What are false information, propaganda, and fake news?
The definitions of “propaganda,” “misinformation,” and “fake news” sometimes overlap. They describe various situations in which disseminating knowledge harms people, whether on purpose or accidentally, and are typically associated with advancing a specific moral, political, or ideological goal.
Three distinct applications of information that come under this category may be distinguished:
False information disseminated with no malicious intent is known as misinformation.
Disinformation is purposely false information disseminated to damage people.
Malinformation is factual data disseminated with malicious purposes.
While none of these phenomena are new, the widespread availability of sophisticated kinds of information and communication technology in recent times has given them newfound relevance. Information may go viral in a matter of hours when it is shared online, whether it be through text, photos, videos, or links.
Why is it vital for schools to spread disinformation, propaganda, and fake news?
Because technology now permeates every aspect of their lives, youth are particularly vulnerable to propaganda, misinformation, and fake news. Young people spend a lot of time on the internet talking, blogging, listening to music, watching television, playing video games, uploading photos of themselves, and searching for other users to interact with. They largely rely on information given online to help them understand the world and how they view reality. Many parents are not tech-savvy enough to keep an eye on their children’s online activity and alert them to any potential risks. As a result, schools have an obligation to provide youth with the critical thinking and informational skills that they are unable to learn at home.
More than just a security measure, the capacity to react critically to internet propaganda, disinformation, and fake news is a crucial democratic skill in and of itself. The core competencies of the Council of Europe Reference Framework of Competencies for Democratic Culture include analytical and critical thinking, knowledge, and critical comprehension of the world, including the function of language and communication. They are essential to media and information literacy and digital citizenship education.
Propaganda, disinformation, and fake news may be found both offline and online, and handling them is essential in many different academic topics, including science, religion, history, social studies, and art. In history classes, for example, students may examine the employment of nationalistic and patriotic slogans, or “atrocity propaganda,” during World War I; in art classes, they may study the creation of works of art intended to promote specific ideologies.
ICT is beginning to cause problems for educational institutions in other ways as well, such as the disparaging comments made about instructors and schools on social media. Schools are learning that parents and other stakeholders are more likely to take their disagreements to social media when they have a disagreement with the policies, practices, or behavior of the staff. At some schools, administrators and teachers are concerned about how to react to online campaigns or comments that are derogatory or negative.
What difficulties exist?
Schools that want to treat propaganda, disinformation, and false news seriously as a social or pedagogical issue face several obstacles:
Instructors usually have very little online engagement and experience, which usually lags behind that of their pupils. Because of this, they can be reluctant to tackle this aspect of teaching and learning without making a sizable investment in their professional growth.
Teachers find it challenging to stay current on advances because of how quickly technology and youth’s online behavior change. Programs for professional development might also quickly become outdated.
It may be difficult to find a quiet time during the school day to teach about subjects linked to the creation and sharing of knowledge. Even while some parts of the phenomenon may be covered in multiple areas, it may be challenging to find a place in an overburdened curriculum where the phenomenon may be tackled head-on as an issue in and of itself.
The term “fake news” does not imply that “true” news exists in any sense. Every news piece is curated and tailored to a certain readership for a specific objective. Some schools may find it difficult to provide students with the depth of study and advanced abilities necessary to do this subject justice, particularly when it comes to teacher preparation and competency (Council of Europe, 2018).
Digging up facts about fake news
The truth is that not all of the “news” that passes for news is fact-checked, which may surprise most responsible politicians. Even worse, falsehoods are frequently twisted into compelling stories and passed off as fact. From the era of current information, greetings. It is unsettling and does not seem promising for enforcing strict policies. Then, how can it be addressed?
The advent of false information and its extensive propagation on social media platforms have transformed—some have even declared it destroyed—political conversation. Propaganda, also referred to as computational propaganda, combined with automation has the potential to influence public opinion. The question is, in practice, how can we tell the difference between true facts and fakes?
The goal of Samantha Bradshaw and her colleagues at the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project was to determine how junk news—which includes fake news, computational propaganda, and content that is ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, and conspiratorial—was distributed on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential campaign in Michigan. Their results demonstrate that professional, fact-checked content was disseminated just as often as garbage news.
