[Media Psychology] Fake News in Social Media
4 besides Dong wan, Goo
( Yonsei University )
Introduction After the American presidential election in 2016, the Fake News was regarded as a serious factor which has affected the result of the Election.
Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................. 2
Definition of the Fake News ........................................................................ 3
The seriousness of Fake News – by Statistics .......................................... 4
Consumption Patterns and Cases of Fake News .................................... 5
Cases of Fake News – Broad Sense ........................................................... 5
Cases of Fake News – Narrow Sense ......................................................... 6
Why people consume Fake news? ............................................................ 7
How does the diffusion of Fake news happen? ...................................... 7
Current Solutions ......................................................................................... 8
Conclusion and Suggestions for Further Research ............................... 11
References .................................................................................................... 12
Introduction
After the American presidential election in 2016, the Fake News was regarded as a serious factor which has affected the result of the Election. Thus, many scholars tried to figure out the true influence of Fake News on people's perception. However, even though the Fake News is usually accused to change the recognition and 'even' the behavior of the public, it is yet uncertain that Fake News really 'change' public perception of the world. For example, according to one study conducted by two researchers from New York University and Stanford University, although it was definite that the Americans watched and remembered more Pro- Trump articles than Pro-Clinton ones, the researchers couldn't prove any effective influence of the Fake News affecting people's voting choice (Allcott, Hunt & Matthew, 2017). This research gives us a significant insight that the Fake News itself hardly changes public behavior. Instead, it would accelerate the political polarization and reinforces people's political tendencies.
Thus, our group focused on people's perception of the Fake News, because, to find out the fundamental resolution, what people think about the Fake News and how some of them consume it is much more important than the Fake News itself. So, in this report, we'll point out the gap between the academic definition of Fake News and the broad definition by social recognition toward it. After that, we'll find out a pattern of Fake News consumption and try to explain its psychological mechanism. Finally, we'll give our solution to lessen the consumption of Fake News.
3. Definition of the Fake News
Fake News is very hard to define because it is used as an umbrella term which indicates rumors, news parodies, miswritten articles, etc. Thus, scholars have tried to define it to clarify it, and we found there are at least two common elements of their studies; the formality and intention (Lee, 2018). In this sense, the narrow sense of the Fake News could be defined as 'an article published by the press and diffusing disinformation with political or economic intention.' Thus, to be considered as a Fake News, a text must be published by the press or have a form of an article. And it must be proved to be written as disinformation with the author's unjust intention. This definition makes hard to point out Fake News because it is subtle to verify the writer's inner motive of an article. (We'll see an example with this problem at the following part.)
However, public perception of the Fake News, especially in Korea, is much more flexible than its academic definition. According to a survey conducted by the Korea Press Foundation, people regarded any misinformation from various media platforms as harmful Fake News and more than 38% of them thought the misinformation was written with certain political intentions (양정애, 2019). Thus, we defined this much broad sense of the Fake News as 'every misinformation which contrasts with one's political tendency.' With this definition, we could include flexible many texts with misinformation including disinformation shared in Social Media in our research.
Because it is unacceptable for the press to admit having produced a Fake News, to define Fake News with the formal sense is very limited. In comparison, the perceptional definition facilitates us to regard what certain people actually read as Fake News and analyze their consuming pattern. Now, we'll see two actual examples of Fake News and examine the pattern of Fake News consumption.
4. The seriousness of Fake News – by Statistics
Fake news spreads widely in our lives. Because of these situations, many people think seriously about fake news and that worry reflects reality well. In South Korea, over 70% of people thought that the reality of content is essential feature of the news . But, as I said about fake news, Fake news distorts ‘the case’s reality’ with intention.
With these statistical results, Korean people already recognize the seriousness of fake news in South Korea. In a survey conducted by Korea Press Promotion Foundation, over 80% of Korean respondents said fake news is serious and because of fake news social division is getting worse.
These two statistical results said that fake news already destroys essential of real news and makes society getting worse, even promotes social division.
_______
a. Korea Press Foundation. (2019). What is the most essential element in news?
b. Korea Press Foundation. (2017). The degree of consent to comments on the phenomenon in the form of false news?
5. Consumption Patterns and Cases of Fake News
Cases of Fake News – Broad Sense
The broad sense of fake news hasn’t restricted by the format of news, that matter of formal or informal. If one distorted true spoken in Net and reproduced by many people and spread, it can be also fake news in a broad sense.
In real life, a broad sense of fake news isn’t uncommon to see. In 2016, when South Korea is in a state of instability due to Presidential Impeachment, fake news starts and spreads in Extreme right online community site, Iibe(일간베스트). The statement that Park Geun-Hye's impeachment is opposed by prominent foreign politicians and celebrities received great attention and expanded to the famous conservative politician, intellectual’s SNS accounts.
