliableecorrupt. Believing that there is a relationship between vaccines and the onset of autism is one of the most widespread hoaxes in the medical field that has heated up quite a few tempers in recent months.
True as fiction
About fifty years ago it was said that freedom could be threatened by the scarcity of information, but today it is exactly the opposite. The network, with the great mass of information it produces and disposes of, appears problematic and ambiguous to us, as full of opportunities as it is of pitfalls. In fact, it seems that the media and the net are no longer mere means of communication; on the contrary, they have entered so strongly into everyday life that they now appear to be our actual habitat. It is as if the new mediums have become true constructors of reality, beyond reality itself. We are faced with a depowering of the real in favor of its often false representations. From the beach vacation to the death of a VIP, from the terrorist attack to the weekend after party, everything, in short, seems to be done to make news on social media. We are in the age of the showmanship of every little snippet of life, and it matters little whether what has just been shared on social is real or not.
It's not true but I believe it
Theyear 2017 was definitely theyear of hoaxes, the expression fake news was mentioned so much that the Collins Dictionary Word chose it as the expression of 2017, while Wikipedia included it among its new entries, along with hoax and post-truth. But what makes us believe in fake news? Probably the scope of fake news, which usually cites credible but untrue sources, or again a particular transport to the news. All this leads us to believe and share again what does not actually exist. Why do many young people fail to recognize hoaxes? AStanford University study has tried to provide an answer. The report calls the ability of young people to reason about information on the Internet depressing. Digital natives who can, with no problem, go from Facebook to Instagram by planning the different publications and performing hashtags, when they have to evaluate a piece of information that comes through social media are easily fooled. Between January 2015 and June 2016, researchers subjected middle school, high school, and college students in 12 states to 56 different tests: in each, the student had to determine whether and how reliable the digital information presented was and why.
The researchers after analyzing nearly 8 thousand responses realized that the situation was much more serious than expected. But it is not only hoaxes that are of concern, the study also found that young people do not know how to recognize advertising content from news. The problem is not traditional advertisements, but the native advertising. Nearly 80 percent of the middle school students surveyed did not understand, for example, that the words "sponsored content" indicated an advertisement.
Unmasking a hoax? It could be taught in school
Fake news is perpetually accessible thanks to the Internet, while in parallel the media's control of content has weakened. This means that every citizen must now begin, and learn, to think a little like a fact-checker. To combat misinformation, why not play ahead of the curve and teach right from school a method for recognizing hoaxes? Instead of just exposing hoaxes, reasoning tools could be offered to develop critical thinking. It is on this basis that the project Informed Health Choices born on the inspiration of the best-selling Testing treatments (Where is the evidence?) downloadable from here. The Informed Health Choices team promises, then, to teach the public to ask the right questions when they are faced with a health-related claim.
Everything is a business
Last November, aninvestigation by Buzzfeed unmasked a network of Italian sites created specifically to spread fake news, copied news and misinformation. A real business consisting of a network of 170 internet domains and several facebook pages, all owned by the company Web365. The content belongs to certain categories well recognizable to the high viral potential: articles against immigrants or glorifying national popular positions, religious pieces or posts that focus on sensationalism and clickbaiting. BuzzFeed analyzed the interactions and shares that posts on these pages generated: in many cases they were even outperforming large national newspapers. What about the business of fake food news that all promise the same thing: live longer, lose weight fast, make us look better. And testifying to the success of diets or foods are often TV stars, celebrities and influencers who contribute to the cause by posting pictures every day on their social profiles in which they consume these products. The message, often accompanied by a discount code with referral link, is clear and simple: you can become exactly that as long as you follow this diet, buy that book or drink at least two cups of tea every day.
How Facebook fights fake news
It was just a few days ago that news broke of the threat from advertising giant Unilever, the world's second-largest advertiser (it invested more than $9 billion in digital adv last year), which let Facebook and Google know to stop advertising on their platforms if they do not do more to combat fake news. And here Zuckemberg 's team here the official note goes to work introducing a new measure to curb fake news by relying on the voice and opinion of those who matter most: users. People will be the ones to say whether they trust the news outlets they learn information from, and the more trustworthy a source is deemed to be, the more the content they publish will gain visibilitynel News Feed. A feature that will significantly reduce the amount of information passing through the feed but will go a long way toward improving its quality. When a story is judged false, Facebook will show the analysis written by the person who verified it, in the section below. In Italy with the collaboration and support of Pagella Politica, a signatory of the Poynter International Fact Checking Principles, it will be possible to report a story judged false. If the story turns out to be fabricated or partially untrue, underneath the friend's post (who will be alerted with a notification that he or she has shared a fake news story), Facebook will show a box displaying the other version of the facts with the experts' analysis, removing the importance of the sharing from the news feed. If, on the other hand, the article turns out to be well-founded, the social will introduce a sort of label that will act as a guarantor of the story's veracity.
Hoaxes and legality
As of Jan. 1, the world's first law against offensive posts, fake news andonline hatred went into effect in Germany. It forces social networks with more than two million members to delete defamatory content within them, under penalty of fines of up to 50 million euros. According to a Deutschlandfunk investigation in the first month, the Federal Justice Office, which oversees the law, received only 98 complaints.
France is also working on its own law against fake news. Announced on January 4 by President Macron it will be called the Law on Trust and Reliability of Information. The anti-fake news law will be enacted by May.
And in Italy? Since January 18, a new service has been active from the postal policewhichlaunched the Red button project. The citizen is able to report to the Police.
The existence of fake news. If a hoax is accurately identified, a denial will be posted on the website of the Ps Commissariat online and on social-institutional channels.
Bad News: the vaccine against hoaxes
It is a game and simultaneously a social experiment is Bad news which invites the user to step into the shoes of a hoax creator. The game was created by a team from theUniversity of Cambridge together with a collective of Dutch journalists and researchers Drog. The ambitious goal? To unveil the mechanisms of online fake news: how fake news is created, how it spreads, what effects it causes against the rapid spread of misinformation. In the game the player must succeed in creating chaos, increasing consensus using the unique weapon of fake news, all while maintaining a good credibility score to remain as persuasive as possible. The whole thing is quite realistic. The basic idea of the experiment is to act as a kind of vaccine against fake news; by dressing in the shoes of someone attempting to deceive you should become adept at identifying and dismantling those same techniques. The risk, however, is that it becomes a gymnasium where those already working with fake news can train. We shall see, in six months, in fact, results will be published in a scientific journal.