WeChat: How Chinese students consume (fake) news in Australia

The Fake News epidemic in Australia is not exclusive to western social media sites such as Facebook. WeChat, the Chinese social media behemoth, has a strong presence in Australia among international students from China of which there are almost 200,000 each year.

Chinese students who are unable to read local English language use WeChat as their primary source of news. The revenue model is similar to Facebook- the higher the views the higher the potential for advertising income. This results in the production of sensationalised fake news with themes of nationalism.

Australian Red Scarf is one of the most popular WeChat pages in Australia. The site claims to translate Australian news for a Chinese audience. However it is filled with exaggeration, opinion memes and attention grabbing headlines making it a source of Fake News.

Three top fake news stories are:

1. Not only have the nuclear test areas been polluted, but every city of the Australian east coast is facing a nuclear crisis

2. Breaking! ISIS officially announced their Australian attack! Many famous locations in Sydney and Melbourne targeted

3. White Australia Policy is Back

-Jake

Fake News and Safety Warnings: Why You Should Be Alarmed

There is an infinite amount of blogs issuing warnings, advice and tips on health and safety. With so much of this information being unsubstantiated viewers face the Fake News Dilemma: I Don’t Know What To Believe.

 

 

For the most part, this dilemma is encountered with celebrity gossip or sensationalized politics. However, the case study of the Hawaii Missile Alert can be seen as an example whereby the Fake News Dilemma resulted in total inaction by the public to a potentially real threat.

In 2018, the state department of Hawaii issued a warning:

 

The alert was a mistake by someone pressing the wrong button. More interesting is the public reaction. Some Hawaiians went into panic mode while others waited for further confirmation. The fact that many people did not believe the alert was real can be attributed to the rise of Fake News. They didn’t know if it was a joke, a stunt or in fact a real missile threat.Thus the Fake News phenomena impacts the ability of governments to communicate to their citizens in times of crisis. With so much misinformation circulating people become skeptical of everything including what is real; as seen in the case study of Hawaii.

-Jake

Trumpaganda

What’s a blog on fake news without addressing Trump?

Trump did not invent Fake news nor was he the first administration to have a contentious relationship with the press yet it is no secret that Trump’s use of propaganda has significantly popularised the term, evident during his 2016 presidential election and to some extent, it helped him win.

Fast forward 2 years and fake news have flooded the internet and social media has become weaponised to an extent that it is more effective than airstrikes in destroying the target, in this case legitimate news. Therefore, it comes to no surprise that aside from shaping Trump’s fortunes, fake news has since been used by activists, propagandists and thought police to curate a tide of opinion. By the time the truth is dug up, who knows what damage has already been done.

Of course, Trump has continuously spoken out against ‘fake news’ and journalism, calling it the ‘enemy of the American people‘. You see, Trump likes to tell us what he thinks about Fake News.

Exhibit A: 

Exhibit B,C,D,E…..

Yes, he has a lot to say.  However, what’s ironic is that for all the president’s complaints, he also craves validation from the media. In fact, Trump has given exclusive interviews to The New York Times and, in addition to loving Fox News, reportedly watches CNN and MSNBC every morning.

He is also often the center of fake news posts.

You may have come across this edited photo that appears to show Donald Trump floating in a raft, extending a red Make America Great Again hat to a flood victim. It went viral last year but has resurfaced online as a result of Hurricane Florence

As New York Times reporter Kevin Roose pointed out on Twitter, the pic is a fake ― it was taken in Central Texas in 2015, long before Trump was elected president, and he definitely wasn’t in that raft.

Take a look at the real photo 

It has been shared 275,000 times on Facebook.

Trumps direct and indirect involvement with fake news will continue to exist.

According to a 2018 survey done by ABC, about 7 in 10 Australians are now worried about the spread of false information and of ‘fake news’ being used as a weapon to mislead and influence public opinion. Political engagement is also on the decline.

What can be done? 

Fact-checking. Of course, by fact-checking,  I don’t mean researching every single thing you read on the internet. It can simply mean being mindful of the mediasphere and the key catalysts of fake news (Trump being one of them). It means encouraging public figures to think more carefully about the quality of information they are disseminating.

Look out for more tweets from Trump I’m sure there will be plenty.

P.S Trumpaganda (the title of this blogpost) is actually the name of a university course offered at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign examining President Donald Trump’s impact on democracy and the free press.

-Cecilia

Art of Conning: Actual Fake News

As the last part of the series, this one will focus on actual fake news.

Source: Swadeology

Unlike satire, actual fake news deliberately aim to mislead and misinform whether for revenue or political purposes.

Alex Jones & Infowars

Managed by far-right conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, Infowars has published harmful stories such as the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and Boston Marathon bombing being hoaxes that involved ‘crisis actors’.

So, what are the tech companies doing?

After the Senate hearing about the alleged anti-conservative bias on major tech platforms where Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, and Twitter CEO ,Jack Dorsey, testified, Twitter and Periscope permanently banned Alex Jones and Infowars from their platforms.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1037804427992686593?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1037804427992686593&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2018%2F9%2F6%2F17829264%2Falex-jones-info-wars-banned-twitter

Twitter follows Google parent, Alphabet, Inc, along with Apple, Facebook and Spotify in banning Jones and Infowars from posting content on their platforms. Since then, Paypal has also banned Jones and Infowars from using their service and platform.

