Abstrict

In this study, the researchers examined the prevalence of fake news in the social media debates on Pakistani politics and society. The content analysis showed that both Twitter and Facebook carried a sizeable number of fake news relating to the politics and international affairs, military, economy and religion. Though more fake news was posted relating to politics and politicians, fake news stories relating to international relations got more likes and share as compared to other topics. Interestingly, even though the fake news was busted as fake and not genuine, these continued getting attention of people. This indicates the influence of cult following and populism on the Pakistani social media users. The findings of this study support the available scholarship on the prevalence of fake news, its popularity and spread in the Western world.

Keywords

Fake News, Pakistan, Politics and Democracy, Cult and Populism, Algorithm. 

Introduction

While social media is generally credited for promoting democratic debates, researchers and analysts have also cautioned against its undemocratic potential by promoting fake news especially in the pre and postelection scenarios (Faris, 2017; Gentzkow, 2017). The issue of fake news in the social media platforms first came to the limelight during the 2016 presidential elections in the US when Donald Trump was accused of generating a massive amount of fake news (Berinsky & Yamamoto, 2017). Researchers have analyzed the extent of fake news during the Brexit referendum, elections in Spain, Canada and France and found preponderance of uncorroborated information for political purposes (Greenhill, 2017; Berinsky & Yamamoto, 2017). During hearings in the US congress and EU parliament, Facebook and Twitter’s top management revealed that Pakistan was a target of fake news industry (BBC, 2018). This study has been undertaken to investigate the nature, extent and spread of fake news in Pakistan.

Defining Fake News

The phenomenon of Fake News is usually defined as spreading misinformation for political and economic gains in the form of propaganda entertainment (Khaldarova and Pantti, 2016), blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction (Berkowitz and Schwartz, 2016) and using satire to discuss public affairs (Berinsky and Yamamoto, 2017)”. Claire Wadle has divided fake news into seven categories. These include (a) false connection among visual and captions, headline and news content, facts and figures (b) false context— genuine content is presented in false context to confuse viewers (c) manipulated content—genuineinformation is used to deceive audiences (d) misleading content—use of information for misleading purposes through framing (e) imposter content—impersonation of genuine sources (f) fabricated content— false or incorrect content is designed in a specific way to deceive or harm and (g) satire/parody—use of folk-content to fool audiences but no intention to harm anyone (Wadle, 2017). Political communication researcher Bounegru (2017) argues that fake news can be entirely incorrect or containing misleading information that gets huge circulation due to its inherent persuasiveness. On the other hand, Miller and Dinan (2008) relate the concept of fake news with the five features of social media ecology. These include (a) the instant circulation of disinformation and misinformation via propagandist and user-generated content (b) increasing immediacy of news cycle (c) emotionally saturated online discussions (d) financial decomposition of legacy news and the (e) massive use of algorithm by the social media platforms.

Fake News is not Restricted to Social Media

While majority of researchers have investigated the presence of fake news in the social media platforms, the phenomenon is wide spread in traditional media as well Leveson (2012). In fact, the fake news industry can be traced back to the history of journalism itself (Mcstasy, 2017). Journalism historians have documented the propagandistic and jingoistic trends in media from the Two World Wars to the ensuing war on terror instead of doing objective and impartial reporting (Carruthers, 2011; Youngblood, 2017; Iqbal and Hussain, 2018). Similarly, President Trump has continuously criticized CNN as fake news and producing fabricated information against him (Mcstasy, 2017). In the case of Pakistan, two prominent TV anchors Dr Shahid Masood and Dr. Amir Liaqat Hussain were indicted by the Supreme Court for promoting false news. Dr. Shahid Masood while hosting a arrange of programs on the rape case of a teenage girl exhorted the Chief Justice to take notice of the group of organized crimes having links with the government. When the Court took action and asked the anchor to present evidence, he could furnish a single event. The court accused him of spreading fake news and the anchor was barred from hosting the TV show. Likewise, the televangelist Dr. Amir Liaqat Hussain accused his former employer Mr. Shakeel Rehman, owner of Jang Group of blasphemy and conducted a series of programs in which the anchor claimed he had enough evidence. When Mr. Rehman sued him in court, the anchor could not furnish evidence and was sentenced to jail. 

