Vigilance and a willingness to engage by citizens and consumers of media is the best counter to the scourge of fake news, according to a new report by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR).
Fake News: A New Challenge to Human Rights? – authored by IRR staffers Terence Corrigan and Nicholas Lorimer – acknowledges that while fake news poses a threat to free societies, poisoning information environments, distorting perceptions of what is true and false, and corroding social and political interactions, combating it can ‘introduce a raft of dangers to free societies too’.
Corrigan and Lorimer note that possible solutions to fake news include legislation to punish the purveyors of it, fact checking, and the use of algorithms to identify it. They caution, however, that these measures have their weaknesses, not least because they can become subject to their own brand of censoriousness and push their own narratives.
The study comes out in favour of media literacy and proper engagement by citizens with the media content they consume.
In a statement yesterday, the authors said: ‘Just as it is often said that a society will get the standard of governance it deserves, so it is with media. This is a tough, uncertain business, but with the stakes as high as they are, it is a challenge that democratic societies dare not fail to rise to’.
Surveying the history of the idea of fake news, the report argues that while fake news came to prominence in the 2016 American presidential campaign and the election of Donald Trump, it has a much longer pedigree.
Fake news is in essence material that attempts to communicate false or deliberately distorted information in pursuit of a narrative and typically a political or social goal.
The report notes that one can go back to the Roman Empire or the Middle Ages for examples of this. The anti-Semitic ‘blood libel’ – that Jews used the blood of Christians for their rituals – can be traced to an accusation made in England in 1144. This fakery, which still persists in some quarters today, visited untold misery on Jews for generations, with the last known trial on this charge having been in 1911 in Russia.
It points out that, today, the advent of cheap and user-friendly communication technology has given the phenomenon of fake news a fearful reach.
The study looks at a number of case studies of fake news in recent years: the conspiracies around COVID-19, the ‘Facebook Genocide’ of the Rohingya, and the viral video of the ‘confrontation’ between a student at Covington Catholic High School, Nicholas Sandmann, and a Native American activist in early 2019.
According to the IRR’s statement: ‘Each of these illustrates the dangers of fake news and the narratives they build. They have aggravated social fault lines, diverted societal conversations, complicated already complex issues (not least handling the COVID outbreak) and, in its most extreme manifestations, led to or justified murder. This is a matter of human rights in their most basic sense.
‘This is a real danger, and one that is only likely to grow ever greater in societies that increasingly engage with themselves digitally.’