But, fake news characters, ‘Artoria Pendragon’, ‘Hikigaya Hachiman’ was the name of an animated character in Japan. In conclusion, it was fake news aimed at mocking extreme right sites, but those who had positive thoughts about the former president truly accepted and constantly expanded the fake news.
Cases of Fake News – Narrow Sense
We brought an article from Korea's credible news media as a narrow sense example of Fake News. The article <Death of a woman in her 50s who was fired from a restaurant that felt burdened by the minimum wage increase> was reported in 2018. This controversy arose as the reporter created a hasty causality without any fact-checking on the incident. Since then, < Hankyung(Korean Economy)> has made a correction to claim that the article has been 'misreporting'. The correction article clarified that this article was not mere misinformation. Despite the fact – the death that the reporter reported did not really exist, the correction article cited other death and argued that what the original article was tried to say was not wrong. We have determined that this point is where the political intent of the article becomes apparent. Therefore, We treated this article as an example of Fake News and a mistake reporter made in his hasty reporting with apparent political intentions(Political intent to criticize Moon Jaein government - Looking at the way the Hankyung has been reporting, this becomes clearer.).
As soon as this fake news(Hankyung insists that it is misinformation.) was reported, it was quickly quoted by the conservative media and conservatives. In particular, they re-spread it through Twitter and YouTube channels, which in turn led to the expansion in the conservative community. Although the press published a correction report and claimed it was a "misinformation," conservative netizens still claimed that the cause of the death(Another actual case of death added in the correction article) was the current government's "minimum-wage increase" policy. Many conservative netizens and figures even made unfounded claims that the current government had imposed media oppression or exerted influence on media reports. That is, even though it turned out to be obvious misinformation and fake news, the point that defines it as fake news can become extremely ambiguous depending on the news consumer's political tendency. Also, It is a representative example of how fake news reported by biased producers biases the news consumer.
With these two cases, we tried to establish a process of Fake News consumption and reproduction. Aside from the producers’ intention to make Fake news, there are psychological mechanisms underlying its consumption and reproduction which we analyzed separately.
7. Why people consume Fake news?
As Blumler and Katz (1974) developed now widely studied approach of why and how people actively seek out the ways to satisfy their needs through media, we can apply Uses and Gratifications theory. There are lots of reasons of using social media such as social interaction, information seeking, pass time, entertainment, relaxation, communicatory utility, convenience utility, expression of opinion, information sharing, and surveillance/knowledge about others (whiting & Williams, 2013). These are all significant reasons correspond to Fake news consumption.
When people perceive a Fake News, they judge the reliability of information according to their pre-existing belief to avoid cognitive dissonance (Fontaine & Festinger, 1957). This typical phenomenon that happens when we search for and interpret information is called confirmation bias in psychological terms (Nickerson, 1998). Thus, in their perception, their cognitive bias lets them find only corresponding information and evidence which meet their belief, Political Stance.
7. How does the diffusion of Fake news happen?
People not only consume Fake news on their own but also they reproduce it and diffuse the wrong information to others. We can see a spiral of silence here. Even though not all people are extremely biased, the public tends to become silent when they think they are relatively minor in their opinion. In this sense, because the moderates keep silent, they let the Fake News distributed, expanded or reproduced which are produced with the intention to deceive public.
Then How the spiral of Silence works in the process of Fake News diffusion? First, active consumers think they are relatively more objective than opponents. So they believe the Fake News is correct, and diffuse it with conviction. We call this Third-person-effect.
In the meantime, bystanders, which are most of the public keep silence, even though they know that the Fake News is wrong. That's because they think they are relatively minor, so hesitant to insist on their opinion. It is called Pluralistic Ignorance. With these underlying mechanism, the Spiral of silence is enlarged and Fake News is diffused or accepted in silence. This vicious cycle is maintained, with each consumer of Fake news affecting reciprocally without noticing.
8. Current Solutions
In Korea, legal regulation is the main focus of fake news solutions. But there is a controversy when discussing legal regulations, and government intervention needs to be approached cautiously because it may be accepted as content censorship. For this reason, there is a growing demand that operators should focus on self-regulation. There are a couple of actual technical solutions already applied in Social Media to make the public stop searching for and consuming Fake News.
For example, social media companies like Facebook let users notice fake news by themselves. Facebook users in the US and Germany can now flag articles they think are deliberately false, these will then go to third-party fact checkers signed up with the IFCN(International Fact Checking Network). These users check some questionnaires before uploading a post or report a Fake News and tag the suspected stories. These stories then get a disputed tag and a warning appears when a user tries to share these false stories. One of the biggest French newspapers, Le Monde’s fact-checking unit called Les Decodeurs. It’s web extension program Decodex is another example to help users find a way to fact-checking by themselves.
