New challenge for first responders: Fake News

When discussing the online context of false information in today’s information age, the concept of false information driven by a motive of a deceptive agenda has existed for many decades in military warfare.10,11 Therefore, the strategies for countering false information with a malicious agenda in the online environment by either coordinated efforts of humans or bots could be informed by the offline environment as well.12

Problem
One of the biggest challenges public safety agencies and organizations face is how to reduce or eliminate the spread of false information especially as public demands for a response from these authorities increases. Social media can distribute news faster and to a wider audience than traditional news sources. However, that also means the potential for misinformation, false information, and rumors o spread and go viral is high.13 A factor that may impede first responders’ ability to mitigate and minimize the spread of misinformation, rumors, and false information is the decreasing public trust in government, media, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). While 2017 was a low point in terms of credibility of the media, the 2018 Edelman’s Trust Barometer showed trust in journalism jumped five points while trust in social media platforms dipped two points. In addition, the credibility of “a person like yourself” — often a source of news and information on social media — dipped to an all-time low in the study’s history. While this paper is focused on social media, responder agencies should be aware that many people still get their news primarily from television, which serves as an additional resource to counter false information.14,15

Solving the problem of how to reduce or eliminate the spread of false information requires understanding of the following questions: 

— What are the causes of misinformation, rumors, or false information, and what are its characteristics?  

— How does false information spread?   

— What are best practices to counter the spread of false information?  

This paper builds on real-world case studies of several incidents to explain and investigate answers to the aforementioned questions.

After discussing various aspects of the problem; offering case studies on events in which fake news played a part; listing recommendations for action; and highlighting the challenges the implementation of these recommendations face, the draft report concludes:

Conclusion
While rumors, misinformation, and false information continue, they cannot be entirely eliminated. Agencies can leverage the above proactive and preemptive measures to lessen the risks during disasters and emergencies as a result of misinformation, rumors, and false information. Some of the measures detailed in this report include mutual aid and partnerships with credentialed digital volunteers, pre-scripting messages, verification tactics, setting up a centralized web page, and more.

Agencies should consider testing and exercising with rumors, misinformation, and false information to help them determine which best practices will work best for their audience. The SMWGESDM’s [S&T’s Social Media Working Group for Emergency Services and Disaster. Management ] previous report on incorporating social media into exercises offers how-to guidance.

Social media is a continually changing topic, and while the tactics discussed in this paper are relevant now, the landscape keeps evolving and will continue to do so. In the future, the authors of this paper may add to this paper or create an external living document of references and resources that may be relevant for first responder agencies.

1 An early example of social media being used to share information is the website Friendster.com, which was launched in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster

2 Susan Coppess Pendleton. 1998. Rumor research revisited and expanded. Language & Communication, 18,1: 6986;. 4 Jiang, M., Cui, P., & Faloutsos, C. (2016). Suspicious behavior detection: Current trends and future directions. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 31(1), 31-39.

3 Starbird, K., Spiro, E., Edwards, I., Zhou, K., Maddock, J., & Narasimhan, S. (2016, May). Could This Be True?: I Think So! Expressed Uncertainty in Online Rumoring. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 360-371). ACM.

4 Bessi, A., & Ferrara, E. (2016). Social bots distort the 2016 US Presidential election online discussion. First Monday, 21(11).

5 Huang, Y. L., Starbird, K., Orand, M., Stanek, S. A., & Pedersen, H. T.(2015, February). Connected through crisis: Emotional proximity and the spread of misinformation online. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 969-980). ACM.

6 Gao, H., Hu, J., Wilson, C., Li, Z., Chen, Y., & Zhao, B. Y.(2010, November). Detecting and characterizing social spam campaigns. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement (pp. 35-47). ACM.

7 Mukherjee, A., Liu, B., & Glance, N. (2012, April). Spotting fake reviewer groups in consumer reviews. In Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 191-200). ACM.

8 Gupta, A., Lamba, H., & Kumaraguru, P. (2013, September). $1.00 per rt# bostonmarathon# prayforboston:

Analyzing fake content on twitter. In eCrime Researchers Summit (eCRS), 2013 (pp. 1-12). IEEE.

9 Allendorfer, W. H., & Herring, S. C.(2015). ISIS vs. the US government: A war of online video propaganda. First Monday, 20(12).

10 Whaley, B. (1982). Toward a general theory of deception. The Journal of Strategic Studies, 5(1), 178-192.

11 Holt, T. (2010). The deceivers: Allied military deception in the Second World War. Simon and Schuster.

12 A computer program that performs automatic repetitive tasks. https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/bot

13 Madhusree Mukerjee. “How Fake News Goes Viral – Here’s the Math.” Scientific American, July 14, 2017.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fake-news-goes-viral-mdash-heres-the-math/

14 Pew Research Center. “Pathways to News.” July 7, 2016. http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-tonews/

15 Catherine Graham. “The Viral Nature of Social Media Messages in Disaster.” January 31, 2018. https://www.slideshare.net/CatGraham/the-viral-nature-of-social-media-messages-in-disaster  18 Humanity Road Rumor Management Team Training June 20, 2016.

— Read more in Countering Misinformation, Rumors, and False Information on Social Media Before, During, and After Disasters and Emergencies, Pre-Decisional Draft (HSSTAC, 22 February 2018)