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On Tuesday night, reports abounded that Joe Biden had lost the state of Pennsylvania and that his new title as “incoming president” was at stake, writes The New York Times.
High-profile American right-wingers such as former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani helped dispel the rumors when they tweeted on Monday that the political news site Real Clear Politics had reverted to predicting that Joe Biden would win Pennsylvania. . It turned out to be wrong.
– This is not true. We have not announced a victory in Pennsylvania and it has not changed, wrote Real Clear Politics director Tom Bevan in Twitter.
The false information was collected by a verified YouTube account, and its video was viewed by around 900,000 in just twelve hours. Most of the traffic came from Facebook, according to the New York Times.
– He’s quite critical, says postdoctoral fellow in media studies Magnus Hoem Iversen from the University of Bergen in Dagbladet.
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Many reasons
Iversen explains that there are several reasons why Facebook and other channels cannot keep up with the false information that is being spread.
– First of all, this comes from a high political team. One tends to speak of fake news as something spread by the “stupid masses”, but here you see the main contributors to society. It’s no wonder this misinformation spreads when society’s leaders stand up and say so. It has a huge signal effect, he tells Dagbladet.
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Iversen also believes that Facebook does not currently have good enough technical solutions to filter out fake news. The question is whether they want to or not.
– It is difficult to create good technical solutions to do this, but it is not impossible. If Facebook had been very interested, it probably would have been done. But I doubt that Mark Zuckerberg wants to be seen as an editor at a news company, or as someone who has to regulate free speech. At the same time, Facebook does not benefit from being associated with a set of conspiracy theories, says Iversen.
Therefore, the numbers differ
Improvement
He adds, however, that there has been an improvement. During the election campaign and elections, Twitter and Facebook have attached links to official election information and contextualized posts from, among others, Donald Trump.
– The conversation has changed a bit. Twitter is the most visible. I wouldn’t call it censorship, but they contextualize. They have started behaving a bit more like publishers. But this is symbolic, and the problem of spreading false information has many elements, requiring even more solutions, he says.
Landscaping company makes Trump’s mistake
– Pretty dramatic
Iversen believes that fake news is easier to spread now than before, and that it can be difficult to visually distinguish between a news story from a traditional media house and something “muffens.”
– Then there is also the question of why do people choose to share. It may have to do with political affiliation to a party. We tend to like and share what our worldview confirms. If you think it would have been good for Trump to have won Pennsylvania, you are probably more tempted to share that “news.”
Iversen says that, in the long run, the dissemination of false information and its legitimacy from a high level can have critical consequences for democracy.
– It can weaken the legitimacy of elections and the legitimacy of the electoral system, that is, democracy. It’s a bit difficult to see in the short term, but if this happens, it can have major long-term consequences. All the American experts echo this, but what is happening now is quite dramatic, he says.
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