1997 SPECIAL REPORT: "FAKE NEWS ON THE INTERNET"

Many of the early, optimistic assumptions about how the internet would create a public sphere with greater openness, transparency and accuracy have been battered by how it has actually been used and abused, according to Frank Pasquale, professor of law at the University of Maryland.
During a talk, The Automated Public Sphere, last week at Berlin’s digital culture festival Re:publica, Pasquale said that fake news stories, the spread of propaganda, secret sponsors behind what we see and read, and hashtag flooding (using hashtags to flood searches on a topic) had all damaged utopian ideas about the public benefits of the internet.
“We were told the internet would empower everyone and reduce the dominance of mainstream media, but it has also encouraged extremism,” he says. “It promised openness, but lets influence go unchecked and unmonitored” because it is difficult to figure out who is actually funding and supporting many websites.
He also notes that academic researchers have established that tens of thousands of posts to social-media sites during the American presidential election came from automated bots. Hundreds of fake stories were shared.
The use of so-called “dark ads” (promoted but unpublished posts, visible only to followers of a Facebook page) and ad personalisation directly targeted certain types of content to those “who are most susceptible to it” because such content and news stories appeared in an individual’s personal news feed – where a wider community could neither see the posts nor refute them.
“So, you can accelerate propaganda, as well as accelerate truth,” he says.

Видео 1997 SPECIAL REPORT: "FAKE NEWS ON THE INTERNET" канала Hezakya Newz & Films