Can of Worms?

While many has welcomed the ban, conservatives have criticised it as an infringement of free speech. To what extent does our opinions count as truths? How do we draw the line between an objective truth and an individual perspective?

-Maria

Art of Conning: PR Stunts and Satire

Remember that viral video of a hawk dropping a snake on an innocent family picnic by the Yarra river?

NOPE.

It was a PR stunt. The fake video reached 5 million views within 48 hours and was covered by multiple media outlets from around the world.

While this is relatively harmless, there’s an important question to be asked: when is satire satire and not fake news?

Satire or Fake News?

Along with his denouncement of mainstream media, Trump also lashed out at the Saturday Night Live skit featuring Alec Baldwin.

 

Watched Saturday Night Live hit job on me.Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016

On top of that, there are plenty of news satire sits such as The Onion and our very own, The Betoota Advocate. However, detecting satire may be a lost art form. The New York Times reported that China’s Reference News published a satirical article from the Borowitz Report, legitimately claiming that Trump ordered all White House phones to be covered in tin foils.

Source: The Washington Post

Why does it matter?

Satire has long played an important role in democracy- it subverts and questions authority. It also is accessible, and easily digestible, especially for millennials in the forms of memes, commentaries, and articles. Conflating ‘fake news’ with satire leaves an entire generation disillusioned, discouraging them from engaging in politics and debates.

In an era of post-truth, w need to better equip people with the necessary skills and tools to distinguish satire from fake news. This is why media literacy is so important.

Next in the series- Art of Conning: Actual Fake News

 

Art of Conning: Manipulation

The second part of this series will look at what we all think of when it comes to fake news: manipulation.

Manipulating Audio, Video, or Image

When we think of fake news, we think of [badly] photoshopped images or videos. Remember when Donald Trump, Jr. instagrammed this [badly] edited poll to show his dad winning?

It’s definitely not the Photoshop magic wand tool with smart select

While stuff like these are easy to spot, technology is advancing and the tools to manipulate images, audios, and videos are becoming more sophisticated. In fact, we aren’t actually that smart to identify manipulated images.

See if you can spot the real image used in the study:

Fake Profiles

After major events, especially tragic ones, photo collages of victims or missing people have become common practice on social media. However, these photos can be hoaxes and are often shared by well-meaning people.

Following the shooting in Santa Fe, people created fake profiles of the shooter to fit their political narrative. Some presented him as a Trump supporter and others pinned him as a Democrat.

That hat is totally legit, guys

Gone are the days of badly photoshopped images and memes, and we’ve now entered the era of ‘deep fakes‘. Barack Obama can be made to lipsync. Donald Trump’s face can be manipulated. Yet our media literacy and skills to spot what is fake and manipulated hasn’t caught up with technology.

 

The real image was A. by the way  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Next in the series- Art of Conning: PR stunts and Satire

-Maria

Art of Conning: A Half-Truth

 

We all think we’re pretty smart enough not to believe that weird article your grandma shared on Facebook.

Ok, Grandma

Source: Imgur

Thing is, fake news isn’t always that easy to spot. Sign in to any social media and the endless scrolling overwhelms you with huge amounts of information. On top of that, fake news spread quickly online, and before you can even fact check one article someone’s already got their pitchforks ready.

So, beyond obviously fake and manipulated photos/videos, how are you being conned online? This series will look at the ways were being deceived online by fake news when we least suspect it.

The first part of this series looks at how fake news deceive even the most media literate of us- when something real and true is presented as a lie.

When the Truth becomes a Lie

With millions of photos and videos being shared everyday, the Internet provides a rich database of content. Content that can easily be misinterpreted or decontextualised. According to a research by the Visual Social Media Lab, 30 percent of problematic photos are real, but out-of-context, photos.

During September 2017, a Facebook post claimed that the following video was Hurricane Irma tearing through Antigua and Barbuda.

 

This video wasn’t even shot in the Carribean. It was actually from April 2016, during a tornado in Dolores, Uruguay.

 

A Half-Truth

A half-truth is defined as a statement that contains elements of the truth, but is deceptive in nature.

In January 2018, Donald Trump, tweeted that Black Unemployment was at its lowest due to his policies.

Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2018

He isn’t technically wrong. Black unemployment was at record low, but the rate has been in decline since 2010.

Source: politifact

This is precisely what is problematic, and potentially terrifying, about fake news. We often see truth and facts as the means to combat fake news. But what happens when truth can be manipulated and presented as a lie? Who do we trust then?

Next in the series- Art of Conning: Manipulation

-Maria

Google, I thought you were my friend

Why Fake News isn’t that Easy to Spot

You could say fake news or edited images as easy to spot: they’re often exaggerated, bizarre and totally unrealistic.

Melania Trump having a body double? Lizard people disguised as real humans and are planning for world domination?

Source: Giphy.com

But the problem with fake news is that it isn’t always easy to spot.

Does the #Truth matter anymore?

Truth & Technology

In a Guardian article, Katherine Viner asks: In an age where social media news reporting has dominated over media institutions, and everyone has their facts, ‘does the truth matter any more?’

Source: Sébastien Thibault

Technology is rapidly developing. This isn’t necessarily good or bad. But what is worrying is whether or not we have the skills to adapt to it. In an age where attention, clicks, and data are the new economy, less than 40% of us actually go further than the headline, and read the article.