The story projected onto the screen claimed that Amazon’s office space was now larger than the actual Amazon rain forest.
University of Washington professor Jevin West pointed to the projection and asked the audience: Is that real or fake? The audience laughed. It was clearly fake. That’s a minor annoyance, he said.
Then he showed another story about the Israeli defense minister saying Israel would destroy Pakistan with a nuclear attack. It too was fake, but Pakistan’s defense minister actually responded to the story in December and threatened to retaliate.
“Fake news is more than a minor annoyance,” West told the audience in University of Washington’s Kane Hall on Wednesday night.
Fake news — and how to combat it — was the focus of The Seattle Times’ LiveWire event, “Fact vs. Fake: Fighting Back Against Fake News,” featuring a panel of technology and journalism experts. Among the panelists was West, an assistant professor in the University of Washington’s Information School. He co-directs the DataLab and co-teaches the popular course “Calling BS in the Age of Big Data.”
Delip Rao, founder of Joostware, an artificial-intelligence research consulting firm, said he differentiates between fake news that is benign, and spread because someone didn’t do research, and fake news that is purposefully fabricated content. Rao created the Fake News Challenge, which brings together researchers and technologists to create fact-checking tools using AI.
Fake news has been used as a weapon in conflicts around the world, noted Jeanne Bourgault, president and CEO of Internews, an international nonprofit that works with local media organizations and trains journalists in developing countries. In Ukraine, for example, Russia hired an actress to serve as a source for stories that benefited that country.
Longtime issue
Seattle Times Managing Editor Michelle Matassa Flores says she often hears from readers who call with concerns about a story and call it “fake news” because the story included something he or she didn’t like.
“This has been going on for time eternal in newsrooms,” she said.
A bigger concern, she said, is that sources might be targeted by people who say something is fake news.
And the panelists noted that the spread of fake news is becoming a greater issue. West cited a graphic showing that fake news stories had more engagement on Facebook than real news stories leading to the presidential election.
The panelists offered several ways for the public to stop fake news, including “think more, share less”; remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and subscribe to newspapers that provide real news.
“The most important way to combat fake news,” Bourgault said, “is real news.
