Below is an archived edition of Ctrl Alt Right Delete, a weekly email newsletter. This edition was published on 04/16/2017. Members of Factual Democracy Project have access to past editions. Subscribe to Ctrl Alt Right Delete.
Programming note: Starting next week Ctrl Alt Right Delete will go on a short hiatus while I take a brief medical leave. There will be no newsletter on April 23. I’ve lined up a guest editor for April 30 that you’ll really enjoy.
I’m not fond of the term “fake news.” Mostly because I could talk to ten different experts about the topic and get ten different definitions of the term. First Draft News has a fairly comprehensive way of organizing fake news by type and intention, but when Trump and the frog squad talk about fake news, it means something else entirely. Fake news is a term and a problem that everyone knows about but no one can define. Unfortunately, that conundrum is exactly what the Trump administration have used to their advantage by labeling news they don’t like as fake.
The result of trying to tackle the issue of fake news has been several entities attempting to solve a problem without clear parameters. This week, Facebook stepped into the fray. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a lengthy interview this week outlining his thoughts on fake news among other things. Facebook also began rolling out tips to spot fake news to their users. You might have received a push notification directing you to look at it. The post is a checklist of 10 items, which when you think about how long most of us spend looking at an individual post on Facebook, feels absurdly long. Mike Caulfield, a veteran blogger and news literacy geek, pushed back pretty hard against Facebook’s suggestions:
This Facebook advice? It’s indistinguishable, for the most part, from what you would have told students in 1995. And beyond the ineffectiveness of it, it has potential to do real harm. It was precisely these impulses — to judge resources by look and feel and what they say about themselves — that propagandists played on so expertly in 2016.
The history of technology is that the fakers are going to get even better at these things next time around. Yet the Facebook advice doesn’t even seem to realize how good they got at this in 2016.
Facebook is rolling this out in the same week where a Buzzfeed Ipsos Public Affairs Surveyshowed that Americans at large can’t agree what news on Facebook counts as news. Some stats worth noting:
The increased skepticism around news seen on Facebook news feeds is a great relief to me. When Buzzfeed and Ipsos Public Affairs did a survey last December they found that 75% of Americans believed fake news stories when they saw them on Facebook. I’m glad that public attitudes have changed so much since the end of 2016. We still might not agree on what the problem is, but there now seems to be broad agreement among the American public that we should take what we see in our social media feeds with a grain of salt.
Now that Americans are perhaps better able to acknowledge the existence of fake news and its effects, I hope we can have a conversation about the role that fake news and other forms of disinformation play in creating the current media ecosystem that we find ourselves in. As Columbia Journalism Review showed in an exhaustive study of media during last year’s election, right-wing media had an outsized effect on the media ecosystem at large.
Given the partisan nature of the content, it’s going to be challenging to make the debate over disinformation nonpartisan. But if we have any hope of getting back on track, it’s a conversation and a debate we need to engage in.
A few odds and ends worth keeping an eye on this week:
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Thank you Nicole Belle for copy editing this every week. I couldn’t do this without her. Thank you also to everyone who took our reader survey. I’m going to work on putting your feedback into action after my brief hiatus. See you all in a couple of weeks.
