Can We Stop Fake News?
As technology giants and news media titans wrestle with fact-checking, algorithm-tweaking, and outright lies, Americans remain susceptible to a more pernicious threat: fake news.
Fake news is just one tool in President Trump’s disinformation toolbox, one that administration officials wield, not only to discredit the news media, but also the judiciary, individual members of Congress, and the intelligence community. It’s a classic tactic that wannabe autocrats deploy to undermine democracy: consolidating power by sowing distrust in major institutions.
Political commentators Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Yevgeniy Golovchenko, and Gianni Riotta took up the topic of fake news and authoritarianism at the 2018 Social Media Weekend in New York. Sree Sreenivasan, a former New York City chief digital officer, hosted the June 1–2 conference at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Ben-Ghiat is a New York University professor of history and Italian studies; Golovchenko is a University of Copenhagen PhD fellow in political science and an NYU visiting scholar; and Riotta, a columnist at La Stampa, an Italian daily, is a visiting professor of Italian studies at Princeton.
What follows below are excerpts from their panel discussion, “Can We Stop Fake News?” Their remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Gianni Riotta: The United States invented the internet and social media. All the big platforms that spread social media are indeed American. How did the Russians get here and eat our lunch? Because we were great at technology, but they were masters at disinformation. They know how to run disinformation [campaigns] very well.
Lack of trust precedes the issue of fake news in Western societies, Europe, and the United States. It’s not just media we don’t like. We don’t trust politicians, religious authorities, scholars, and so on. The problem is not the fake news. The problem is the lack of trust.
Yet the percentage of fake news is much less than you [might] assume. In France and Italy, the Reuters Institute found that maybe one out of four voters were actually affected by fake news. Dartmouth and Princeton pretty much estimated the same percentage in the presidential election in this country in 2016.
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