What is Fake News, statistics related to it, tools to discover fake news,examples across countries, India scenario in the context of fake news, criticism of these tools and the effect of fake news on POTUS elections.

1. Seminar on
“FAKE NEWS”
CHETAN THATHOO
ENGLISH JOURNALISM
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MASS
COMMUNICATION

2. Fake news(Definition by Paul Chadwick)
Context Problem statement
Fake news means fictions deliberately fabricated and presented as non-fiction with the intent to
mislead recipients into treating fiction as fact or into doubting verifiable fact.
● “Fictions” is meant to distinguish fake news from items which have a kernel of truth but are
exaggerated, out of proportion, in the cliche “sensationalised”.
● “Fabricated” emphasises the made-up, manufactured aspect of fake news.
● “Deliberately” and “intent” draw attention to how fake news is purposeful, and help to show it
is distinct from the flawed journalism that can result from haste, carelessness, partiality,
conflicts of interest or the successful spin of others.

3. Fake news(Definition by Paul Chadwick)
Context Problem statement
Fake news means fictions deliberately fabricated and presented as non-fiction with the
intent to mislead recipients into treating fiction as fact or into doubting verifiable fact.
● “Presented as non-fiction” focuses on the premeditation and calculation which often
seem to characterise the originators of fake news, as distinct from the people who
simply spread it unthinkingly.
● “Mislead” indicates seriousness of purpose and distinguishes fake news from, say,
entertainment, pranks or satire.
● “Treating fiction as fact” and “doubting verifiable fact” look to consequences. These
seem to be the two main political purposes of those who create fake news.

4. Introduction:
Context Problem statement
● False stories or information that is deliberately created to mislead people into
believing something that is not true.
● “Fake news” is a term that can mean different things, depending on the
context. News satire is often called fake news as are parodies such as the
“Saturday Night Live” or the homegrown “Faking News”.
● Fake news often employs eye-catching headlines or entirely fabricated news
stories to increase readership, online sharing and Internet click revenue.
● Fake news looks professional.

5. How are they spread?
Context Problem statement
● Fake news can be spread via multiple mediums.
● Pulitzer who is considered the benchmaek in Journalism practiced Yellow
Journalism in print form which can be considered as a form of fake news.
● Television has been a favourite tool of certain countries to spread lies and this
form of fake news has been the most damaging. A case in point would be the
story of WMDs propagated by CNN that led to USA ultimately attacking Iraq, but,
the story ultimately turned out to be a hoax.
● Digital has blurred the lines between what is real and what is not. Easy access,
great monetization options and a huge audience has led to a situation where
anybody can cook up a story and reach a wide audience too.

6. Fake news and POTUS elections
Context Problem statement
● The term “Fake News” broke into limelight in 2016 when
American President-elect Donald Trump used it in
reference to CNN.
● But, the practical usage in the POTUS election could be
traced back to when Donald Trump suggested that Ted
Cruz’s father knew the killers of JFK.

7. Fake news and POTUS elections
Context Problem statement
● POTUS elections were significant as they highlighted how
social media could be utilized to push such stories and on
such a large scale.
● These stories were mostly broadcasted via social media
especially Facebook in the form of hyperbolic articles that
favored a a particular candidate, but, was later on,
emulated by other candidates as well.

8. In terms of statistics,
here is the interactivity
of the American
people with new
media during the
elections.

9. More than 62% of
american adults
consume their news
via social media.

10. FACEBOOK was
the primary
source
responsible for
most of fake
news.

11. Most stories favoured Trump over
Clinton.
To put it in perspective, the study found
that in the said databse, there were 115
pro-Trump shared on Facebook, a total
of 30 million times against 41 pro-
Clinton fake stories that were shared on
Facebook, a total of 7.6 million times.

12. The traffic on such fake news websites
was enormous.
The websites included in the study had
over half the articles fake and, still they
registered over 159 million hits.This is
evident because most of the people on
Facebook are passive news readers.

13. The term
“Fake news”
received
sudden
traction and
kept trending
for the rest of
2016.

14. Reasons for the prominence of this trend
● One of the prominent reason has been the erosion of trust in public Institutions.
● With tools like Photoshop, After-Effects and availability of tools online to learn
these softwares, it has become easier to forge information.
● Another reason would be the bombardment of people with too much information
too soon and very little attention span that has made people susceptible to
“clickbait”.
● One of the major reason would be null distribution costs. Earlier, it used to cost a
lot to set up and spread media, but, with the advent of social media, anyone can be
a dispenser of information.

