‘Fake news is an epidemic’

The scale of the fake news problem is so vast that the only solution is for everyone to be on the lookout for scammers in relation to all online information, somewhat like fraud.

This is the conclusion British journalist Alan Rusbridger draws in his latest piece for Prospect magazine. Titled ‘Fake news is an epidemic that’s out of control -- and we all need to be inoculated’, Rusbridger’s article reveals that according to one survey, almost two-thirds of people “can no longer tell the difference between good journalism and falsehood. Around the same are finding it harder to tell if a piece of news was produced by a respected news organisation.”Rusbridger details his experience meeting 19-year-olds starting university. They tell him that most of them get their news from social media: Instagram, Reddit, TikTok.

Rusbridger says his “follow up was to ask where did the news come from before it was published on social media? This caused a certain amount of confusion: it seemed to be a novel thought. I prompted them to consider whether Instagram itself employed any reporters -- and, if not, might the news have originated somewhere else?”

He writes that “only three out of a group of nearly 20 could name the origin of a piece of news they’d recently consumed on social media.”

The article continues that not one of the students had paid for news or would pay for news and just one or two had looked at BBC and almost all of them could not say whether Daily Mail or Mirror were right-wing or left-wing. “They had no idea who owned a single newspaper, though one or two had heard of an abstract figure called Rupert Murdoch. They were not markedly interested in questioning why anyone would want to own a newspaper, or who determined what ‘news’ was.”

On facts, says Rusbridger, the 190-year-olds were “sceptical as to whether there were even such things as facts. “Whose facts?” they wanted to know. After some discussion, there was some consensus that it would be difficult to get to grips with the climate crisis if we couldn’t agree that there was one.

I’ve no wish to be at all disobliging about these youngsters, who were tremendously smart, likeable, and curious. Most of them sort of kept abreast with some news, though two said they had zero interest in current affairs. But at no point had they been encouraged to be critical, sceptical or even especially inquiring about what they were being told about the world around them. The role of the national press in informing, or shaping, public opinion seemed a genuinely unfamiliar concept.”

Rusbridger comes to his main question: “Never mind the three million falling for online fraudsters, where’s the campaign of information to help the 20+ million of us who are struggling to negotiate their way through a digital thicket of disinformation, trolls, bias, propaganda, PR, disguised advertising, churnalism, lies, deep fakes, AI-generated stuff, hallucinations and conspiracy wing nuts? With a bit of truth somewhere in the mix.”

He says that regulation is probably not the only answer: “The first reaction to the bewildering revolution of information chaos we’re being battered by is usually a call for more regulation. Regulation surely has a role—but which regulator on the planet could stay on top of the 4.75bn items shared by Facebook users every day? Or the 500m on Twitter/X? Or the 95m on Instagram? Or the 35m on TikTok, or the one million on Reddit?”

And so he concludes that the scale of the problem is so unimaginably vast that the “only solution is for each and every one of us to be on the lookout for scammers in relation to all online information -- a bit like fraud.”

In his article, Rusbridger says that he would have liked to ask the students to think more deeply about the origins of information: “the difference between news and comment and how to spot it; to question who owns and gatekeeps the news -- and why. To be able to differentiate between a good source and a dodgy one. To be able to tell the difference between a real picture and a fake one. To have some sense of the political motivation, if any, lying behind words. Were professional journalists involved? Or other people who are genuinely expert in a subject? How would they spot and assess a piece of content generated by a computer, or a deepfake image? How do conspiracy theories start? How do you nail one?”

The article also says that “a generation of information innocents represents a huge vulnerability” and that intelligence agencies are aware of the threat that disinformation can pose.

He continues to talk about how Media Studies, a course that “used to be considered a joke course”, while asking whether “some kind of compulsory grounding in media literacy” is becoming an urgent need in the national curriculum.

Other countries are already on it, says the article: “The Germans are ahead of us -- with a No Education without Media movement. Media literacy is part of the core curriculum in Denmark (for 16–19-year-olds) and Sweden and is being taken seriously by Unesco. A DCMS-funded UK pilot, the News Literacy Trust, has found that only 2 per cent of children have the skills they need to identity misinformation, and that half of teachers believe that children are not equipped to identity fake news.”

The solution? Rusbridger concludes: “by all means tackle the online scammers. But the virus of misinformation is now an epidemic. And every single one of us needs a form of inoculation.”