Why facts are not enough in the fight against fake news

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You might have read that we live in a ‘post-truth’ era, when facts no longer matter and emotion reigns supreme. But Dorothy Byrne, head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, takes issue with the idea: “You can be pre- or post-breakfast, but you can’t be pre- and post-truth; it’s a different concept.” Likewise, Byrne says, there’s no such thing as ‘fake news’. “If it’s fake, it can’t be news, because news is about something that actually happened.”

However much one might dispute the labels, ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ are problems that many have been grappling with since Britain’s EU membership referendum, and even more so since the Donald Trump presidency. 

Byrne is acutely aware of the danger of misinformation and the harm it can do to the public’s perception of what’s real. Speaking at a recent London conference, organised by the Westminster Media Forum, she described how Channel 4 conducted a survey of the British public, asking them to distinguish between several true stories and several fake ones. “Only 4% got all the answers right,” Byrne says. “That is genuinely very worrying.” 

Equally disconcerting is that it will take more than facts, figures and evidence to combat the spread of fake news. A surfeit of facts will not make up for a deficit of trust. 

Loss of confidence

Surveys frequently record a decline in trust in the media and government, which leads people to doubt the information these institutions produce. This loss of confidence has left people more open to alternative sources of information, especially those that are channelled through people they do trust: friends, family and colleagues – the people they connect with through digital social media.

Fake news has thrived in this environment for several reasons. First, people can create content unburdened by the editing and fact-checking that news organisations employ to try to stop errors and mistruths from making it on air or into print. Second, through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, individuals can push their content to a huge audience. Third, and most important perhaps, is that on these platforms “quality news content… is not distinguished from junk news produced to gain attention”, says Martin Moore, director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, King’s College London.

Attention is the currency on which digital media thrives. A Buzzfeed analysis found that, in the three months before the 2016 US presidential election, the top 20 fake election stories on Facebook generated a million more engagements than the top 20 ‘mainstream’ news articles. All these extra clicks help generate revenue in the digital advertising ecosystem, further incentivising the production of fake news.

Fake news on social media is in some sense “a flight from the complexity of the world in which we live”, says Steven Erlanger, London bureau chief of the New York Times. But fake news also satisfies another need – serving up stories that people either want or feel to be true, even if the facts say otherwise. This appeal to emotion is a central component of the post-truth phenomena, says Matthew d’Ancona, a Guardian columnist and author of the book Post-Truth.

“Post-truth is not lies,” he says. “We’ve always had lies… Post-truth is a very specific, and very 21st-century, problem, which is where emotion trumps factual assessment and evidence.”

The growing number of fact-checking organisations is an “encouraging” development, d’Ancona believes, but he warns: “Just bombarding people with facts is not enough… the answer to fake news is to wrap our response to it in an emotionalism that does not compromise factual accuracy, but acknowledges [that] the way in which people respond to information has changed.” 

Brian Tarran is editor of Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association