PART 4
THINK BEFORE YOU CLICK
With over 50,000 followers on Twitter, Timmy (not his real name) was considered a social media “influencer.”
He was subsequently hired by a public relations agency for its online marketing operations, promoting certain brands through Twitter.
“It’s just like advertising,” said Timmy in a 2016 interview with the Inquirer.
Things changed when the firm he worked for was tapped by the camp of a Presidential candidate in the 2016 elections.
At first, he said, it was just like building up the candidate’s image, and creating a sort of a “buzz” around the person.
But as the campaign heated up, they found it necessary to employ the so-called “troll tactics,” a divide and rule strategy meant to shape public opinion, propagandize, and ruin reputations.
Philippine trolls, he said, are “aggressive, angry, and looking for an argument.”
“That’s the very nature of a troll — you want to argue, you want to convince people even if you have to lie and fabricate things,” said Timmy who spoke to Inquirer on condition of anonymity.
Timmy worked in a suite of rented rooms set up like a call center operation, just one of several clusters spread throughout the country.
Each day, he said, the team leader would put up a board with a list of recent posts with the most “likes” and “shares” which had to be responded to.
The replies were “carefully worded” by the team’s designated writer before the “keyboard warriors” would post answers to the targeted posts by just copying and pasting the prepared response.
“We really worked at it, 24/7. The pay was very good. You could earn P2,000 to P3,000 a day just doing copy-paste,” recalls Timmy in the same
Inquirer interview.
“It’s social media mind conditioning. Our public relations firm was working with a psychologist. He really knows how to mind-condition the people, how to make lies seem like the truth, fabricated stories into fact. And the trolls spread it like rumor or gossip. You inject it into the real accounts, the real accounts will believe you and spread it to other people, and so on,” he added.
With the continuous spread of fake news, people are understandably confused on what contents to believe or to pass up.
The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) — a private, non-stock, non-profit foundation that promotes professional and ethical values in journalistic practice — came out with the following criteria to warn Internet users about the reliability of the contents they read on social media:
No Identification
Fake news sites, CMFR said, are presented as legitimate news providers that employ trained and credentialed reporters whose articles are reviewed and scrutinized by editors.
To determine the legitimacy of the news provider, CMFR said Internet users can look into the “About Us,” “Contact Us” page of websites to know about the site’s editorial team and staff, the physical address, telephone number, email address, its history, and other important information.
Without such information, no one could be held accountable for the content it holds.
“A news website should be accountable for what is posted on its page, and it starts with identifying the people behind it, as well as how they can be contacted so they can be asked to explain errors posted in their sites, among others,” the CMFR stated.
Unverified Collection Of Information
CMFR said websites that aggregate or collect someone else’s content found on social media do so without checking whether these are true or not.
Websites which aggregate and curate content nowadays do not only share content; but also create their own reports from other news sources.
These often do not verify information prior to quoting a news article, hence the possibility of spreading falsehood.
Another practice, the foundation said, is to pull out a factual report from mainstream news sources and to “spin it” — giving it an entirely new meaning.
Article Submission
News Sites
There are news websites that invite the public to contribute or send articles, videos or photos to be posted on the website regardless of its bias and whether it is a public relations piece or downright propaganda.
Since these do not satisfy any journalistic criteria, CMFR said they should be dismissed as a legitimate news source.
News Trending Sites
These sites pick up selectively from viral and trending posts in the internet. No other criteria govern the selection except that the content has gained a significant amount of following.
Some of these sites, CMFR noted, provide an excuse for possible errors, warning users with a disclaimer that their content has not been verified and is likely to be unreliable.
Satirical Websites
Satire uses “humor, irony, exaggeration and ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity, or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”
CMFR said that the material from satirical websites, the content of which is often taken literally by those who access them, despite tag lines and disclaimers that proclaim that they are satirical, or are meant to spoof or make fun of ideas, events and individuals, are also often used and reposted as if the contents were factually true.
“Many Filipino social media users cannot distinguish truth from satire,” it said.
CMFR said a Rappler Move.PH article “Why can’t many Filipinos tell truth from satire?” by Rappler Social Media producer Marguerite de Leon pointed out that “it’s possible, through a flawed educational system, that many Filipinos were not taught to think critically enough. And if you can’t think critically enough, grasping satire may be more difficult than it should be.”
Social media users
In 2015, the Asia Digital Marketing Association noted that the Philippines had the 2nd highest number of Internet users in Southeast Asia and was 6th in all of Asia with 44.2 million users.
Of these numbers, 94 percent have social media accounts which they use to share news and information.
While they help shape the image of the Philippines, these Filipino online users can also multiply possible errors by reposting and sharing flawed information, the CMFR said.
“It is important to read and be critical of material posted in certain sites before actually liking or sharing them on Facebook or Twitter. Sharing misinformation through social media can actually lead to the dumbing down of large numbers of people, and contribute to the further deterioration of democratic discourse,” it added.
Watchdog
Aside from CMFR, other organizations such as the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), and Vera Files as well as fact-checking blog Memebuster and Hoax-alert provide learning resources to fight fake news.
In June 2017, CMFR and NUJP launched Fakeblok, a Google Chrome plug-in that would sanitize Facebook newsfeeds from fake news sites. The online application has to be downloaded.
Once downloaded, it will tag a news website as fake based on the list of identified fake news websites.
The promising solution to fake news has been downloaded by almost 2,000 users of the web browser a month after it was released. It flagged over 2,000 fake news stories and prevented more than 1.6 million people from reading them.
Vera Files, for its part, has a fact-checking project that monitors false claims and misleading statements of public officials and other prominent personalities, and debunks them with factual evidence.
But the group, whose name Vera is derived from the Latin word for “truth,” can only do so much.
“The number of fake contents on social media has been so overwhelming that we could barely keep up with them all. What we are doing is just a small effort compared to the production of lies,” said Ellen Tordesillas, president of Vera Files.
While social media has benefited the populace, she said people also have to deal with its ill-effects.
“Social media is like a genie in a bottle. You can’t put it back in. We can’t do that,” Tordesillas told Cebu Daily News.
To beat fake news, she said people must know to decipher which items are worthy of belief and those that must be avoided.
“The primary solution to fake news is education which is long-term. People should know how to detect fake news. That is why I urge you to stop clicking and sharing any story without even knowing its veracity,” she said.
“Don’t take any story as authentic just because it rings a bell,” added Tordesillas. (To be continued)
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