What will happen in 2017 hoax

While the fire was still raging, news outlets, including the BBC, reported a baby was saved after being thrown from the 10th floor, but nobody ever came forward to say their infant was caught or that they caught a baby. In October a BBC investigation suggested that the dramatic rescue probably never happened. When Storm Harvey displaced thousands in Texas, US, in August, a Canadian imam had to point out he had never been to the state after he was accused of closing his mosque's doors to Christian victims in a fake story been shared more than , times.

During Hurricane Irma the White House fell for a fake video claiming to be Miami Airport , a doctored forecast was shared almost 40, times, and a video of the wrong storm was viewed almost 28 millions times on Facebook. Inaccurate advice that valuables be stored in dishwashers was also widely shared. You might also like. Then in September a girl called Frida Sofia caught the attention of much of Mexico after she was trapped in a deadly earthquake. But it seems Frida never existed and instead was the fictional product of collective hope in the face of disaster.

And after a deadly earthquake struck the Iran-Iraq border in November, a video of a young boy securing food for his friend was widely shared, but the video was not filmed in the aftermath of the earthquake. While will probably see more fake news circulating around the big stories, there are efforts to try and limit its impact. Facebook is attempting to alert users to potential misinformation by displaying fact-checked articles next to disputed stories.

And Twitter expanded its rules in early December as to what is classed as hateful or harmful behaviour on the platform. However, alerting users to fake content is not easy, with Twitter banning a crowd-sourced bot designed to warn people about fake accounts. The bot was suspended in December following a large number of "spam complaints". BBC to help students identify 'fake news'.

How Russian bots appear in your timeline. Facebook ditches fake news warning flag. Fake news worries 'are growing'. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

Terror Attacks. What is fake news? Completely false information, photos or videos purposefully created and spread to confuse or misinform Information, photos or videos manipulated to deceive - or old photographs shared as new Satire or parody which means no harm but can fool people. BuzzFeed News identified more than pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

An analysis by BuzzFeed News found there is a very limited appetite for completely fake news in British politics, thanks to our highly partisan newspapers.

Interesting historical parallel that sheds light on how fake news pandemics spread by Joshua Zeitz. A fascinating study of how truth is passed on in other areas apart from media, such as science is How Facts Travel edited by Peter Hewlett and Mary Morgan. The sudden uptick in subscriptions for mainstream media outlets has got to be a good thing, even if it amounts to compensating for a fraction of the losses from newsrooms since the hay days of the s. Is this before, after or during an already insane workload?

Especially not when global newsrooms are dominated by the kind of war-mongering, eat-the-poor ilk of Rupert Murdoch.

Sadly, the days of bottom-up influence from crusading journalists appears to be over, outsourced to embattled volunteers such as Wikileaks and Snowden. Perhaps the London School of Economics might profit society better by — hold on, profiting society is still what economics is about, right? The US right wing comprises rational conservatives, cynical Republicans, white nationalists, and the religiously anti-intellectual. Search for:. Charlie Beckett March 11th, About the author Charlie Beckett.

Posted In: Director's Commentary Featured. Pingback: How you could implement, not fight the development of journalism. Pingback: How Fake News hurts…….. Related Posts Director's Commentary. Twitter: Dead or Alive? May 2nd, Director's Commentary. AI Invest: New strategies for news February 24th, It seems unlikely that government can play a meaningful role as this referee.

We are too polarized. Too many Americans will live in political and social subcultures that will champion false information and encourage use of sites that present such false information. There were also those among these expert respondents who said inequities, perceived and real, are at the root of much of the misinformation being produced.

It is impossible to make the information environment a rational, disinterested space; it will always be susceptible to pressure. People will continue to cosset their own cognitive biases. When there is value in misinformation, it will rule. Big political players have just learned how to play this game.

The current [information] models are driven by clickbait, and that is not the foundation of a sustainable economic model. There is too much incentive to spread disinformation, fake news, malware and the rest. Governments and organizations are major actors in this space. As long as these incentives exist, actors will find a way to exploit them. These benefits are not amenable to technological resolution as they are social, political and cultural in nature.

Solving this problem will require larger changes in society. A number of respondents mentioned market capitalism as a primary obstacle to improving the information environment. The information that will be disseminated will be biased, based on monetary interests.

They eschew accountability for the impact of their inventions on society and have not developed any of the principles or practices that can deal with the complex issues. They are like biomedical or nuclear technology firms absent any ethics rules or ethics training or philosophy.

It would be wonderful to believe otherwise, and I hope that other commentators will be able to convince me otherwise. Conflict sells, especially to the opposition party, therefore the opposition news agency will be incentivized to push a narrative and agenda. Any safeguards will appear as a way to further control narrative and propagandize the population. They cited several reasons:. A share of respondents said a lack of commonly shared knowledge leads many in society to doubt the reliability of everything, causing them to simply drop out of civic participation, depleting the number of active and informed citizens.

The success of Donald Trump will be a flaming signal that this strategy works, alongside the variety of technologies now in development and early deployment that can exacerbate this problem. Philip J. These are the main causes of the deterioration of a public domain of shared facts as the basis for discourse and political debate.

These people will drop out of the normal flow of information. Jamais Cascio. What is truth? What is a fact? Who gets to decide? Each can have real facts, but it is the facts that are gathered that matter in coming to a conclusion; who will determine what facts will be considered or what is even considered a fact. Some respondents predicted that a larger digital divide will form. Those who pursue more-accurate information and rely on better-informed sources will separate from those who are not selective enough or who do not invest either the time or the money in doing so.

Anonymous respondent. This will use a combination of organizational and technological tools but above all, will require a sharpened sense of good judgment and access to diverse, including rivalrous, sources.

