THE most important thing we have to remember about FAKE NEWS is that it IS REAL. After all, disinformation, spin, and twisting of facts have been around forever. In the past, local journalists would call it kuryente or false leads that would take them nowhere to their great embarrassment.
What makes fake news so different today? In an article in BBC Trending, Mike Wendling recounts that in the mid-2016’s “Buzzfeed’s media editor, Craig Silverman, noticed a funny stream of made-up stories that seemed to originate from one small Eastern European town.”
That town was Veles in Macedonia, where Silverman and a colleague “identified at least 140 fake news web sites which were pulling in huge numbers on Facebook. The young people in Veles may or not have much interest in American politics, but because of the money to be made via Facebook advertising, they wanted their fiction to travel widely on social media.
And thus, began the modern version of fake news, which because of the Internet make “the speed at which it is spread and the magnitude of its influence…in a different category.”
It can, says Michael Burke in a PR News online article, “reshape public opinion, influence elections, and even lead to societal instability.”
But will it be possible to spot the difference between facts, opinion, speculation, and outright fiction?
Yes, it is, says Burke in his article “How a Story Spreads Can Help PR Pros Spot Fake News.”
He believes “it is possible to spot fake news early because of patterns in the way it spreads, according to researchers. Just as cancer cells spread in specific ways, fake news propagates differently on social networks than real news. The longer fake news propagates, the more damage it can do.”
How to do it? By understanding “how fake news goes viral we can better determine why it goes viral and how it can be spotted early.”
Romeo Quintana, principal consultant of Arkintan Consulting agrees. “Finding systematic and reliable approaches to identifying makers of fake news should prove invaluable in enhancing media literacy among PR professionals and the broader media consuming public,” he says.
Burke, who is director of science and technology at MSR Communications and an adjunct instructor of digital marketing a UC Davis, takes on a new media route in spotting fake news, which is just as well as these are the methods used to spread it.
He cites the authors of “Fake News Propagates Differently Even at Early Stages of Spreading” who, through their research, advocate graph analytics to “identify layers or degrees of separation between the creator of news and its re-poster.” What can be considered a third layer, for example, would be someone “who shared an article a previous user shared, who in turn, shared the article based on an original post.”
The study, Burke says, found significant differences in the propagation of fake news within hours of its initial posting. But apart from the news story’s content, author, and publication, here are some things he says PR pros should look out for in spotting fake news:
Layers. “The number of layers in fake news is typically larger than that of real news, and the chain of the people sharing the news is longer,” Burke says.
Truth tip: “If you come across news on a social channel that has been passed on to you by a series of people, as opposed to maybe the just one trusted person who found the article, you may want to scrutinize it for authenticity.”
“This may not be easy to do on Twitter, so you’ll probably want to do a social analytics tool like Meltwater to do the heavy thing.”
Down the line. Burke adds that in spreading fake news, “the study found that people down the line who share the article play a much larger role in propagating the news than the original poster.”
Truth tip: “If an article has gone viral, but the masses of people sharing the article are several steps removed from the original poster, it may also be a sign that you need to dig it a bit before presenting the content to an executive, or basing a decision on it.”
Repostings. With fake news, “the number of repostings based on the first post is much smaller than the number of repostings by individuals down the chain,” says Burke. “By contrast, with real with real news, repostings stem directly from the original source.”
Truth tip: Tap into your intuition and experience in spotting fake news. But even the most seasoned PR pros may fall into this trap. When in doubt, consider these tips and do some good old fact-checking yourself.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the United Kingdom-based International Public Relations Association (Ipra), the world’s premier association for senior professionals around the world. Millie Dizon, the senior vice president for Marketing and Communications of SM, is the former local chairman.
We are devoting a special column each month to answer the reader’s questions about public relations. Please send your comments and questions to askipraphil@gmail.com.