Hello. Rocamora to speech. keyboard. Today I want to confess, like Pantoja, that I am somewhat tired of many people asking me if a source of content or a publication they see on the is it reliable or not when it comes to retweeting, spreading or sharing, especially from professional profiles or company pages. So I greased my stiff finger joints and got down to business writing the Definitive Guide to Spotting Fake News with which I hope, finally, to get my own entry on Wikipedia, which is about time. And a hard-boiled egg, already laid.
Given the bombardment of news that we receive every day through social networks (Whatsapp included), how the hell do we distinguish what is true from what is false?
So before the inability to know what is real and what isn’t plunges us into an existential crisis that would leave Hamlet very self-assured, let’s see if we can separate the wheat from the chaff without waiting for the super-stingy to come and take our chestnuts out of the fire (sorry for the millennials who will have to look for the reference to the )
We will distinguish two sections: the fake news itself, designed to provoke a change of opinion in society or a current of sympathy or antipathy towards a company, a government, an institution or a personand the tricks of the almendruco designed to try to fool the algorithms (mainly Facebook).
Fake news: When things are not what they seem
The great difficulty of fake news is that they have appearance really. They can come from a media controlled by dark interests or they can arise “spontaneously” and spread virally. They usually have very specific themes, which we can group into blocks:
- Policies: Related to the private life of political figures, with alleged public statements that a politician has made (sometimes accompanied by photos or videos out of context).
- International: Reveal alleged confidential or secret documents about foreign governments related to illegal behavior, espionage, or use photos of other countries or situations to illustrate alleged events that are occurring that are not true or are being intentionally exaggerated.
- Government: They reveal alleged confidential information about government plans to create supposed new taxes, or cut rights or social benefits, or about illegal actions.
- Related to companies or products: They reveal alleged hidden information about the danger or lack of guarantees of certain food, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, etc., generally widely consumed products.
- Personal: Smear campaigns against relevant figures in the public sphere, from actors to athletes or in any other field, not necessarily national (there is also local fake news).
Thus, the first alarm signal is the fact of receiving supposedly relevant news that is NOT in the media. Think of one thing: information professionals are just that, professionals. What makes you believe that they would shut up a ‘news bomb’ that could be true?
In addition to these specific themes, Fake news have a series of characteristics that distinguish them:
1.It is very difficult to discern the origin
The person who sends it to us or shares it has received it in the same way. They are the typical news on Facebook that have been shared hundreds or thousands of times.
2. They are usually accompanied by comments that come from fake profiles
Fake profiles are usually open, do not have any type of personal information and either do not have headshots or have photos of models, in addition to other characteristics that we will analyze in detail in another publication.
These comments confirm the validity of the information without citing any source (“it has happened to me”) or feed a negative spiral (I will not buy this brand again / I will not go to this store again / I just threw my razor in the trash of shaving).
3. The information is not verifiable
Sources are not cited, in many cases they are not dated and a Google search will take us to many strange or unknown websites that are spreading this information, none of them citing sources or with a minimum of credibility. Other times studies carried out by universities that do not exist or that have never published such a study are mentioned.
4. They have a clear negative intention
Rarely have we seen positive fake news.
They can serve to support political ideas or spread false theories (for example, that the majority of state aid goes to immigrants, or that the Government has already prepared a plan so that all highways are toll roads) or they can try to harm the reputation of a product or a brand; for example, that the olive oil at supermarket X is sold as Spanish but comes from Morocco, or the typical photoshopped photos showing a discounted product that, when lifting the discount label, shows a cheaper price than the discounted price, that yes the brand looks good.
Or one of my favorites the complaint that “supermarket X’s oranges come from South Africa”… in the month of July.
They usually urge you to perform some kind of act, or even easier, to stop doing it. Political fake news is not so much intended for you to vote for one party or another as for you to stay at home and not vote. The companies do not ask you to buy a product, but to stop buying a product or a brand.
The Other Trick: Tricking the Algorithm
Another type that typically circulates on Facebook: posts that aim to gain exposure by tricking the Facebook algorithm. Of these there are many types, but the ones that circulate the most are of two specific types:
1. Posts shared by friends asking you to “copy and paste this on your wall if you are for/against” (always noble causes) or that you do it if you are thinking of your friends or if you want to honor your parents.
With additions that challenge you with phrases like “I know that 95% of my friends will not copy this on their wall”. Why do they ask to copy and paste and not share? Well, very simple: asking you to share is very cheeky and copy and paste is a way to cheat the Facebook algorithm.
Like Google, Facebook “reads” what you post and prioritizes original content. A verbatim copy that is repeated thousands of times makes Facebook identify the original source and give it more relevance, which allows that account to carry out advertising actions later, guaranteeing an audience. Or so they think, because the people of Facebook are not so stupid as not to detect it, let’s not forget that advertising is what they live by.
2. Posts with misleading headlines that entice you to click
Another unorthodox way to advertise for free. I mean headlines of the type “This girl was going to cross the street and you can’t imagine what happened to her”, with an image that simulates to be a video that takes us to a page full of advertisements where (if we are able to see the video in question) the girl simply stumbles. Things that you would not see, but that incite you to see with a headline that does not reflect reality. Another very widespread modality: “What the government doesn’t want you to know.”
Except if your last name is Villarejo, of course.
There are many other forms of fake news, but the best thing we can do when we see supposedly surprising news is try to compare the information. We can copy the photo and do a Google photo search to see if the photo matches the text. We can search for that news in reliable sources (something especially relevant in the case of news related to health) or we can simply read the comments or responses, since it is more than possible that someone has detected the hoax before us. Anything but contribute to increasing noise and mistrust.
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