Rise of misinformation (International)

The spread of misinformation is as old as recorded history. For example, around 44 BCE, the Roman emperor Octavian ran a smear campaign against the Roman politician and general Mark Anthony by printing derogatory comments about him on Roman coins. However, the opportunity to spread misinformation to a larger audience did not appear until 1450 with the invention of the printing press, and it exploded with the introduction of the Internet, smart devices, and social media. Misinformation such as fake news is rampant in the twenty-first century, influencing everything from people’s opinions to presidential elections.

Background

Early newspapers attempted to increase their readership by publishing sensational stories. The first large-scale hoax occurred in 1835, when the New York Sun published six stories about the discovery of life on the moon. These fictious accounts claimed to be based on the work of astronomer Sir John Herschel, duping many readers. The articles included illustrations of humanoid bat-like creatures and bearded blue unicorns.

In 1917, during World War I, the British newspapers The Times and The Daily Mail both ran a story claiming that the shortage of fat in Germany was so severe that the Germans were boiling down their own deceased soldiers for fat, bone meal, and pig food. The sensationalized story later caused British citizens to be reluctant to believe the reports of the mass murder of Jews and others during World War II.

In fact, propaganda and misinformation were commonly used, and continue to be used, during wars and conflicts. During World War II, the Nazis created the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels, as a vehicle to spread the hatred of Jews. Jews were depicted as being subhuman and obsessed with money and dangerous enemies of the German Reich. In 1965, Indonesia’s military staged a coup, executing six high-ranking generals and placing General Suharto in charge. Suharto blamed the assassinations on communists and made wildly inaccurate and false claims to disparage them. In 2010, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram was caught doctoring a photo of then-President Hosni Mubarak to place him at the front of a group of world leaders meeting for peace talks. In the original photo, he is behind several other heads of state and is not the focus of the shot.

Overview

The mediums to spread information grew over the twentieth century with the introduction of film, radio, and television. Although tabloids such as The Sun in Britain and The National Inquirer in the United States clearly served to entertain with outrageous stories, most people generally trusted what they saw on the nightly news and read in reputable newspapers into the 2000s. However, how people understand and discern truth from fiction changed dramatically during the first two decades of the century as the use of the Internet exploded and social media platforms appeared on the scene.

About 6.3 billion people—roughly two-thirds of the world’s population—were connected to the Internet in 2023. Internet use grew by 5.6 billion between 2000 and 2023. During the time, Facebook amassed nearly three billion users and seven million advertisers and became the most influential social media platform worldwide, although some countries, including Iran, Russia, and China, had banned it. YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram each had more than two billion users. TikTok had more than one billion users; Reddit had more than four hundred million users; and Twitter had roughly two hundred fifty million. Not only did the audience for misinformation expand exponentially, but also the speed at which misinformation could be spread skyrocketed.

During the ongoing Syrian civil war, both sides used social media to spread so much misinformation that citizens had little way to separate truth from lies. When Syrian President Bashar Assad was accused by human rights groups of extrajudicial executions, he called it fake news. Similarly, he suggested that news of eighty-nine civilians killed in a chemical attack was fabricated and false, despite evidence to the contrary. In 2015, a Syrian news anchor used a scene from a Russian video game to make the false claim that Russia was supporting Syria with troops on the ground.

In countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, access to social media has been controlled to varying degrees. News agencies are state-run and only produce news that the government approves of, which is often more propaganda than news. Russia became a hub of disinformation beginning in 2014 with the creation of the Internet Research Agency. Workers at “troll farms” were paid to post to social media, filling Facebook and Twitter feeds with false stories, most of which were in favor of then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump or critical of then-candidate Hillary Clinton.

Trump posted almost obsessively to Twitter, reaching millions of people. Often his tweets were incendiary or misleading. His political rallies, drawing thousands, were equally detached from the truth. Ironically, he made the term “fake news” highly popular among his supporters and used it to refer to any news that he did not like. Russia replaced its workers with computer bots that could produce content in massive volumes. Suddenly, the United States was literally flooded with more misinformation than actual news. People’s trust in truth faded, with opposing sides of the political spectrum mostly accepting only what aligned with their belief systems.

Twitter eventually discovered that Trump’s tweet feed included hate speech and banned his account. For its part, Facebook has been highly criticized for amplifying the role of misinformation in the 2016 election. In addition, Cambridge Analytics illegally obtained personal data on eighty-seven million Facebook users and coordinated with Trump’s campaign manager Steve Bannon to target the accounts with memes and messages that were either pro-Trump or anti-Clinton.

The spread of misinformation continues to rise and is used around the world to push a particular agenda. Evidence suggests that misinformation campaigns may have influenced Britain’s vote to leave the European Union (Brexit) and the 2016 presidential election in the Philippines. In 2017, the Kenyan elections were marred by fake news, and in France and Germany, up to 25 percent of news stories were misleading or false prior to the general elections. In 2023, the war between Russia and Ukraine was marked by large misinformation campaigns by both sides.

Although some governments and the United Nations (UN) have begun to consider ways to stem the use of misinformation as a tool to increase social conflict or hatred, few restrictions are in place. Most experts believe that fake news is here to stay.

Bibliography

“A Brief History of Fake News.” Center for Information Technology & Society, www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/brief-history. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Granados, Nelson. “Media Trends: Why Misinformation Is Here to Stay.” Forbes, 12 Jan. 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/nelsongranados/2023/01/12/media-trends-why-misinformation-is-here-to-stay/?sh=1176f288298d. Accessed 18 Mar. 2023.

Madrid, Pamela. “USC Study Reveals the Key Reason Why Fake News Spreads on Social Media.” USC News, 17 Jan. 2023, news.usc.edu/204782/usc-study-reveals-the-key-reason-why-fake-news-spreads-on-social-media/. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Posetti, Julie, and Alice Matthews. “A Short Guide to the History of ‘Fake News’ and Disinformation.” International Center for Journalists, www.icfj.org/sites/default/files/2018-07/A%20Short%20Guide%20to%20History%20of%20Fake%20News%20and%20Disinformation‗ICFJ%20Final.pdf. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Sadiq, Muhammed T., and Saji K. Mathew. “The Disaster of Misinformation: A Review of Research in Social Media.” International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, 2022, vol. 13, pp. 271–285.

“The Rise and Rise of Fake News.” BBC News, 6 Nov. 2016, www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37846860. Accessed 18 June 2023.