Translator: Salvador Pineda Guevara Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
October 28th, 2017, a group of elderly
were visiting Cabárceno Natural Park in Cantabria.
When they were around the hippopotamus enclosure,
one of the animals surprised them with a big fart
which caused some of the elders to fall down.
Three of them were taken to hospital.
It seems unbelievable, doesn't it?
Well, this headline,
"The fart of a hippo
sent three zoo visitors directly to hospital,"
was published in several mass media that we all consider serious,
we think they have credibility, they seem trustworthy.
However,
this headline is fake,
It is a hoax.
My life changed some months ago.
I left my work at a TV station
to create, along with a partner,
an independent journalist project
that fights against misinformation,
that bets for data journalism,
for trustworthiness,
for transparency,
and for memory.
It will help citizens distinguish what is true
and what is not.
That is what I want to talk to you today.
Let's go.
(Sounds)
When we hear this, we know we are going to hear a newsletter.
We identify these sounds as the consumption of radio information.
We see this:
(Music)
And we know that the TV news are about to start.
We associate these images and that music
with the uptake of audiovisual information.
We touch this paper, we have it in our hand and we know that this,
is an information consumption format, a newspaper.
Our senses associate these formats with news.
Even though they can lie to us, right? I can feel it in the audience.
What we have internalised is that in those formats,
we get information.
This is what we call "the anchor" in maldita.es
Stay with this, because you are going to hear it over again.
And then you will say:
What has changed? What is different?
(Donald Trump audio)
"We are fighting the fake news.
I call the fake news 'then enemy of the people'
And they are. Fake news."
(Audio finishes)
This is what has changed:
to have Internet in our pockets at all times
and to consume every time more and more news through WhatsApp, Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram.
Which is alright, I agree.
But, here is where misinformation is most likely to mimic true information,
to disguise like it.
And here is where the anchor we were talking about before
gets spread.
How does this happen?
This is a real piece of news.
And this is misinformation, what many people call,
I do not like this term though, hoax news,
"fake news."
Because, when I say something is fake news
I am not referring to the same as
when Donald Trump says CNN is "fake news."
Because this is not news. It has never seemed to be one.
It is just a disguise to misinform.
This is a very important thing to keep in mind.
However, what do they have in common?
It seems they all have the same format with their headline and a picture.
We do not have a reference that shows us one is true and the other one is fake.
And we have to add another problem to this:
every time we tend to consume more news on its own, without any context.
Every time we spend less time on the webpage of a mass media,
on its front page, to see what they decided to be important
and we consume news through what comes on social media:
through WhatsApp or Facebook.
Not knowing what kind of webpage we are getting access to read,
or whether the resource is reliable or not.
For instance: "Urdangarín will have a payment in Switzerland
for his expenses."
That headline went viral.
There are many people that, to this day, believe that, effectively,
the king's brother in law, was condemned for corruption
and the Royal House paid for his expenses.
Someone in this audience is probably realising now that this was a lie.
Why did this happen?
Because this piece of news went viral without context, without anchor.
We are going to show you why this is so important.
If we see this news on the cover of newspapers like El País o El Mundo,
we could think by the context, by what surrounds it,
that this news is true.
it might be that the king's brother in law, condemned,
was granted those privileges.
But, if we look at them here, in their true origin,
where is this news coming from?
Precisely, from what is surrounding it, because of the context it has around it,
there is something that makes us think that it might be unreliable.
Well this has another twist.
Sometimes, we do not even read the news.
Sometimes, we just read the headline and the picture.
And if we look at it like this?
We do not have any reference. We do not know where it comes from.
We do not know its source. We do not know its date.
We do not know if it is reliable or not.
I will give you another example:
"Military service for people under 25 becomes compulsory again."
We get this through our phone.
It is a headline, a picture, there is no link, and no date,
because it does not even have the year and we do not know where it comes from.
Where is our mind situating this?
In a reliable web or in a non reliable one?
What are our senses telling us?
We do not have context. We do not have anchor.
And we add another key to this: misinformation becomes democratised.
Do you know where this headline comes from?
From here, from a web that was only made
for you to transform your false rumour into news.
Power used to misinform, it was the one who was able to do it:
economic elites, governments,
the big mass media, the church.
Now, with tools like this, anyone can misinform.
And that is easier and more dangerous every time.
Let's check why is that these fakes news get made.
We have identified three reasons:
the first one is just pure evil, it's just mere enjoyment.
Creating fake news just to see how far they go,
how many people they are able to convince.
And there are situations where this becomes harmful.
Do you remember Frida Sofía, the 12 year old girl
who was found buried under tons of debris of a Mexican high school?
A whole country looking for her.
Mass media all over the world were looking for her.
And it turned out that the girl did not exist.
It was fake news.
It was news created
only for the purpose of generating chaos in an emergency situation.
We have lived this in Spain.
