Re: Turn Me On Dammit Watch Online
Gerarda Zmuda
News organizations are meant to play a critical role in the dissemination of quality, accurate information in society. This has become more challenging with the onslaught of hoaxes, misinformation, and other forms of inaccurate content that flow constantly over digital platforms.
News websites dedicate far more time and resources to propagating questionable and often false claims than they do working to verify and/or debunk viral content and online rumors. Rather than acting as a source of accurate information, online media frequently promote misinformation in an attempt to drive traffic and social engagement.
The above conclusions are the result of several months spent gathering and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data about how news organizations cover unverified claims and work to debunk false online information. This included interviews with journalists and other practitioners, a review of relevant scientific literature, and the analysis of over 1,500 news articles about more than 100 online rumors that circulated in the online press between August and December of 2014.
Many of the trends and findings detailed in the paper reflect poorly on how online media behave. Journalists have always sought out emerging (and often unverified) news. They have always followed-on the reports of other news organizations. But today the bar for what is worth giving attention seems to be much lower. There are also widely used practices in online news that are misleading and confusing to the public. These practices reflect short-term thinking that ultimately fails to deliver the full value of a piece of emerging news.
Within minutes or hours a claim can morph from a lone tweet or badly sourced report to a story repeated by dozens of news websites, generating tens of thousands of shares. Once a certain critical mass is met, repetition has a powerful effect on belief. The rumor becomes true for readers simply by virtue of its ubiquity.
Unfortunately, at the moment, there are few journalists dedicated to checking, adding value to, and, when necessary, debunking viral content and emerging news. Those engaged in this work face the task of trying to counter the dubious content churned out by their colleagues and competitors alike. Debunking programs are scattershot and not currently rooted in effective practices that researchers or others have identified.
Another point of progress for journalists includes prioritizing verification and some kind of value-add to rumors and claims before engaging in propagation. This, in many cases, requires an investment of minutes rather than hours, and it helps push a story forward. The practice will lead to debunking false claims before they take hold in the collective consciousness. It will lead to fewer misinformed readers. It will surface new and important information faster. Most importantly, it will be journalism.
At the same time, digital natives and legacy media alike all seek to build or maintain a trusted brand and be seen as quality sources of information. Chasing clicks by jumping on stories that are too-good-to-check inevitably comes into conflict with the goal of audience loyalty.
Rumors constantly emerge about conflict zones, athletes and celebrities, politicians, election campaigns, government programs, technology companies and their products, mergers and acquisitions, economic indicators, and all manner of topics. They are tweeted, shared, liked, and discussed on Reddit and elsewhere. This information is publicly available and often already being circulated by the time a journalist discovers it.
At its best, rumor is the canary in the coal mine, the antecedent to something big. But it can also be the early indicator of a hoax, a misunderstanding, or a manifestation of the fears, hopes, and biases of a person or group of people.
Ebola virus is now in the UK. PLEASE be very careful especially on public transports. Here are the list of hospitals that have ebola patients. Royal free hospital (north London). Newcastle upon Tyne hospital. Sheffield teaching hospital. royal Liverpool university hospital. Nurses are being infected too. Please BC to ur loved ones.
She said it came from a friend who is a nurse. At the time it was circulating, and at the time of this writing, there were no confirmed Ebola patients in the U.K. But fear of that possibility had birthed a rumor that was now spreading via at least one messaging app, and which could also be found on Facebook.
A 33-year-old Doctors Without Borders physician who recently treated Ebola patients in Guinea was rushed in an ambulance with police escorts from his Harlem home to Bellevue Hospital on Thursday, sources said.4
Our privileged, influential role in networks means we have a responsibility to, for example, tell people in Virginia that there are no confirmed cases of Ebola and to ensure we strongly consider when and how we propagate rumors and unverified information.
Dzieza pointed to an article from the fake news website NationalReport.net that falsely claimed an entire Texas town had been quarantined for Ebola. It quickly racked up over 130,000 likes and shares on Facebook. In research conducted for this paper, we identified five debunking articles from Snopes, The Epoch Times, and local Texas news outlets and discovered that, together, they achieved only a third of the share count of the panic-inducing fake.
The importance and difficulty of addressing the spread of misinformation is arguably matched by a dearth of actionable data and advice for how to manage that task. This report presents quantitative and qualitative data to begin to fill that gap.
I spoke with journalists, skeptics, and others who dedicate at least part of their time to debunking misinformation. This was all done in tandem with a review of the relevant scientific literature written by psychologists and sociologists over the last century about rumors, misinformation, and the challenges inherent in correcting misinformation.
I also worked with data journalist Adam Hooper and research assistant Joscelyn Jurich to create and populate a database of rumors reported in the online press. We used this database, dubbed Emergent, to power the public website Emergent.info, where people could see the rumors we were following and view the related data we were collecting.
The goal was to aggregate data that could offer a picture of how journalists and newsrooms report online rumors and unverified information. We also sought to identify false rumors that were successfully debunked, in the hope of identifying the characteristics of viral debunkings, if such a thing exists. As noted above, we measured the effectiveness of these debunkings using social shares as a metric.
. . . unverified and instrumentally relevant information statements in circulation that arise in contexts of ambiguity, danger, or potential threat and that function to help people make sense and manage risk.16
While theirs is a somewhat clinical definition, it communicates the key aspects of rumors: By their nature, they are unverified, emerge in specific contexts (danger, risk, etc.), and perform a distinct function.
Shibutani said the distinction between news and rumor is that the former is always confirmed, whereas the latter is unconfirmed. (The data presented farther into this paper challenges that distinction.)
False rumors that Hong Kong had been an area infected by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) caused widespread panic there . . . Telephone networks became jammed with people spreading the rumor, which resulted in bank and supermarket runs.26
The above reference to social networks relates to the person-to-person type, rather than Facebook and Twitter. But it reinforces that new digital networks amplify and accelerate a process that has existed as long as we humans have.
Most would characterize the online press as generally self-interested rumor propagators. They spread rumors because they expect to gain traffic or attention. The viral stories analyzed later in this report, including the Florida woman who claimed to have had a third breast implanted, offer little, if any, public or information value beyond being funny or shocking. Press outlets cover and propagate these stories because they attract eyeballs and promote social shares. They typically fit into the category of curiosity rumors.
Both of the above quotes easily apply to journalists. Possessing valued information (scoops or new facts) heightens our status. Being seen as reputable and credible also raises our standing. The former explains why we might be inclined to push forward with rumors, while the latter provides reason for us to be more cautious.
When Mh570 went missing in March of 2014, it created a perfect storm of rumor-mongering in the press. A plane carrying 239 people vanished somewhere (presumably) in the Indian Ocean. This was an event that captured global attention. It was characterized by fear and a remarkable lack of real information: about where the plane was, why it crashed, who was responsible, and how a large jet could simply disappear in an age of radar and other advanced technology.
CNN more than doubled its audience in the two weeks after the plane first disappeared.35 People wanted information, and CNN dedicated seemingly every minute to the plane story. It also struggled to fill the void with real information. At times, segments were based largely on getting people to offer theories about what had happened. It was an invitation for rumor and speculation. This is a sample exchange from a CNN broadcast on March 11, just days after the plane disappeared (emphasis added):
The former director general of IATA says he finds it incredible that fighter jets were not scrambled as soon as the aircraft went off course. I asked Giovanni Bisignani for his gut feeling about what happened to the plane.
I fear I am part of the problem. I keep tuning in to see if there are any new clues . . . Of course, endless speculation from talking heads soon defines the coverage and that can lead to the impression that these folks know something when what they really know is that they have a 20-minute segment to fill.41
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