Episode 118: Fake News - It's Everywhere

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Paige: You're listening to “Coffee with Gringos.” I’m Paige Sutherland.

Ian: I’m Ian Kennedy.

Paige: So today we're going to be talking about quite an interesting topic. It's very personal to me as a journalist and that is fake news. In the US, it's a term that is used quite frequently. It gained a lot of popularity when Trump was campaigning for the first time for 2016 as everything was “fake news, fake news, fake news.” So, it became quite a buzzword. Just to give a definition, the real term of fake news is anything that's inaccurate or untruthful and sadly, often this misinformation spreads like wildfire on social media. So, it's a big problem and me and Ian are going to talk about some of the drastic consequences that spreading fake news has around the world. And so again, listeners if you get lost, check out that audio guide and transcript. Okay, Ian—fake news. The 2016 election, like I said, Trump really made it quite popular saying CNN, NBC, everyone that was against him was fake news, and it actually had quite a lot of impact. You still hear it today with the 2020 election that anyone that reports anything they don't like is quote-unquote “fake news.” But I think what's scary is that with social media, it's very easy to spread fake news and a lot of people don't fact check. And if you look at a lot of the data, a lot of people get their news from social media and the big trap of fake news is they use clickable headlines. So, it's anything that would really get you to stop when you're scrolling on social media, like “Biden killed prostitute”, or something that's very outlandish. But you're like, “whoa”, and sadly what a lot of people do is they don't fact-check. They don't check sources, they don't know where this information is coming from, and then they spread it, and then everyone starts spreading it, and then you have this rumor of misinformation. It's really important, especially with the amount of social media, the amount of material out there that I fact check and figure out where these sources are.  I think also, sadly, it’s just so easy to create misinformation. You can make a meme, you can make a fake newspaper, you can make up fake news articles, videos, everything. It's so easy nowadays, so if you don't know where this information is coming from, please don't spread it.

Ian: Exactly, I think you said it best. You gave a great description of this buzzword that we've been hearing almost every day for at least the past four years, and maybe even a little bit before that. But like you said, President Trump in the US has turned this into his buzzword to use to describe anything that he didn't like or anything that didn't go with his agenda. But, you know, he has a point. There are a lot of sources that, like you said, it's information that's not vetted, it's not something that's gone through a source to make sure that its fact-checked to make sure that it's true. And in our age of social media, we have so much information that we can send immediately, and it's almost impossible I feel like to really monitor what's true news and what's fake news. So, we see this as a huge problem with social media. We see a lot of accounts get banned on Twitter, on Facebook, a lot of different handles and due to some of the rhetoric that's said, and whether or not it's true, and kind of how you mentioned, it's really impacted, not just communication but policy, and elections. For example, the 2016 election, something really interesting that happened was leading up to the 2016 election, it was later found out, mostly by some research done by a researcher named Renee DiResta. She did some extensive research into Russian intelligence agencies that before the 2016 election, they were essentially spreading fake news in Facebook groups and Twitter groups and all the social media outlets that we have basically seeding these negative thoughts, these confrontational fights between people with different views, and basically impacting the news to manipulate the election. For example, she alludes to how Russian agencies would set up fake accounts, and these agents would go on Facebook posing as maybe a black woman from the United States, saying, “Hillary Clinton does not support the black people. She doesn't care about black women like us. Trump, he is our savior, he is here to support us to help us.” And by spreading these kinds of these messages, without any vetting, without any fact-checking, this kind of information was spread rapidly, and really influenced the way people thought. She also mentioned some times where a Russian agent perhaps would organize a rally, for example, pro -Muslim or Muslim pride celebrations across the street on the same day from an anti-immigration or an anti-Islam sort of protest. Obviously, this is really incendiary, and the idea of this is to really get people fighting, to really cause discord among the people, and ultimately, it caused a lot of the negative feelings that we have towards each other—this sort of “us versus them” mentality that I think exists more than ever in our world today. And so, this was really interesting to see that someone actually did the research to discover these findings and say, fake news is actually a real thing. It's a real thing that influences our world for things that happen. We're going to be talking about a handful of these today, but that's a good start.

