By Alissa de Carbonnel -
The European Union has called on Facebook and other platforms to invest more in fact-checking, but a new study shows those efforts may rarely reach the communities worst affected by fake news.
The analysis by big-data firm Alto Data Analytics over a three-month period ahead of this year’s EU elections casts doubt on the effectiveness of fact-checking even though demand for it is growing.
Facebook has been under fire since Russia used it to influence the election that brought Donald Trump to power. The company quadrupled the number of fact-checking groups it works with worldwide over the last year and its subsidiary WhatsApp launched its first fact-checking service.
The EU, which has expanded its own fact-checking team, urged online platforms to take greater action or risk regulation.
Fact-checkers are often journalists who set up non-profits or work at mainstream media outlets to scour the web for viral falsehoods. Their rebuttals in the form of articles, blog posts and Tweets seek to explain how statements fail to hold up to scrutiny, images are doctored or videos are taken out of context.
But there is little independent research on their success in debunking fake news or prevent people from sharing it.
“The biggest problem is that we have very little data ... on the efficacy of various fact-checking initiatives,” said Nahema Marchal, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.
“We know from a research perspective that fact-checking isn’t always as efficient as we might think,” she said.
Alto looked at more than two dozen fact-checking groups in five EU nations and found they had a minimal online presence - making up between 0.1per cent and 0.3per cent of the total number of retweets, replies, and mentions analysed on Twitter from December to March.
The Alto study points to a problem fact-checkers have long suspected: they are often preaching to the choir.
It found that online communities most likely to be exposed to junk news in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland had little overlap with those sharing fact-checks.
PATCHWORK
The European Parliament election yielded a patchwork of results. The far-right made gains but so did liberal and green parties, leaving pro-European groups in control of the assembly.
The EU found no large-scale, cross-border attempts to sway voters but warned of hard-to-detect home-grown operations.
Alto analysed abnormal, hyperactive users making dozens of posts per day to deduce which political communities were most tainted by suspect posts in each country.
Less than 1per cent of users — mostly sympathetic to populist and far-right parties - generated around 10per cent of the total posts related to politics.
They flooded networks with anti-immigration and anti-establishment messages, Alto found in results that echoed separate studies by campaign group Avaaz and the Oxford Internet Institute on the run-up to the European election.
Fact-checkers, seeking to counter these messages, had little penetration in those same communities.
In Poland — where junk news made up 21per cent of traffic compared to an average of 4per cent circulating on Twitter in seven major European languages over one month before the vote, according to the Oxford study — content issued by fact-checkers was mainly shared among those opposed to the ruling Law and Justice party.
The most successful posts by six Polish fact-checkers scrutinised campaign finance, the murder of a prominent opposition politician and child abuse by the church.
Italy, where an anti-establishment government has been in power for a year, and Spain, where far-right newcomer Vox is challenging centre parties, also saw content from fact-checkers unevenly spread across political communities.
More than half of the retweets, mentions or replies to posts shared by seven Italian fact-checking groups — mostly related to immigration — came from users sympathetic to the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
French fact-checking groups, who are mostly embedded in mainstream media, fared better. Their content, which largely sought to debunk falsehoods about President Emmanuel Macron, was the most evenly distributed across different online communities. — Reuters
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