You might be forgiven for thinking the fake news phenomenon is something driven only by mischievous Macedonian teenagers, Trump propagandists or unscrupulous money-makers, but it’s a problem dished out by UK newsbrands too, albeit in a slightly less sinister guise.
BuzzFeed UK’s politcial editor, Jim Waterson – whose team uncovered the origins of some of the worst fake news perpetrators during the US presidential elections, including the aforementioned Macedonian teenagers – said that what his team has found during its investigations was a high level of “hyper-partisan” and truth-stretching news from some of the UK’s best-known newsbrands, on both the right and the left.
Reviewing the different types of fake news during a debate at Ad Week Europe – a spectrum that spans satire and parody through to entirely fabricated content – Waterson said it was the middle-ground, where false connections are made, that was uncovered repeatedly by BuzzFeed and posed a significant problem for journalistic integrity and reader trust.
“In the UK, as far as I can tell, we don’t really have ‘fake news’, as in completely made-up stories going viral. What we have instead is a very crowded market of hyper-partisan newspapers whose online operations are already pretty good at doing this type of stuff.
“When we were doing research into fake news in the UK, on the back of our US team, we went into what is being shared, what is going viral and basically found that it was often the [Daily] Express [Daily] Mail or sometimes even the Independent which had an incredibly partisan headline which stretched facts to the absolute limit.
“That was our equivalent of fake news. The headlines didn’t really stand up to scrutiny. They’re not ‘Pope endorses Trump’ kind of stuff – it was all in that odd category of ‘bullshit news’.”
In UK political news in particular, Waterson said a single, unverified tweet was enough for many people to develop a story – despite no real fact checking taking place.
In response the fake news phenomenon, the BBC is now setting up a team to fact check and debunk fake news. James Montgomery, director, digital development at BBC News, said during Ad Week that he hopes it will add “renewed vigour” to what people say.
“We’re not trying to edit the Internet…but for our audience’s sake, we want to offer some sort of context and explain why it might not be true.”
Waterson added that those on the left of the political spectrum might like to think they are immune to being duped by fake news, but his team’s investigations suggest the opposite is true.
“A strange thing we’re noticing since Trump and Brexit is in the last couple of months there has been a massive up-tick in fake news on the left as people are increasingly looking for anything Trump has done wrong and believing anything they see in a headline.
“We’re increasingly seeing people on the left being tricked…We’re all gullible, no matter what sort of political persuasion you’re from.”