Social Media Companies also revised their algorithms to fight Fake News algorithms. In the sense that what spreads fake news most is its algorithms that make a waterfall effect, First Draft is working with Google and Facebook to explore whether they could incorporate code to stop the spread of fake news. computer code could also be part of the solution. They train program models to identify correct content using posted data from the problematic pages. There are also many non-technical solutions too.
First, we can teach people how to recognize Fake News by themselves. Like Digital Literacy education at school, teach how to discern the contents in online, social media.
Second, economic pressure by the social media platforms to fight fake news could be the solution. To stop the fake news in the first place social media companies like Facebook and Google announced to eliminate the financial incentives. They banned posting Fake News and restrict economic gain by Fake News like ADs. But the disadvantages should be restricted "for the purpose of intentionally hurting democratic values when distributing fake information ".
Third, a nationwide campaign could be the solution for fake news diffusion. There is a case in which such a proposal has been successfully applied in our reality. An NGO, called AVAAZ successfully conducted a project to fight with Fake News during the late European Parliament Election. With 30 members and 80,000 Volunteers, AVAAZ informed politicians, press, and Social Media companies of the current state of Fake News in real time. Also, the organization tried to increase voting to prevent people from losing interest in voting because of Fake News. As a result, Facebook finally banned influential Fake News pages which had more than 2 Billions views. Also, the voting rate was the highest for the last 25 years in the European Parliament Election.
There are a lot of voices that worry about side effects of regulating fake news directly by the government. Particularly, the issue is that it is unclear what criteria are used to judge which news is illegal and false. It is also included in the voice of concern that the freedom of expression can be infringed if the unreasonable "standard" is set, and the freedom of the press can be restricted, and illegal posts such as defamation can be sufficiently regulated by the current law. Thus, the Korean government and the ruling party need to examine the ways to support SNS companies’ self-regulation and nationwide campaign before direct intervention in fake news. For example, Facebook, which has been criticized as a hotbed of fake news circulation, is actively engaged in self-regulation. In particular, they have reduced fake news reach by an average of 80% or more, as a result of working with independent agencies certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)and it expanded to 17 countries.
11. Conclusion and Suggestions for Further Research
We have examined through this study the psychological mechanisms that fake news is produced, consumed and re-diffused. There is no exact statistic based on quantitative research to determine exactly how many fake news is yet to exist. But we were able to find a clear example of fake news, and also closely observe the process in which it was consumed. In particular, we were able to identify how serious the problem of the fake news actually was through our interviews. The interview supports our reasonable doubt that fake news is already prevalent in society. It also makes it clear that people won't be able to distinguish between fake and real news easily. So what do academics have to research about fake news in the future? We have some suggestions for this.
For example, the research on the actual consumption rate of fake news according to age group can be conducted. In fact, according to a survey conducted by the Korea Press Foundation, many people feel that the problem with fake news is getting very serious in Korean society. People also think that fake news is causing extreme social divisions. In addition, it will be possible to study the social structural countermeasures of the fake news problem that will result from the improvement of access to information and the dramatic increase in the amount of information.
References
Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. 2017. "Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election." Journal of Economic Perspective, 31 (2): 232
Wansoo Lee. 2018. What is Fake News? - A Multidimensional Discussion of Fake News Concepts and Scopes -, Journal of Media and Defamation Law, Dec 4: pp.178~180.
Korea Press Foundation. (2019). What is the most essential element in the news?
Korea Press Foundation. (2017). The degree of consent to comments on the phenomenon in the form of false news?
Blumler, J. G., & Katz, E. (1974). The uses of mass communications: Current perspectives on gratifications research(Vol. 1974). Sage Publications, Inc.
Fontaine, R. G., & Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Palo Alto.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of general psychology, 2(2), 175-220.
Whiting, A., & Williams, D. (2013). Why people use social media: a uses and gratifications approach. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 16(4), 362-369.
Mike Wendling. (2017, January 30). Solutions that can stop fake news spreading, BBC Trending
양정애(2019) 일반사람들이생각하는'뉴스'와가짜뉴스', 미디어이슈웹진,5:1,p.7,p.10.
가짜뉴스(페이크뉴스) 관련국민의식및현황과시사점(2018.10.10).입소스코리아의이슈리포트제17호
해냈습니다, 우리가유럽을지켜냈습니다! (2019.5.30) Retrieved June 16, 2019, from AVAAZ: https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/kr/eu_elections_reportback_may_2019
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