Although many of the authors in this book point toward solutions for fake news, this part most directly addresses attempts to mitigate its spread. The first two authors of this part discuss the role of platforms—the places where most misinformation circulates—in tackling the problem, the third discusses teaching fake news alongside the histories of other kinds of mass media to consider the similarities and differences of our contemporary moment to the past, and the fourth details a fake news “solution” that originated as an in-class activity, but turned into something much different after going viral. All of these authors point to larger issues that need to be considered as we address fake news, including the way platforms manage shared content, the need for broader civic engagement, and more support for education and academic freedom, all of which go well beyond calls for individuals to be careful more about what they share online.
More specifically, the first chapter in this part, “Platforms Throw Content Moderation at Every Problem” is by Tarleton Gillespie, who is a principal researcher in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft. His chapter explores how fake news evades detection by camouflaging itself as the kinds of content that platforms are designed to encourage. According to Gillespie, Facebook responded to fake news with four strategies, all of which are out of their existing content moderation playbook: kick fake news sources off their ad networks, partner with expert organizations, enlist users to flag dubious headlines, and promise to eventually solve it with artificial intelligence. Social media platforms have all constructed large-scale, moderation machines identifying, judging, and removing content: pornography, harassment, hate speech, obscenity, self-harm, and violence. But, as Gillespie argues, these current mechanisms of platform moderation are not perfectly tailored to each new problem, whether fake news, terrorist recruiting, revenge porn, or political bots. Discerning the fake from the genuine is not the same as identifying pornography or discouraging harassment, but because Facebook has responded with its existing moderation apparatus rather than developing new strategies for addressing fake news, future expectations, claims, tactics, and disputes will be shaped by it.
The second chapter in this part is “Normalizing Fake News in an Age of Platforms” by Paul Mihailidis, who researches media literacy, community activism, and civic life. This chapter discusses the ways that fake news has emerged in an age of platforms, online networks, and highly partisan political culture. Mihailidis argues that in order to reestablish credibility in news systems, we need to provide people the tools to identify false information, while also reestablishing the values that bring communities together to engage in meaningful dialogue and to understand news systems in the context of community. In other words, advocating for the development of media and news literacies will not fulfill their promise absent a larger civic mission. The chapter concludes with Mihailidis calling for value-driven approaches to engagement that move conversations of fake news from content to context, and educational responses to fake news from skills and critique to dialogue and meaning.
In the third chapter in this part, “Teaching ‘Fake News’ and Resisting the Privilege of Forgetting,” film and media studies scholar Amanda Ann Klein discusses strategies for teaching fake news through her course “Reality TV, Fake News, and Media Literacy in the 21st Century.” In this course, Klein works to give her students the critical tools necessary to find factually sound information while providing them with a historical overview of the technologies and formats used for communicating news and facts. Klein’s class contextualizes fake news by first considering the development of radio and television for mass distribution, before exploring the emergence of computers, the internet, and algorithms in order to examine how our relationship with facts and truth shift when the amount of available data explodes and when that data can be conjured up instantly. Finally, Klein discusses whether and how educators can explain to students the differences between biased and fake news without appearing partisan, biased, or “fake” themselves in an era of threatened academic freedom.
The last chapter in this part is by media studies scholar and coeditor Melissa Zimdars, “Viral ‘Fake News’ Lists and the Limitations of Labeling and Fact-Checking.” This chapter details Zimdars’s entry into addressing the problem of fake news through a viral Google Doc, “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’ Sources.” Zimdars argues that her viral Google Doc, which was shared hundreds of thousands of times on social media and picked up by major news outlets around the world, reveals the limitations of individualized, reception-focused efforts to solving online misinformation. While media literacy and fact-checking efforts can play a role in making our media environment healthier, Zimdars instead calls for systemic changes to the way news is supported, greater regulatory control over social media platforms, and even the development of public social media alternatives.
danah boyd, “You Think You Want Media Literacy … Do You?,” Points (blog), Data and Society, March 9, 2018, https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2.
Dana Cloud, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2018).
Nicole A. Cooke, Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era (Chicago: American Library Association, 2018).