15. Reasons for the prominence of this trend
● The American election was one of the highly debated and polarised event
globally which became an ideal ground for people to earn monetary
profits from it.
● Easy monetization options like Google Adsense helped sustain this trend
monetarily and pumped in more and more superficial information into the
system.
● Another reason would be more psychological called “Confirmation Bias”.
This is the ability of one’s mind to interpret new evidence as a
confirmation of one’s belief. The ideological drift was a major contributer
to it.

16. Indian Case
● Fake news in Indian context too has been very dynamic and this
main promoter of Fake news in India is believed to be WhatsApp.
● Interestingly, this could be because Internet penetration is
increasing in India, but, these new users are still not news literate
in WhatsApp’s largest market in the world.
● Stiff competition from Telegram and privacy issues forced it to
introduce End-to-End encryption which makes it even more
difficult to flag and find Fake News.

17. Indian Case
● Twitter seems to be another casualty where Fake news
seems to be common and has resulted in widespread
bickering across the platform.
● Indian case is also, important because it has given us
an insight into a country that was suddenly hit by global
media and brands and is still, yet to hit the balance
between realizing fake news and truth.

18. Indian Case
● One of the prominent
cases of fake news was
the presence of a tracking
chip in the new Rs. 2000
note. This was covered
even by the MSM, but,
eventually turned out to
be a lie.

19. Indian Case
● In an another instance, a
video of a girl resembling
Gurmehar Kaur was
going viral on social
media which too, later on
turned out to be a hoax.

20. Indian Case
● Then, there were
instances sof fake
news where it was
reported that the first
day earnings of
“Bahubaali 2” were
going to be donated
to Indian Army.

21. Indian Case(Exception)
● But, an interesting case
happened in Indian context
too wherein the Govt.
launched a scheme where
people could donate
money to the Army, but,
everyone believed it to be
fake news, but, it ultimately
came out to be as true.

22. Indian Case(Exception)
● An Indian magazine
apologized when it
was revealed by an
Indian fact checking
site that what they
had posted was fake.

23. Case studies across different nations(France)
● The French election too was embroiled in controversy as Russia was, again
accused of sabotaging French elections.
● French fake news sites are, generally, independent with some having the
sole of earning money. A case in point was the circulation of news that the
victims in Bataclan massacre were mutilated which was denied by the
Parliamentary inquiry commission.
● Emanuel Macron was also a victim of fake news when it was accused that he
had extra-marital gay encounters which forced him to come out and deny
these allegations.

24. Case studies across different nations(Germany)
● Russian and German media covered the fake news over
reports that a 13-year-old girl of Russian origin, had been
raped in Berlin by refugees from the Middle East.
● Even the BfV, the German Intelligence accuses FSB of
using fake media to influence the upcoming German
elections.

25. Case studies(Miscellaneous)
● Not only mainstream media
corporations, even United Nations
contributed to fake news in one
instance.
● During the last stages of siege of
Aleppo, UN reported that Syrian
forces had killed 82 civilians which
was carried by every MSM and
added more tension to the already
worse condition. This however,
later turned out to be fake news.

26. Case studies (Miscellaneous)
● Not only are elections the
casualty of this phenomenon, but,
it is also used by terrorist
organisations like IS to spread
their propaganda.
● Spreading doctored videos and
fake news stories on Telegram
that provides encryption has led
to terrorist attacks all across the
world.

27. Tools to check the veracity of fake news
● FACT CHECKING SITES:
○ These websites do the work of an overviewer and because of their
reputation are assigned this task. These websites check via means of
reputed sources whether a news item that was flagged was true or not.
○ Websites like Snopes, politifact are examples of global fact checking
websites and have over 2.5 million unique visitors every month.
○ Its Indian counterpart would be AltNews, FactChecker,
SMHOAXSLAYER etc that have done a great job in flagging news on
various Indian sites.

28. Tools to check the veracity of fake news
● A lot of news corporations also, have used other innovative ways in the
meanwhile to deal with this menace like bots.
○ For example, The Times launched a bot that busts the filter bubble.
Filter Bubble is how algorithms only suggest a particular type of
news feed to a person based on his previous searches.
● Continuing wih that, BBC too launched a Brexit focused bot and a
section called “Reality Check” that debunks myths and provides
material for research.

