Q&A: How to tackle fake news

LONDON — Fake news is a growing phenomenon, and though it might not be the first thing we think of when we hear the term, there is evidence to suggest it is beginning to pose a serious challenge for development organizations. A report published last month by the International Broadcasting Trust defines two ways in which development organizations have fallen victim to fake news: Through “malicious fabrications” deliberately spread about their work; and through the disruption caused by internet trolls using misinformation to “sway public attitudes” against the causes they fight for. One of the NGOs covered in the report was ActionAid, whose chief executive was the subject of a fake news report linking him to the terror group ISIS. It was “completely ludicrous, completely made up,” explained Sally O’Connell, ActionAid’s head of digital, who has more than a decade’s experience working in social media for the British charity sector. Nonetheless, the incident demonstrated the sudden reputational risk that NGOs can face in an era of fake news, and the pressure on organizations to respond quickly and effectively. Devex sat down with O’Connell to discuss how development organizations can respond when fake news strikes, and the steps they can take to protect their staff from online abuse. The conversation here has been edited for length and clarity. How has ActionAid been affected by fake news? It depends how you define fake news. There is some fake news where stuff is blatantly just made up, which is something we experienced when an alt-right site published completely false information about our CEO. But there’s another type of fake news, which is people just repeating tropes. This tends to be messages that are often put out and repeated by tabloid newspapers. For example, when we had an appeal around refugees, we got a lot of hostility toward our Facebook ads. There’s a lot of blatant racism, but there’s also a lot of people talking about “Why should we let people into the country? They get all the benefits, they don’t put anything back.” That kind of messaging just comes out again and again. It’s not true, but it’s stuff that people read every day in newspapers and on TV, and they see it repeated on social media themselves. “We are trying to be an evidence-based organization, driven by provable data and provable facts, and that’s why it’s really important that we do keep turning back to the facts and show our integrity and our evidence base.” --— Sally O’Connell, head of digital at ActionAid To some extent, it’s a kind of cognitive bias. You want to believe it so you repeat it. On Facebook we get people being pretty vile because they are anonymous and no one’s picking them up on it. We have had a hostile response to a lot of our appeals and campaigns. How did ActionAid react when your CEO was targeted by fake news? What was the process for handling it? That’s the only incident I am aware of [of ActionAid being targeted directly by false reports], but it was quite a big one. It was on LinkedIn. Our chief executive, Girish Menon, was identified on this alt-right website as being a supporter of ISIS. It was all completely ridiculous, completely made up. Lots of people were getting in touch with Girish on LinkedIn to ask what was going on. As soon as we saw it, I talked to our media manager and he got in touch with LinkedIn. I think it was taken down within about a day. They were quite helpful, once we’d found the right person to deal with. I don’t know what would happen if that was happening to us every day, though. That would be a challenge. What was LinkedIn’s response? It was fine, although it took the best part of a day because they can be quite hard to get hold of. I don’t know if they have changed since, because this was about a year ago. There wasn’t a button to flag items as spam or anything like that on LinkedIn, so there was no automated process you could flag through your own page. You do have to get in touch with them to get things taken down, or at least you did at the time. [LinkedIn updated their complaints processes in September 2017. It still doesn’t provide a telephone line for reporting concerns, but now includes a “Report This” button on articles it hosts, which allows readers to alert LinkedIn to any concerns.] The IBT report quotes ActionAid as saying, “there’s only so many times you can issue a rebuttal.” What are the other ways to fight back against fake news? Facts. I think that’s the most useful way to rebut things, rather than getting into an argument. Trolls want you to get into an argument, they want to waste your time, so I think you can put facts out there. It’s really important to do that. But it still remains the case that if people don’t want to be proved wrong, and don’t want to consider another opinion, then they just aren’t going to. We are trying to be an evidence-based organization, driven by provable data and provable facts, and that’s why it’s really important that we do keep turning back to the facts and show our integrity and our evidence base. Do the big digital platforms — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — have enough ways for you to report abuse or lies? No. Definitely not. Is social media the primary battleground when it comes to fake news? Yes, I would say so. That has become especially apparent in the [European Union] referendum vote in the United Kingdom, and in the United States elections. I still think it has its origins in tabloid newspapers, though, because again there are lot of those tropes which are just repeated and repeated and repeated. We have all seen The Sun’s “Clarifications & Corrections” section [where it acknowledges incorrect, incomplete or unclear information published in previous stories], which is hidden away in eight-point font on page 19. The difference with social media is that it