As part of their groundbreaking quantitative study on fake news, Ms. Bradshaw and her colleagues looked into Twitter interactions from November 1–11, 2016, in Michigan, a state that was a battleground in the US presidential election. The research team was interested in learning what political news and information people shared. After gathering tweets with website addresses, they divided the information into three categories: professional political content from think tanks, political parties, experts, and the government; other political news, which included links to particular countries, especially Russia; and junk news and other subcategories like WikiLeaks. The group discovered that the quantity of professional news and junk news posted on Twitter was equal, i.e., the amount of professional news was shared more often than the trash news.
In Germany and France during the 2017 elections for the federal presidency, the ratios of junk news to professional news were significantly lower, with one-to-four during the German federal presidency election and one-to-two during the French presidential campaign. Is it true, though, that Europeans are less susceptible to false information? Most likely not. Instead, the system of generating false information that originated in one nation is probably going to spread to others (Clarke and Gyimesi, 2017).
“Fake News” and Cyber-Propaganda
Globally high levels of mistrust in mainstream media have also been intimately linked to the problem of false news in the modern era. Over the past ten years, there has been a notable fall in the percentage of individuals who believe that the media can report on noteworthy material in an accurate, fair, and true manner. Consumers now place less trust in traditional media, preferring to obtain news and information from friends and acquaintances on social media and the Internet, according to study results. This led to the emergence of various media-enabled echo chambers, which stifle opposing ideas and reinforce personal beliefs. The present cycle of mistrust has affected the major media establishments. The spread of “fake news” in mainstream media can be largely attributed to the breakdown of gatekeeping systems and an over-reliance on online sources’ norms and practices. Some of the factors contributing to the loss of high-quality news output in Africa have been recognized, including the juniorization of newsrooms and the hiring of interns and journalists.
This highlights the role that mainstream media plays in disseminating “fake news,” a topic that is often overlooked in studies of African journalism. The mainstream media’s tardy admission that they are no longer the only ones with the power to shape and drive the news agenda is largely what started the debate in the West. “Fake news provided a catchall symbol for journalists grappling with their diminished institutional power,” says David Uberti. According to Wahutu’s argument in this article, misleading news should therefore be seen as “intricately tied to traditional media norms, which have themselves been problematic.”
Part of the problem stems from the well-known fact that the mainstream media has always been unfriendly to critiques or any sort of in-depth investigation originating from sources outside of established entities like unions. Leaders in a number of African countries have followed US President Donald Trump’s lead by disparaging alternative media sources’ trustworthiness by utilizing the term “fake news.” The American press’s broad “informational moral panic” following the 2016 US presidential election served as the primary inspiration for this. As a result, we need to distinguish between the political discourses that are currently spreading as misleading information and the actual normative framework.
In light of this, the current debate over the emergence of “fake news” and cyber-propaganda is given an African perspective in this special edition of African Journalism Studies’ African “Digital Media Review.” We do not pretend that Sub-Saharan Africa is a homogeneous location, nor do we wish to conceal the diversity and dynamism of social and communication experiences there. As a result, we want to address this method’s homogenizing effect by emphasizing significant complexity and intricacies both within and across nations while also situating our case studies within the context of Sub-Saharan Africa as a region (Mare, Mabweazara, and Moyo, 2019).
Reference list
Clarke, R. and Gyimesi, B., 2017. Digging up facts about fake news: The Computational Propaganda Project – OECD. [online] www.oecd.org. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/governance/digging-up-facts-about-fake-news-the-computational-propaganda-project.htm [Accessed 21 November 2023].
Council of Europe. 2018. Dealing with propaganda, Misinformation and Fake News. [online] Democratic Schools for All. Available at: https://www.coe.int/en/web/campaign-free-to-speak-safe-to-learn/dealing-with-propaganda-misinformation-and-fake-news [Accessed 21 November 2023].
Council of Europe, 2018. Dealing with propaganda, Misinformation and Fake News. [online] Democratic Schools for All. Available at: https://www.coe.int/en/web/campaign-free-to-speak-safe-to-learn/dealing-with-propaganda-misinformation-and-fake-news [Accessed 21 November 2023].
