Learn To Speak A Different Language! A Short Story About Facebook And Journalism

Many people will have seen this quote, attributed to a 1998 interview with Donald Trump in People Magazine, in their Facebook news feed. It's a great quote, but he never said it. It typifies the kind of fake news and misinformation that has plagued the 2016 election on an unprecedented scale. It's not surprising that the Oxford Dictionary has named "post-truth" its international word of the year, which it defines as an adjective...

"...relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

The deliberate making up of news stories to fool or entertain is nothing new. And there is fake news in mainstream media, too. But the arrival of social media has meant real and fictional stories are now presented in such a similar way that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the two apart.

We have always relied on many kinds of sources for our political news and information. Family, friends, news organizations, politicans certainly predate the internet. But whereas those are sources of information, social media provides the structure for political conversation. When Jenkins considered new media "to have the potential to extend civic participation, and to create new forms of deliberative democracy" in 2006, he probably would not have thought that ten years later president Obama warns that the ease with which people can promulgate fraudulent news stories on Facebook threatens basic democtratic principles.

The company is being accused of abdicating its responsibility to clamp down on fake news stories and counter the echo chamber that defined the US election. But is Facebook to blame for electing Trump? No. Is Facebook clear of responsibility? No. Are media free of responsibilty for what happens on Facebook? No. Can they cure the situation? No. Can they improve the situation? Yes.

What journalists can do

CUNY J-school professor Jeff Jarvis said it loud and clear:

"We [in media] should be going to the social platforms, speaking the language there, respecting their context, and using the devices they provide - memes, video, photos, dancing GIFs if that's what it takes - to bring journalistic value to the conversations that now occur without us."

As a journalist who gathered most of my news experience by working in social media I couldn't agree more. I don't want to set up Facebook or Google as the censors of the world. I don't want them to decide what is real and fake, true and false. I rather work on Facebook or Twitter not to promote my own damned stories but to find what people are curious, wrong, and confused about and to bring them journalism. I want to strengthen fact-checking, context, explanation, education, reporting, watch-dogging. Journalism should inform and empower the users, the citizens, the public to share smarter, more factual, more rational and reasonable information. They won't win all the wars but they will win some fact battles if only someone enable them.

Fact Check: Asylum Procedure in Austria

What Facebook can do

Facebook is not blameless. In the opinion of Jarvis, Facebook, too, has a problem. It can do much better to improve what people read and share - "to create not just a better experience but a better society." He states that Facebook has the means to show related content and with that it can show related fact-checking and debunking from reliable media sources. Imagine if, as you get ready to share a meme, Facebook says: "Hey, here's something you might want to see from a news organization showing this is not true." To make this happen, he suggests that Facebook hires an editor not to create content, and not just to do delas but to bring sense of public responsibility; to explain journalism to Facebook and Facebook to journalism.

So with the fake news floodgates now wide open, has the battle to contain it already been lost? No. There will always been fake news, lies, and politicans and they will all go together. Will Facebook's role in the news disappear? Unlikely. It's undeniable that Facebook is a massive source of news consumption, and according to a study by the Pew Research Center, it's only growing. More than 40 percent of American adults access news on the social media platform. Instead of complaining that Facebook doesn't send enough traffic to articles that countless consumers have demonstrated they don't want to read, media should flood it with true news and nurture it.  

Change we believe in? By Ibrahim Ghubbar

Since Obama’s campaign for the presidential elections 2008 the political sphere got to know the new way of political communication. The retail politics has moved from the streets to the worldwide web. With all the web 2.0 application it is possible to reach a huge public and to react immediately to the rival’s campaigns. Especially blogs are an easy way to connect with the electorate why many parties decide to use the new way of communication.

There are several elections going on right now in Europe. An important one will take place in the United Kingdom where the House of Commons and so a total new government will be elected. As all elections it shows the new age of political communication, e.g. the main parties have websites, online-communities and the use of the social networks as Facebook or MySpace. For the direct communication their candidates use Twitter to connect with their supporters. Nevertheless the numbers of followers on Twitter or Facebook create a bigger attention in the media. Another very important way are weblogs in which the parties and their candidates are not bonded to a fixed number of character (e.g. Twitter allows only 140 characters per message) and can write longer statements to certain issues and combine them with video clips, links to their online-channels (YouTube, MyVideo, etc.).

On May 6th the British people will vote a new parliament. The three main parties are the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party that is the current leading party in the House of Commons. It is the first election for the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown who became leader after Tony Blair’s resignation in 2007. Next to several TV debates of the three parties, there is a lot of online campaigning going on between the two main parties, Conservatives and Labour, which I would like to present.

“Labour-Central”- that is what the blogs (yes, plural!) by the Labour party are called. Surprisingly, there are no blogs. The site provides information about the on-going campaign and opportunities to support the party by giving donations or organising local events. Beside that the site forwards to other websites by the Labour party or its supporters. One of them is “Bloggers4Labour” that summarizes all labour-related blogs on one page, the other one is “Labourhome” within the “Labourspace” a reference to the social community MySpace. The first thing that one notice on Labourhome is the candidate pictures that is similar to the ones during the Obama/Biden-Campaign 08. The colour-scheme, the shadowed faces and the writings are almost the same. Same as Labourcentral the Labourhome offers its users to support the party on the networks of Twitter and Facebook or to join the online-community. In comparison Labourhome supports the user with more knowledge and articles about the campaign than the main page.

The “blue blog” is the Web2.0 home of the Conservative party. In a traditional blogspot-layout it greets its visitors with several topics, blog-entries and YouTube-Clips supporting to convince the electorate. Interestingly, every user is able to post a comment or blog-entry, not only the party itself (same thing is on Labour party).
A typical example for the copying-trend in political communication is the video clip on the website. What everyone notices immediately is the significant word “change” which was one of the leading points of the Obama/Biden campaign. It is a kind of irony due to the fact that the British Conservatives are more similar to the American Republicans than to the Democrats to whom Obama belongs.
Another very interesting thing is the time-clock in the movie. Two years ago a Dutch nationalists Geerd Wilders tried to offend the muslim community by creating a video-clip called “Fitna” that shows a cartoon with a bomb fuse on Mohamed’s head. The sound of a clock keeps on going in the background until in the end a black screen and the shatter of glass shall symbolize the detonation. Very similar to the end of the “Change”-clip. This is meant to be a comparison of the settings – not of the contents.

Terry Few said: “Through interaction with new media, knowledge easily passes between sources resulting in a form of collective intelligence”. So what is the political blogosphere? Obviously the political parties support by using Web 2.0 tools and writing Blogs the online-world with a pool of general knowledge and political education. On the other hand the user is able to join this by contributing its own statements. The sharing component of the blogosphere is the most important point of the political online-communication and the main reason why parties decide to use that way. So, the political blogosphere is a collecitve intelligence.
On the other hand it is a great example for the preconditions of produsage due to the fact that is has no hierachy or others strings attached. The fact is that through the online trend in political campaigns more people an especially the younger population deals more with political issues and the parties fulfill there job of contributing to the political education of the people. Thus, the political web 2.0 is defenitely a change that we can or should believe in.