Understating the Mechanism of Fake News

Algorithms determine the functioning of social media. Algorithms are computerized based programs that record the online history of social media users and decide on the basis of a set of ranking standards which options to prioritize to over others (Ghonim, 2017). Due to the huge amount of information on the social media networks with millions of posts uploaded every second, algorithms determine which content to present to the particular user. The online activities of the three billion social media users hailing from all parts of the world are monitored, recorded and sold to big corporations who use it for strategic, economic and political purposes (Ghonim, 2017). These algorithms are very much integrated to the needs and requirements of modern life and keep data about political and societal beliefs, our social interaction, financial management, our shopping and selection options and information gratifications. These data storage algorithms identify the target groups and bombard with a lot of information. Since most of the individuals usually keep like-minded people as friends in the online platforms to retain cognitive consistency, the incoming information is assessed through the perspective of group-level shared narratives rather than to be put to critical analysis (Menczer, 2016). In this scenario, the available online climate of opinion determines the relative falsity of information. Since all the members of a group behave almost identically, the fake news are usually construed as true. In a more detailed analysis, Swire (2017) studied the two basic properties of human receptivity and interpretation: First, source credibility has strong impact on social interpretation of specific information related to any event. People trust the information coming from well-known and familiar sources, more specifically, they accept the information coming from the sources align with their world-view. Second, humans seek only biased information: humans receive information only from the sources, which confirm or comprehend their existing beliefs. Individuals accept only that information, which confirms their prior views and ignore information coming from unfamiliar or opposition sources (Sunstein & Bobadilla-Suarez, 2016). Fake news spread from sources to the end users through a strong ecosystem of social media bots and websites. Significant features that keep the individuals engaging on the social media are including ease of sharing content, reproducing parallel content, tagging a large number of people, sharing viewpoint frequently and getting instant feedback, extensive outreach and many more factors facilitate the manipulation of information and become the powerful source of spreading misinformation across the world (Menczer, 2016). Once the fake news producing individuals and organizations get approval from the target audiences, they intensify their activities to attract even larger audience (Oliveira et al, 2017) which often lead to overpowering the temporal content and making the consumers laggard to the social bots (Ferrara & Varol, 2017). The social bots are structured to amplify the outreach of fake news (Shao, 2016) and extensively exploit our defenselessness that stems from our social biases and cognitive processes (Ratkiewicz, 2011). Contrary to the above more technical explanations, McStay (2016) takes a more psychological approach to discuss the phenomenon of fake news. He argues that fake news is directly concerned with the economics of emotions. Human emotions are used to grab attention that generates advertising revenues. The ability to understand moods, emotions and feelings in ecosystem of communication is rapidly growing through biofeedback and online technologies that store, observe, record and assess our emotions. Mcstay (2016) terms it empathetic media because it has spawned many aspects of virtual life and has raised mediated emotional standards of human life—which is increasingly controlled by virtual reality, voice analytics, biosensors, augmented reality, facial coding and sentimental analysis. According to Metzger and Flanagn (2010), producers of fake news usually present an abundance of information irrespective of their popularity. The false information is mixed with accurate content to give evidence of complete accuracy and complicate the process of distinguishing misinformation from valid information. Though oblivious, the more one is politically active on social media, the more he or she is sharing fake news (Metzger & Flanagin, 2010). 