29. Tools to check the veracity of fake news
● Many Universities like Stony Brook University have come up with
courses for News Literacy wherein they teach high school students how
to identify fake news stories, propaganda etc.
● Finland and 11 other EU countries are currently working on a project
that will lead to the establishment of an Institute in Helsinki that will deal
with the problem of hybrid warfare.
● This will be a huge boost as it will not only work towards eradicating
fake news, but, also, help in making sure that it acts as a nodal
authority in case of a global hybrid attack.

30. Tools to check the veracity of fake news
● A novel way is being put into action at Spiegel Gruppe wherein
the publishing group has implemented fake news detection in its
editorial workflow.
● This whole idea is called ‘dokumentation’ and has different
desks wherein each desk is headed by a Ph.D and thus,
provides consultation to journalists.
● These desks of over 70 fact checkers add over 60,000 articles
per week which serves as an authority to check the authenticity
of related data or any other events.

31. Automated Tools to check the veracity of fake
news
● Last, but, not the least, many educational institutes like
MIT and Indiana University have come up with many
tools to check fake news. Many of them are The Trust
Project, Rumour Lens, FactMinder etc
● These automated tools are based on very deep learning
of human language and could be used on very large
datasets to give the desired results.

32. Hoaxy ● Hoaxy, visualizes the claims in
the news and fact checks those
claims that spread online
through social networks.
● Hoaxy provides users a
physical map of how each
unverified article has spread,
and provides related links to
fact-checking websites,
allowing users to draw their
own conclusions.

33. FactMata
● Factmata is built upon cutting-
edge academic research in
natural language processing
and information retrieval.
● This is a product in the making
that engages people in the
process of correcting news
articles, identifying fallible
claims, and supporting more
accurate information on the
web.

34. Rumourgauge
● Motivated by this, we are creating
computational models of false and
true information on Twitter to
investigate the nature of rumors
surrounding real-world events.
● The models have been trained and
evaluated on several real-world
events, such as the 2013 Boston
Marathon bombings, the 2014
Ferguson riots, and the Ebola
epidemic, with promising results

35. IBM’s Watson
● IBM Watson’s Angles app, is
also an interesting
development that checks
stories against a trove of 55
million previously published
news articles.
● It assembles basic facts
relevant to the topic at hand
and offers context, a timeline
and key quotes that are
germane to the topic at hand.

36. Criticism of these Fact Checking Tools
● These fact checking tools undoubtedly help us
differentiate real news from fake news, but, they do
raise some eyebrows.
● In the case of Facebook(in Germany and USA) which in
an attempt to weed out fake news brought in
IFCN(CONNECT!V in Germany), a fact-checking
organization led to a lot of concerns like Facebook using
the media to kill stories that don’t fit their or the
organisation’s agenda.

37. Criticism of these Fact Checking Tools
● Add to that, these Fact-Checking organizations are
funded by very rich Industrialists that can also use these
organizations to push their agenda.
● Critics have pointed out that rather than using these
tools, one should trust the human instinct and let one be
the decision maker of what is right and what is wrong.

38. Post Truth
● The word gained so much importance in the aftermath of POTUS
elections that it was named the “Word of the year” by Oxford Dictionary.
● Relates to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in
shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
● This concept is very relevant in American scenario with debates on
topics like Global Warming going on, but, not much has been
researched in the Indian context.

39. Alternative facts
● During his press briefings, Sean Spicer accussed the media of deliberately
trying to underestimate the size of crowd at the Trump’s inaugural
ceremony.
● When Spicer couldn’t corroborate the data, Kellyane Conway defended him
by saying that he was talking about “alternative facts”.
● The term was not accepted by “The Guardian” whereas far-right website
“Breitbart” accepted its use. The critic panned her for the use of the word
blatantly calling “alternative facts” just lies.
● Later in the week, she discussed "alternative facts", substituting the
phrases "alternative information" and "incomplete information".

40. Alternative facts
● Continuing with the previous trends, Alternative Facts too saw an upward
trend on Google Search.

41. Conclusion
● The concept of Fake News is very interesting, yet, it has
been prevalent since, a long time. But, as we have
done before and should keep doing it further after is
that we should let ourselves be the judge rather than
allowing machines to think for us.
● Rest assured, objectivity never loses its customers.