In the fires of Galicia and Asturias in 2017,
when the fire was almost reaching Vigo townhouses,
and suddenly, a warning popped up on media:
"Tap water cannot be ingested. It is not drinkable. It is contaminated."
This was quickly viralised on WhatsApp and it ended up being a false warning.
And notice that, it was not the only one.
This is a map of some misinformation that were viralised
in a single fire night where neighbours,
who were fighting against the fire,
also fought against the fear
that this misinformation were spreading through their phones.
This is very dangerous and I can tell you that
if you happen to do something like this, we are watching you.
Let's go to the second reason: money; to make income.
Because there are people that earn money by making fake content.
During American elections,
in Macedonia, a group of activists started making fake news.
They started making them against Trump and Hillary Clinton
and, very quickly, they realised that news against Trump were not making any money,
so they decided to go for Hillary Clinton.
And it worked.
They earned thousands of euros.
In Spain there are web pages that do something similar:
they generate fake content for people to visit their website
and in doing so they charge for publicity.
And they say in the legal ad that they are satire,
they just do it for fun.
Of course, sometimes they don't do it to make fun out of it but to make money.
And there might be a skeptic in the audience who says:
"And who are you to decide what is satire and what is not?
Well we are none.
What we do is we only tell you in the manuals about misinformation,
we have to look at the legal ad from the web pages we read
before we believe them.
We tell you with our technological tools
that you are getting access to a satiric webpage,
through our extension
and we make sure citizens get informed as much as possible
to avoid a strain of lies.
And there is a third reason, which I consider is the most dangerous:
the hoaxes made from ideologies.
The ones that are made to distort our reality,
to create a particular state of opinion
that favours specific ideas.
We have lived this in Europe: with Brexit,
with Cataluña, with the refugee crisis.
Who has not received a video in the phone, an audio, an image,
a WhatsApp chain against immigration in the last months?
These resent messages between thousands of people,
sometimes look like they are reliable,
sometimes it is a headline and a picture,
but it does not have a source, neither date nor anchor.
There are also headlines like this one:
"A family welcomes a refugee who rapes their 12 year old daughter."
This headline is fake.
The man was not a refugee and it did not live with the family.
And, even though, to this day, this headline is still out there
and people who have read it associate refugee with a rapist.
This is the ecosystem where we are and it is very dangerous.
I just want to say one thing:
If some time you do not have something clear, do not share it.
It is the best advise I can give you today.
We are in an environment where fake news can go from being simple lies
to become beliefs.
Misinformation soaks through
and people stop believing in scientific evidence, for instance.
We see this in Italy with the anti-vaccine movement
that is winning the battle with the vice-president as their leader.
We start believing that Earth is flat.
We start arguing that man has not reached the moon yet.
We start drinking raw milk.
But, how can we fight against this?
Well, legislation seems to be a plausible solution.
There are some people who maintain that a judge
or even a state dependent institution
is the one that should decide what is truth and what is not.
We believe that this is not the way,
because the line between an anti-hoax legislation
and censorship is excessively thin.
And we are not alone in this.
Experts from the European Commission,
a group of experts that set up months ago where we are part of,
also believe we are not ready yet
to harshly legislate against misinformation.
We do not know the phenomenon enough, we need to keep studying it.
But we do have other tools to fight against it.
For instance, with data and fact journalism,
with early warning technology against misinformation,
with the community, with education and with you.
Because we need you to warn us about possible misinformation
that is spreading in your networks.
Because we can't be everywhere,
even less during family chats where more than once
you have spotted misinformation,
or in those closed Facebook groups where
memes of a right wing politician are being posted,
or a meme of a left wing politician,
or from an actor or a historical figure,
which are tremendously problematic, but do not have source or date.
When you give us that misinformation,
our team works with a very strict methodology.
What things are becoming more viralised?
This is the first thing we are going to try to find out.
from that point on, it is journalism duty:
pick up the phone, talk to the sources,
verify the pictures and find out the origin of all the videos.
And when this job is done and we already know if it is a hoax or not
the whole team has to audit the checker,
and ask questions to know whether he or she has done a good job or not.
And then we vote.
There has to be a majority of votes supporting that denial
and none against it for us to make sure and be ready
to go out there and tell you that something is fake.
And there we need you once again, because it has to be you
the ones who will come back to our WhatsApp and Facebook groups
and will tell your contacts that in fact,
that information is not true, it is a hoax.
Journalism, technology, community and education
are the keys to be victorious.
Not everything is lost.
The journalists who want to do our jobs well, exist.
And we are the majority.
We know you do not trust us anymore,
because we have failed sometime, and we ask for a lot of forgiveness.
But from this, from misinformation, they will not deceit neither with hoaxes,
nor the executive,
we just get out there together, citizens and journalists.
Because journalism is the best tool to fight against deceiving.
Thanks for listening.
(Applause)