Tell me lies…

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Tell me lies…

Vanessa Baird writes about ‘fake news’.

There's nothing new about fake or junk news or 'alternative facts'.

But today the amount, the speed, and the popularity of fake news on social media is new and different from before. And it is also profitable. Macedonian teenagers found this when they started fake news sites with fake stories they wrote about Donald Trump during the US election, for example, that the Pope was supporting him.

Lies feed populist politics and populist politics feeds lies. As religion and authoritarianism show, telling – and believing – things that are not true can be a good way of asking for and showing loyalty. Believing comes easily when the entertainment value of news is more important than the truth or the importance of the news. But even if we think we are people who do not believe things so easily, filter bubbles, which is how the internet and its algorithms work now, easily support our interests, prejudices, and ideas.

Seeing the difference between truth and lies can be very difficult. And it’s going to get worse very soon. Since early 2018 Reddit has become a place full of ‘deepfakes’ – for example, videos where they change the actor’s face for someone else’s face, using an algorithm. By February 2018 people had downloaded a desktop tool for making deepfakes, called Fake App, more than 100,000 times. There are problems for audio too. DeepMind is the artificial intelligence division of Google based in London. Recently it made big progress in making artificial voices. US tech writer Parmy Olson says, ‘Fake news is going to get crazy soon.’

So far the solutions we have do not seem very good. Facebook’s idea is that users decide if we can trust sites. But this is not reliable. Experts say that efforts by governments around the world – France, Brazil, Britain, Malaysia, India – to stop fake news are too simple, do not look very far ahead, and threaten free speech. Fake news is ‘a really big problem, but no-one has a good answer yet,’ says Paul Bernal, lecturer in information technology and media law at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

Also another problem is that people in power use the term ‘fake news’ to talk about journalists who criticize them. Trump, Putin, Kim Jong-un, Duterte have all done this, and also Aung San Suu Kyi, when she denied Myanmar’s genocide.

Before we blame the internet and social media for everything, remember this. Our elected politicians told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This false information led to a lot of destruction - wars, lost lives, and violent terrorism. That had nothing to do with social media. It was just old fashioned misinformation or even lies from Mr Bush and Mr Blair.

NOW READ THE ORIGINAL: http://www.newint.org/features/2018/06/19/tell-me-lies-fake-news

(This article has been simplified so the words, text structure and quotes may have been changed)