Paige: For me being a journalist, I think it's definitely made our profession a little harder because we get lumped in with all these people that aren't reporters and aren't journalists. These are just people that are on their computer and spreading misinformation by maybe using Photoshop or using their phones and creating fake news. And so, it is tough because when you work for a reputable reputation and you're sourcing and you're checking your facts and you write an article and you have someone that just goes “fake news! “and it's like you didn't even read the article, you don't even know what you're talking about. But it's like anything now is fake news, and so it is a little disheartening when you are a journalist because I work really hard to source information, to fact check, to do what journalism is, and it's always discredited with this term. So, it has definitely made things interesting. Fake news has always been around because of social media but I think Trump has coined it to be any news, any outlet, anything that he doesn't agree with—it's just fake news. As Ian was saying, with the election that was a big consequence, that was a big impact to influence an entire election of the most powerful country in the world. It just shows you the damage that spreading misinformation can have. You had scandals like “Pizzagate.” That was a big one where misinformation was spreading that there was this child sex ring that was happening at pizza parlors in the basement and so some man went to the pizza parlor—that didn't even have a basement—with a gun to help these kids that were allegedly kidnapped for sex trafficking. And he luckily didn't fire anything, no one was hurt, but he believed this information so much that he went out to stop it. And that's pretty terrifying of just how powerful this myth information is, and that when you do spread it, it becomes more believable because you see a post of a fake story and it has a million likes and you're like, “Oh, this must be true. You know this is terrible. I must do something.” And so that's why it is so important that you shouldn't share anything if you don't know where the information is coming from.

Ian: Exactly. It's so important in that sense because, first of all, you don't know what's true, and second of all, these things get released so quick into the world that oftentimes you don't even have time to see if it's real. With the click of a button, your information is released to anyone in the world who wants to view it.

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Ian: And to sort of piggyback off of what you were talking about with the “Pizzagate” scandal, we're seeing now a lot of these different sorts of strange conspiracy theories rising up from the fake news sources that we're talking about. One, in particular, to again, to kind of echo the child sex trafficking allegations, there's a conspiracy theory of a group right now called QAnon. And QAnon, basically, as a group, they allege that the “Deep State”, which is another term used basically for the most powerful people in the world, most often associated with the Democratic Party in the US, that are actually Satan-worshipping pedophiles that are running a global child sex trafficking ring and that they are plotting to do whatever they can to take down, President Donald Trump, and that President Trump is doing his best to fight this evil that's causing all these problems with child sex trafficking. Now, this has absolutely no validity to it, but it has a huge growing. We hear about it in the news, we hear about the group growing, and this is a classic example of just take something that you hear or that is alleged, and you take it at face value, and you take it as truth. And, so a lot of these groups, they gain this huge momentum because of what we talked about. You can release anything on social media that has a clickbait title, somebody is going to click on it, they're going to read it. It's like the old saying, people say, sort of, paradoxically, kind of ironically is “It's on the internet. It must be real.” Which we know, of course, is not the truth. But a lot of people still think in this way, so they say, Well, I read a source that looks legitimate. This is the headline. That's what they said. It must be true.” And that's the issue that we have now with all this misinformation—there's no way of telling what's real from what's fake. And so now you have groups running around alleging that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the whole Democratic Party are plotting to enslave the world with child sex trafficking. So, it's quite odd to see happening.

Paige: I mean it's terrifying, as you said, because it just spreads and it spreads, and no one's doing any fact-checking and people adamantly believe it. As we were saying, unfortunately, some of this fake news can lead to violence and this isn't just a US problem. This is all over the world. There is a big case out of Nigeria where there was, on Facebook, images of babies, of mass graves, of just terrible violence that was just spreading on Facebook. And was accusing Fulani Muslims of doing this and so people went out into the streets to get justice and they were pulling people—these Muslims—out of cars and killing them. And at least ten people died just because there were these fake images, that weren't real, of violence just to create more violence against a religious group. Clearly, the source probably had it out to get this group, but that's just the worst impact that you can have. It's just these fake images, create this mob mentality of we need to seek justice, and kill people without even fact-checking. So that is obviously just a terrible case of fake news—literally ending people's lives. We're seeing it now with COVID. With this global pandemic, there's just so much misinformation out there, and that's caused a lot of anxiety because there's a lot of alarmist information that’s, “Cases are rising. People are dying.” Conspiracies about what's the cause, what's the solution, the vaccines, everything. So, unfortunately, fake news has had a lot of impact during this pandemic where there's so much misinformation out there that the medical community is like, please don't believe everything you read on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. Please fact check because there's just so much information out there that is not being vetted and unfortunately during a global pandemic everyone's looking for information and most people see it on social media.

