Dissecting fact from fiction: Is there hope?

Sri Lanka may have never felt its impact more strongly as in the past couple of years

According to one study conducted in 2018, false news reached more people than the truth

It was not a phrase we were accustomed to several years ago, but ‘Fake News’ is today a force to be reckoned with. Misinformation, especially on social media is not a new phenomenon. However, Sri Lanka may have never felt its impact more strongly as in the past couple of years. Fake news spreads rapidly as it is often shared among known people, making the receiver more inclined to believe its content, researchers suggest. It has also been termed an epidemic, as clearly evident with the global spike of misinformation following the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only does it disseminate false information, half truths and deliberately ambiguous reports, fake news is now a global threat for democracies across the world.   

Fake news was perhaps made the most popular by none other than the US President Donald Trump himself. In fact ‘Fake News’ was named 2017’s word of the year by the Collins Dictionary. Their lexicographers stated that usage of the term had increased by 365% since 2016. Although it seemed like a distant problem for Sri Lanka during Trump’s initial bid for presidency, the 2018 Constitutional Crisis, the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic and most recently the political and economic crisis have revealed that Sri Lanka is equally susceptible to the dangers of misinformation. Today, the phrase has become a frequent feature in our own rhetoric.   

Worldwide, government agencies are attempting to gain visibility and trust through social media. But in the wake of data privacy scandals such as Cambridge, the public are less trusting of social media communications and suspicious of fake news stories.   

With the widespread dissemination of fake news in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks, Sri Lanka’s government attempted to introduce new laws to combat the problem. According to the proposed law, a five-year jail terms was sought for those disseminating hate speech and fake news on social media. Although the then Cabinet of Ministers approved this proposal, which also sought to fine offenders a sum of one million rupees, the proposal was never legislated. Furthermore the definitions of these two offences were never made public, sparking concerns over freedom of expression.  

In 2021, another Cabinet approval was granted to draft laws seeking to criminalize false and misleading online content based on a joint Cabinet paper presented by Justice Minister Ali Sabry and Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella.  

In June the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) announced that it formed a special team to take action against the dissemination of fake news especially on social media platforms. The Police Media Spokesperson said that as fake news was being widely circulated on social media during the crisis period, the CID were instructed to deploy a special team to monitor cyber space activity in relation to various political and social issues.  
Is fake news more appealing?

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that uncertainty over fake news continues to grow. Their research found that out of all the participants in the study, 63% agreed that the average person does not know how to tell good journalism from rumour or falsehoods. 59% agreed that it is becoming harder to tell if a piece of news was produced by a respected media organization. Nearly seven in ten, worry about false information or fake news being used as a weapon, the report said.  

According to one study conducted in 2018, false news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people.  

The study investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. The researchers classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications.   

The study found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust.   

The Sri Lankan scene
With the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act being used to make a spate of arrests of prominent anti-government activists recently, critics are now concerned that a vague interpretation of the term ‘fake news’ may be used against anti-establishment voices.   

According to a misinformation management project in Sri Lanka from July 2021 to December 2021, by the Sentinel Project, misinformation about the economic crisis was almost as prevalent as COVID-19-related misinformation. Common sub-themes included the foreign exchange crisis, national debt, taxes, rising living costs, prices of essential goods, and import restrictions. This demonstrated the public’s ignorance of issues concerning public finance and policies, as well as the general inaccessibility of lay-person-friendly economic information.  

Politically motivated false information about the government and the opposition was also widespread, particularly on Facebook meme pages and gossip websites, often tied to a statement or an action by the politician involved. False information targeting alternative political parties, such as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) or the National People’s Power (NPP), was a distinct sub-theme under the larger politically motivated false information umbrella, they found.  

Can the situation improve?
In an effort to counteract false information on COVID-19 and voting, in 2020, Facebook put limits on the number of people or groups, users could forward messages to, restricting it at five. Similar restrictions were put in place by WhatsApp earlier that year, preventing its more than two billion users from forwarding messages to more than five people at once. This move was made in response, in part, to more than a dozen deaths that Indian public officials have linked to false information that was spreading on the app. But controlling the dissemination of fake news and misinformation on social media platforms has also sparked crucial discussions about speech freedom and censorship.  

Economist David McAdams and other researchers recently examined ways to raise the standard of information shared on networks without putting any organization in charge of policing content and determining what is true and false in new research that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.  

In light of these difficulties, the researchers studied public policies that enhance social learning and informative content without requiring anybody to know or judge what is true. They focused on how individuals learn as a function of their networks when data is prone to mutation, intentional manipulation, and 
transmission failure.   

The scientists described how a person’s network’s depth and breadth affect learning. Increasing depth and breadth of a network increases the number of messages passed and therefore received. However, it also increases the number of distant sources, from which surviving messages are less accurate, more than it increases the number of nearby sources. “Our analysis shows how and when limiting the network can improve the accuracy of overall content without the need for censorship or message monitoring,” the researchers said.  

“If you limit sharing, you could also be limiting the spread of good information, so you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that doesn’t really help you,” McAdams states. “Our analysis explores how to strike that balance.”