My View

So far on this blog, fake news and disinformation have been given a rather specific attention by focusing either on particular cases or particular studies; however, in this entry I will try to discuss fake news in the context of Slovakia in a more theoretical and conceptual manner. The aim is to evaluate the current situation and offer suggestions how to improve it in the future.

To begin with, I would like to address the question why are fake news and disinformation even relevant, or in a more extreme case, why are they dangerous? To me the most serious issue is that the existence of fake news in its principle authorizes the nonprofessional public to create, publish and share claims, whose final impact outweighs the impact of claims of the  professional public, no matter if the claims are true or not. Even more importantly, fake news authorizes nonprofessionals to cast judgments about authenticity of standard information produced by professionals. Moreover, fake news pose a direct threat to democracy as it gives interest groups a tool of manipulating the public opinion, which is subsequently reflected in the results of elections.

The second question to be addressed is who are the people that are most likely to incline towards acceptance of fake news? In the entry “What the Experts Say II” I mentioned that a study that analyzed the US presidential elections 2016 discovered that people aged over 65  years share almost seven times as many fake news posts on Facebook than people aged 18-29 (Guess, Nagler & Tucker, 2019). Although I have not found a similar study in the context of Slovakia, my personal observations of my acquaintances in Slovakia and those that I encountered in the online environment correspond with the findings of Guess and his colleagues. This hypothesis would of course require a further investigation. However, it is likely that it is not only the seniors that incline towards accepting disinformation; another demographic group worthy of investigation would be the minors, since although these people are not legally allowed to actively participate in the election process yet, they can still accept and share information regarding politics through social media and other channels of communication. Furthermore, minors, unlike people aged 18-29, may lack in experience regarding critical sorting of information, which might make them more vulnerable to disinformation and extremism.

Finally, the last question is how to fight fake news and disinformation? A study conducted by Marin Lessenski (2019) suggests that the most important factors that determine whether people will incline towards acceptance of fake news or not are education and freedom of media in a given country. The study unfortunately focused solely on 35 European countries; therefore, we can compare the situation in Slovakia only in the context of Europe. Nevertheless, this comparison suggests that Slovakia’s position here is relatively mediocre, meaning there are still areas of improvement. According to the results of the study, education seems to be a more serious issue than freedom of media; therefore, this should probably be the best place to start.

In conclusion, I expect fake news to become an even more serious issue in the future once various interest groups learn how to exploit it more effectively than so far. As a result, I believe it is our civic duty to help find ways of fighting disinformation in our respective countries and to protect the democratic values that are endangered as a consequence. In Slovakia the most prominent areas of improvement should be general education as well as education of media literacy and to pay special attention to seniors.

Reference

Guess, A., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. (2019). Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fakw news dissemination on Facebook. Science advances, 5(1), eaau4586. DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aau4586 

Lessenski, M. (2018). Common Sense Wanted: Resilience to ‘Post-Truth’and its Predictors in the New Media Literacy Index 2018. The Media Literacy Index. Retrieved from http://osi.bg/downloads/File/2018/MediaLiteracyIndex2018_publishENG.pdf