Democracy, Social Media and Fake News

While there is almost an academic consensus on the crucial role of media to promote democratic culture, researchers have cautioned against the media conglomerates whose financial interests were eroding the quality of democracy (Herman and Chomsky, 2010; Lynch and Galtung, 2010; Youngblood, 2017). With the advent of social media, there was a sigh of relief that power structures that dominated the traditional media would not be able to pressurize the people-driven media. This optimism has now been put to test in the face of cyber-attacks and the fake news industry that was first identified in 2010 but proved in 2016 during the US presidential elections. Political communication researchers like Gentzkow (2017) and Faris (2017) in their detailed studies have shown that despite presence of huge amount of quality information on the social media, fake industry has successfully penetrated the public domains. They lament that in this maze of information, the common people are in disarray to find facts separated from fiction and misinformation. Berinsky and Yamamoto (2017) argue that there hardly exists a public forum and opinion which is not adulterated by fake news which obviously has negative effects on quality of democracy. Building on the same argument, another political communication researcher Greenhill (2017) noted that out of the three billion people using social media, majority of them were victims of fake news. He maintains that the proliferation of misinformation posed serious threats to political discourses in the democratic societies. Social media networks provide open-mic options to anyone who wants to attract hisfollowers which obviously allows small number of people who were technically equipped to proliferate a huge volume of false information and “fake news” (Fernbach, 2017. Swire (2017) believes fake news are very effective in making the opinion of the people because of the propensity to follow informative and like- minded people which facilitate the algorithm, filter-bubble, and echo chamber. In social media isolated groups people tend to combat conflicting ideas with the help of content coming from the like-minded individuals sharing the same bias. These strategies enable discriminatory and inflammatory information to go viral and enter in the public discourses (Swire, 2017). During different events in US, UK, France, Spain and India, researchers have found that populist leaders effectively engaged the common people through rhetoric, emotional appeals and fake news (Metzger and Flanagin, 2017; Sunstein and Bobadilla-Suarez, 2016; Greenhill, 2017). These researchers believe that the ubiquitous social media has facilitated targeting the required populace for lobbies, advertisers and politicians through fabricated and orchestrated political strategic campaigns to achieve political and military goals. Taking cognizance of the immense news industry in the US, which thrived during the US presidential elections and facilitated Donald Trump (Silverman, 2016), the governments in UK and Germany took a number of steps to stem its flow in their countries. German government came up with legislation for fine of up to 50 million Euros to those social media organizations, which refuse to remove hate speech, fake news and other hateful or illegal content. Similarly, European Union imposed a fine of 4.3 billion dollars on Google for violating EU competition rules and monopolization of Android-based operating system (Xinhua, 2018). Other researchers like (El-Sharawy, 2016; Miller & Dinan, 2008; Kirby, 2016; Tynan, 2016) believe that the real motive of fake new industry is not the political gains rather the commercial interests are supreme. These researchers argue that the fake news industry is like public relations firms and campaign specialists who specialize in utilizing social media to persuade the common people. However, they agree that false information, misinformation and propaganda are dangerous for public discourses and opinion— the bedrock of a democratic culture. In a seminal study, Mcstay (2017) attacked the prevalence of fake news which she argued was democratically and socially problematic on different three fronts: First, it produces wrongly informed public opinion because it goes uncorrected across the network and lead to present biased and misinformation. Second, the citizens are most likely to remain poorly informed in echo chambers—it happens because the misinformation is fed into the self-reinforcing automatic cognitive system. Echo chamber exists where beliefs, information and ideas are amplified by repetition and communication inside a system where opposite ideas do not exist. Third, the most vulnerable citizens become emotionally outraged as a result of continuously being fed fake news. Fake news most effectively circulates in closed communities (like in social media groups or pages) where inflammatory points are added to create hype against the factual news.Once created, fake news is extensively spread through social media by common people who believe in its veracity and share them with the massive public. Facebook is criticized most for spreading fake news. In UK in the 2017 general elections Facebook removed tens of thousands of UK-based accounts for suspicious activities. The social network companies also pledged to hire an extra three thousand moderators to view videos shared across its pages. This initiative came in response to rising concerns of British politicians claiming that social media provided different outlets where anybody can publish something without making cross check (Williamson, 2016). In Pakistan alone this year (2018), as many as 17 Satellite TV channels have been issued show cause notice by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) for airing fake news. Similar to the other regions of the world, Facebook and Twitter are the two most used platforms. A Global Digital Report published by The Express Tribune (2018) stated that as many as 3.2 billion people worldwide are using social media such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Twitter. Whereas in Pakistan alone, 35 million people which is about 18 percent of the total population, are using social media.This study attempts to analyze the number of fake news between July 2018 till September 2018 in the post elections times when political parties, activists and other groups massively used social media. Unlike the Western country, in Pakistan we do not have a systematic mechanism to sift the fake news from genuine news. Facebook authorities have recently launched fake news literacy campaign guiding the users how to fight fake news. In this regard, artificial intelligence is utilized which works on the basis of algorithmic technology while analyzing texture information in different dimensions. In this study, the researchers identified the fakeness through officials’ denials and newspaper reports. The following core research question is posed on the basis of fake news literature. R.Q.1: What is the extent of prevalence of fake news in Pakistan across a range of issues like politics, international relations, judiciary, military, economic and religion in the selected time period? 

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