Fake News is Easy

Pew has a new survey that looks at the ability of the average media reader to distinguish facts and opinions in articles.  What makes this important is the Information Warfare strategy to use statements in social media, backed up by news articles supporting the position, and extending the spin cycle by feeding both sources of information.  The Russians and Chinese both use similar methods to support their positions on such things as territories they have seized, political issues, economic matters, and undermining contrary positions.  Their techniques are different, but the end result is the same.

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Note from the survey:  "A new Pew Research Center survey of 5,035 U.S. adults examines a basic step in that process: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it."

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The Wall Street Journal makes that easy by putting commentary in an Opinion section, but many news outlets confuse the two by putting articles on the front page that should be in an identified opinion section.  Social media has no place for this kind of separation.  What complicates the whole thing is readers cannot tell the difference between opinion and fact.  News outlets reporting on the Pew study tended to focus on the 26% who could identify which statements were factual and which opinion, but the numbers were actually better in some ways than that number would indicate.  Identifying opinions was about 44% for some groups, though still less than half of the people who were studied.

When readers cannot tell the difference between fact and opinion, they put themselves at risk from writers who want to influence opinions in one direction, by any means necessary.  Facts matter, but only if the reader can accurately identify them.    What the data shows is that a higher number of people can tell the difference than that 26% would indicate, but the categories created by Pew showed something counter-intuitive:  that people who had high political awareness, were digitally savvy, and had less interest in news, actually did better on making the determination than those who distrusted the news media and were more interested in it.  Forty-three  percent could discover the opinions, but did less well on facts.