Outside this, chaos will reign. However, when consumers are not directly paying for such accuracy, it will certainly mean a greater degree of misinformation in the public sphere. That means the continuing bifurcation of haves and have-nots, when it comes to trusted news and information.

Many who see little hope for improvement of the information environment said technology will not save society from distortions, half-truths, lies and weaponized narratives. In the arms race between those who want to falsify information and those who want to produce accurate information, the former will always have an advantage.

David Conrad. Paul N. Many of those who expect no improvement of the information environment said those who wish to spread misinformation are highly motivated to use innovative tricks to stay ahead of the methods meant to stop them. They said certain actors in government, business and other individuals with propaganda agendas are highly driven to make technology work in their favor in the spread of misinformation, and there will continue to be more of them.

There are a lot of rich and unethical people, politicians, non-state actors and state actors who are strongly incentivized to get fake information out there to serve their selfish purposes. Jason Hong. Scott Spangler , principal data scientist at IBM Watson Health, said technologies now exist that make fake information almost impossible to discern and flag, filter or block. Lastly, the incentives are all wrong. Those wanting to spread misinformation will always be able to find ways to circumvent whatever controls are put in place.

Some respondents expect a dramatic rise in the manipulation of the information environment by nation-states, by individual political actors and by groups wishing to spread propaganda. Their purpose is to raise fears that serve their agendas, create or deepen silos and echo chambers, divide people and set them upon each other, and paralyze or confuse public understanding of the political, social and economic landscape.

Anonymous project leader for a science institute. This has been referred to as the weaponization of public narratives. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter appear to be prime battlegrounds.

Bots are often employed, and AI is expected to be implemented heavily in the information wars to magnify the speed and impact of messaging. Messages can now be tailored with devastating accuracy. Furthermore, information is a source of power and thus a source of contemporary warfare. An emeritus professor of communication for a U. It is being replaced by social media, where there are few if any moral or ethical guidelines or constraints on the performance of informational roles.

The existence of clickbait sites make it easy for conspiracy theories to be rapidly spread by people who do not bother to read entire articles, nor look for trusted sources.

Given that there is freedom of speech, I wonder how the situation can ever improve. Most users just read the headline, comment and share without digesting the entire article or thinking critically about its content if they read it at all.

The rise of new and highly varied voices with differing agendas and motivations might generally be considered to be a good thing. But some of these experts said the recent major successes by misinformation manipulators have created a threatening environment in which many in the public are encouraging platform providers and governments to expand surveillance.

Some of these experts expect that such systems will act to identify perceived misbehaviors and label, block, filter or remove some online content and even ban some posters from further posting.

Retired professor. This will end up being a censored information reality. A distinguished professor emeritus of political science at a U.

Censorship will be rejected. But because the internet cannot be regulated free speech will continue to dominate, meaning the information environment will not improve. But another share of respondents said that is precisely why authenticated identities — which are already operating in some places, including China — will become a larger part of information systems. A professor at a major U. In the United States, corporate filtering of information will impose the views of the economic elite.

Several other respondents also cited this as a major flaw of this potential remedy. They argued against it for several reasons, including the fact that it enables even broader government and corporate surveillance and control over more of the public. Lying is a powerful way to do that. To stop that requires high surveillance — which means government oversight which has its own incentives not to tell the truth. Algorithmic solutions to replacing human judgment are subject to hidden bias and will ultimately fail to accomplish this goal.

They will only continue the centralization of power in a small number of companies that control the flow of information. Most of the respondents who gave hopeful answers about the future of truth online said they believe technology will be implemented to improve the information environment. They noted their faith was grounded in history, arguing that humans have always found ways to innovate to overcome problems.

Most of these experts do not expect there will be a perfect system — but they expect advances. A number said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment to embed moral and ethical thinking in the structure of their platforms. They hope this will simultaneously enable the screening of content while still protecting rights such as free speech.

Adam Lella. In fact, the companies are already beginning to take steps in this direction. An associate professor at a U. Adam Lella , senior analyst for marketing insights at comScore Inc. If there is a great amount of pressure from the industry to solve this problem which there is , then methodologies will be developed and progress will be made to help mitigate this issue in the long run.

Many respondents who hope for improvement in the information environment mentioned ways in which new technological solutions might be implemented. In order to reduce the spread of fake news, we must deincentivize it financially. Amber Case. A longtime U. It is profitable to do so, profit made by creating an article that causes enough outrage that advertising money will follow. If an article bursts into collective consciousness and is later proven to be fake, the sites that control or host that content could refuse to distribute advertising revenue to the entity that created or published it.

This would require a system of delayed advertising revenue distribution where ad funds are held until the article is proven as accurate or not. A lot of fake news is created by a few people, and removing their incentive could stop much of the news postings. Market makers will increasingly incorporate security quality as a factor relevant to corporate valuation.

The legal climate for security research will continue to improve, as its connection to national security becomes increasingly obvious. These changes will drive significant corporate and public sector improvements in security during the next decade.

However, non-certified, compelling-but-untrue information will also proliferate. So the new divide will be between the people who want their information to be real vs. A number of respondents believe there will be policy remedies that move beyond whatever technical innovations emerge in the next decade. They offered a range of suggestions, from regulatory reforms applied to the platforms that aid misinformation merchants to legal penalties applied to wrongdoers.

Some think the threat of regulatory reform via government agencies may force the issue of required identities and the abolition of anonymity protections for platform users. The excuse that the scale of posts on social media platforms makes human intervention impossible will not be a defense. Regulatory options may include unbundling social networks like Facebook into smaller entities.

Legal options include reversing the notion that providers of content services over the internet are mere conduits without responsibility for the content.

These regulatory and legal options may not be politically possible to affect within the U.