is amplified a million times, and there is no obvious way to shut it down. You are in an echo chamber and people are very receptive to stories they want to hear. We know that people are more receptive to stories they hear from people who are in their networks, too; stories which confirm their views. People are also more receptive to slightly shocking and unbelievable stories. There was a recent story about the U.S. elections, and how Facebook was able to charge Hillary Clinton’s campaign more for their Facebook advertising than they charged Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign got more user-engagement, so it basically cost them less. All Trump’s ads were trying to do was to get people to click and share the page. His messaging was all quite outrageous, whereas Hillary Clinton’s campaign messaging was all about improving schools and getting rid of guns. But it just wasn’t so outrageous, so they didn’t register the same levels of engagement. What does that mean for development work, which is also trying to send across quite a nuanced, optimistic message in an atmosphere with so much trolling and anger? It leaves us doing a lot of testing with messaging. We’re never going to lie, we’re never going to be outrageous for the sake of it, but we obviously test quite a lot of different formats of messages and types of messaging. We need to be able to see what does better with our various audiences and issues. What is the next big frontline for NGOs battling fake news? I think fake video is going to be an issue, not just for the development sector but for everyone. As soon as you can fake video and audio, the two things which are really the last bastion of believing the evidence of your own eyes, I can see the way that it could play out in the development sector. Video is the way we tell our stories. Video is the way people who are living through emergencies want to show the rest of the world what is going on. There’s a lot of places where cameras can’t go in, of course, but we are seeing it happen in eastern Ghouta at the moment. Video is shared on social media, and as soon as people start to doubt it, that becomes a problem. It won’t just be a problem for the people in that particular emergency, but a wider problem. As soon as people start saying, “well, a video’s not proof, what have you got?,” you haven’t got anything left really. As soon as you start to doubt video and doubt audio, what irrefutable proof can you then show people? How can you explain that this is what is happening and that this is why we are asking for your support? The wider battleground is whether people start to doubt video in the same way they have started to doubt the authenticity of some images. Are there tools we can apply to authenticate video, like reverse Google image searches, which are commonly used as a quick way of verifying the origins of photographs? There will definitely be ways of authenticating video. It has got a type of digital code embedded in it, so you should be able to track it back down to its origin. That’s definitely the sort of thing that organizations like ActionAid will be looking at, just to make sure we know that any footage we get is exactly what it says it is. At the moment, we use our own images and we use our own photographers. That way we can be confident about the authenticity of our images. We know that if we’re taking portraits we know who those people are, we have their consent, we have their back story. That’s really important for us, and that will continue through our videos. How do you decide whether to engage or not with people who are causing trouble online? In general, we don’t really engage. We delete messages if they are inflammatory, if they are racist, and if they are threatening. If they break our terms of service, then we will delete them. We generally hope that the community will engage with that person, and that is great to see. It’s much better for us to have our supporters, or even people who aren’t our supporters, being ambassadors for our brand. It’s much better to see normal people actually support us, rather than us having to put out corporate messaging. That’s fantastic. But we rarely engage, simply because a lot of people are just trolling and all they want is for you to engage. They just want to waste your time. We don’t have that time to waste, and we don’t want to waste our supporters’ money by responding to that type of stuff. In its report, IBT recommended rotating staff who work online and see a lot of unpleasant content. Do you do that? Yes, absolutely. That’s something we found out early on, again in our refugee campaign. We found that people who were moderating comments, or just looking over comments during the weekend, were coming to work like emotional wrecks on Monday. There’s a lot of comments and a lot of them are incredibly unpleasant. We made sure we had a bigger team of people moderating so that the burden was shared. It’s also important to remember that when people are doing the moderating for us, that’s not their full-time job. The rest of their job is supporter care, supporter contact, supporter information. So their role is normally to concentrate on the positive side of things, and be very cheerful and upbeat and helpful. Moderating is a big ask, even if people are dedicated social media managers. It’s a really big ask. What other steps does ActionAid take to support people potentially exposed to online abuse? If our staff and spokespeople are putting themselves out there on social media, [we know] they are opening themselves up to interaction which can be abusive, especially if you are a woman or talking about women’s rights. All of these new risks which have emerged with digital technology will have to be taken into consideration when we are looking at our policies. Read more about aid and the media in Devex’s special series.