Ian: You're right. And that's why it's so difficult because we're in this very scary moment. We are all scared. We haven't lived through a pandemic before. Naturally, people are looking for answers. They're looking for anything to make them feel better, make them sleep at night, and when you have so many different sources saying so many different things, that makes your head spin. You don't know what's true, who to trust. You have one person saying the CDC knows everything. The other person is saying that the CDC is lying, and so someone in the middle you say what do I do?  Who do I believe? We see this exactly like you said with COVID measures, the causes when we're going to have a vaccine if the vaccine is going to work if people will want to take the vaccine, and the vaccine issue comes into light again because of COVID. But it's something that we've seen for years that people say on social media that there are claims or there's fake research that people say that vaccines cause autism in children or they cause mental problems, these other autoimmune diseases when there are a few cases where this is the exception or maybe causation doesn't mean correlation. But people tie it together and they say, “Well, my son's autistic, and he maybe had a bad reaction to a vaccine. Maybe the vaccines do cause these problems in children. And what this does is it started spreading this misinformation that we've been talking about this entire podcast, to the point where there's a big problem in the United States with parents deciding not to vaccinate their children, based off of fake news that they read on social media or on other forms of media. So now we're seeing rises in measles, rises in mumps. These diseases that we were able to eradicate thirty to fifty years ago, they’re coming back up just due to some people publishing some clickbait worthy titles online. Again, it's scary, because this doesn't only affect your life—that ends up affecting your children's life, your own life. So, we come to a bridge that we have to cross where we say, what can we do to make sure that we are vetting and spreading the right news sources? And I think this is something that we're going to, obviously, keep seeing with the rise of social media in the future, and more closely to COVID and the vaccines that we're talking about more in the short term. So, I just think it's really important for people too—not only social media—I think in life, in general, is trying to think for yourself. Does it make sense? Does it seem like common sense? Does it seem like something that could be possible?  Do you trust the source that you're getting this news from? Do you know what the sources?  There are a lot of questions that you need to ask yourself before you fully dive into believing what you read online. And I know it can be easy to do, but it's something that we as a society, I think, we need to work on a little bit harder to ensure that we are telling each other the right things and not the wrong things and causing anxieties that don't exist or don't need to be so big.

Paige: It's almost kind of a call to action to our listeners and everyone is that take everything you read on social media with a grain of salt, and if you do see something that, you want to believe in, check the sources, I mean, we have the internet and Google searching at the tip of our fingers. Just do a quick Google search, if you see a few sources that back up that claim that you're reading on social media, and they're reputable sources, not made-up sources, then okay, that has some clout to it. But don't just read headlines and have no idea where that information is coming from. So, again, this is kind of a heavy topic but, unfortunately, one that isn't going away and has been around for a while. So, everyone, vet your sources. But if you get lost, check out that audio guide and transcript online. As always, thanks for listening.

Ian: We'll see you next time.

Paige: “Coffee with Gringos” was brought to you by Dynamic English, where you can learn English simply by using it. If you’re interested in taking classes or just want to learn more, go to our website at dynamicenglish.cl. Thanks for listening.

Key Vocabulary, Phrases & Slang:

 1.     buzzword (noun): popular word or phrase.

a.     Fake news has been a buzzword of the recent past.

2.     drastic (adjective): extreme; serious.

a.     It has become a drastic problem for the country.

3.     to fact -check (verb): investigate information to verify it’s the truth by the facts.

a.     It’s important to fact-check the news that you read.

4.     outlandish (adjective): ridiculous; unbelievable

a.     The outlandish claims made it to the front of the news.

5.     vetted (adjective): investigated and carefully examined.

a.     The vetted news sources proved they had the real story.

6.     banned (adjective): legally prohibited.

a.     The story is banned in over thirteen countries.

7.     confrontational (adjective): aggressive or argumentative.

a.     He is one of the most confrontational leaders in the world.

8.     to allude (verb): to mention or call attention to something.

a.     He alluded to the strange stories that were published months ago.

9.     rally (noun): a large meeting of people to celebrate or promote something.

a.     The huge rally was held in the downtown center.

10.  incendiary (adjective): causing conflict.

a.     The incendiary headlines made people want to read the story.

11.  discord (noun): disagreement between people.

a.     The discord in the community was terrible.

12.  lumped (adjective): associated with something else that isn’t related.

a.     The stories were all lumped together even though they had different subjects.

13.  reputable (adjective): respected; credible; trusted.

a.     Reputable news sources are hard to find nowadays.

14.  to coin (verb): to name or indicate something.

a.     He was the first person to coin the popular term.

15.  allegedly (adverb): claimed to be true but not proven.

a.     He allegedly said the illegal things that they are now investigating.

16.  to piggyback (verb): to repeat or support something previously mentioned.

a.     To piggyback your comment, I think fake news can be dangerous.

17.  face value (noun): the superficial appearance of something.

a.     At face value, the story headlines seem possible.

18.  clickbait (adjective): intended to capture the attention and excitement of the reader even though it might not be true.

a.     Clickbait headlines for news stories are so common.

19.  adamantly (adverb): firmly and seriously.

a.     They adamantly believe everything they read on Facebook.

20.  alarmist (adjective): causing attention.

a.     The alarmist story captions make people want to read them.

21.  to come into light (phrasal verb): to come to attention.

a.     If these issues come back into light, it will be an interesting discussion.

22.  to eradicate (verb): to terminate; to finish.

a.     We eradicated these diseases many years ago.

23.  a grain of salt (idiom): to consider the truth of something before believing in it.

a.     Make sure to read everything with a grain of salt.

24.  clout (noun): influence or representation.

a.     There are few news sources that have real clout anymore.