Notes by a co-founder //
I still remember the first times when the words ‘fake news’ put together. They were usually connected to something Donald Trump had said – either Trump accusing newspapers of misinformation, or vice versa. Then it gradually became a more apparent and widespread topic. Slowly, people began talking about media literacy, relevant public figures began expressing concern, schools began addressing the issue in their curriculum.
For a while, it still felt like a problem fairly removed from my world. I trusted the newspapers I read (probably, if I’m honest, because the people I trusted read them too – which says a lot about how our opinions are formed). I saw myself as a fairly well educated person, and I thought ‘fake news’ was mainly an issue for those who get informed on social media. That trust I had made me feel safe.
Then I moved to the UK. I started reading the ‘trusted’ British newspapers, and again felt safe and informed. That is, until I eventually got to articles about my country – a fairly large and relevant one. I had been born and raised there, explored all its corners and studied its history, sociology and politics for many years in university. Compared to the general British audience, I was an expert. To my surprise, however, it became clear to me that even the most well-established British newspapers sometimes spread misinformation about it. It came in different shapes and forms. Sometimes the information was simply false, and sometimes presented through a limited and misleading perspective. There was often no concrete ‘information’, but rather value judgements based on widespread assumptions and not really backed by facts. Sometimes, even, the misinformation was hidden in seemingly hand-selected images that didn’t speak to the reality I knew and reinforced inaccurate stereotypes.
I was puzzled. Could there really be some kind of conspiracy? After digging deeper, I realised this was actually a much broader and complex problem. I did find fairly extensive public evidence connecting newspapers to politicians, businessmen and institutions all around the world. Those connections, appointed by the Leveson Inquiry, for example, made it clear that news stories often do have an agenda. But, mostly, in our digital world of free and unlimited information, I realised newspapers need to publish fast, protect their audience and write shiny headlines to win clicks, simply lacking the resources to thoroughly check all that they publish. Just like us and any other human beings, their journalists also have unconscious biases (see more about our biased opinions) and political preferences (see how are our opinions formed), and are mostly passing forward content made by other sources that aren’t always properly verified (and might just feel right to them). More than that, they might not really be interested in fully verifying those stories when they corroborate their preconceptions (see why people lie).
Newspapers and journalists themselves acknowledge those issues as some of the main challenges to producing good quality content. The acclaimed journalist Christina Nicholson, for example, says newspapers often need to resort to third-party contributors and recalls how she used to write articles for a major US publication that were published, in her own words, “without any review.”
Still, most people are not willing to hear it. When I tried to warn people about the misinformation I read, most of them quickly dismissed me – they thought I was being self-interested, or informed by unreliable sources and faulty statistics (let’s be honest, chances are you too were a little suspicious when you read this). I can’t really blame them, because up until that moment I had always done the same. They, too, thought they lived in a safe and informed world built by their trusted media, and wanted to protect that sense of stability. They too thought ‘fake news’ was a problem reserved to ‘flat-earthers’ on social media and the political opposition. Admitting that one piece of information published by a trusted source was simply wrong was admitting a very hard truth: that we can’t really trust what we read, even when it is published by the most reliable newspapers (see how we sometimes want to protect the stories we’re told, especially when the storytelling benefits us). Of course, some newspapers are more committed to the truth than others, and there are ways of verifying whether the information we’re reading can be trusted (see how to avoid misinformation), but we should never trust blindly – no matter where the story is published.
“How could I really trust anything? How could I make sure I wasn’t just consuming stereotypes, distorted opinions and politically-motivated disinformation which would ultimately lead me to support the wrong people and the wrong causes?”
That realisation entirely changed my perspective. I could easily spot misinformation about my home country only because I knew it so well – but what about all the other information I consumed on a daily basis? How could I really trust anything? How could I make sure I wasn’t just consuming stereotypes, distorted opinions and politically-motivated disinformation which would ultimately lead me to support the wrong people and the wrong causes?
We often forget that public opinion is the ultimate sovereign, and that it can be shaped by one thing only: information. Storytelling is therefore a vigorous and largely underestimated power, and ill-intentioned stories can – and have – lead society down towards very dark paths.
There are four critical obstacles to fighting misinformation. The first one is that no one can possibly have the time or energy to extensively investigate and double-check absolutely everything at all times. The second is that it is really hard to prove misinformation as most of it is not just simple lies (see Is fake news really fake?), but rather fragments of the truth selected to mislead us – and those fact-checking it are also people, with their own biases (as MIT Director Sinan Aral poses, “who checks the fact-checkers?”). The third is that most of those checks come after misinformation has already been spread. Finally, the fourth is that, even if we could systematically prove misinformation, we should be extremely careful creating tools to actively punish it as those very same tools can easily become tools of censorship and thought control.
Any structural solution to the misinformation crisis must address those obstacles. It needs to be fast and work at large scale to keep up with the daily bombarding of information. Fact-checkers are great to spot plainly false information and are a key part of the solution, but they take a long time to investigate news and can only cover a handful at a time. The solution can also not be based on simply separating truth from lies (because most misleading information actually uses fragments of the truth to mislead us), but rather assess contextually and causality to identify biases. Perhaps the hardest part, it should ideally not be done by one person or a specific group of people, as they will always have some degree of bias, but rather by a combination of objective rules applied agnostically and a broader collective of readers. That solution needs to be available at the same time that we’re exposed to misinformation, to protect us from its negative impact. Finally, it should offer a way to hold accountable without silencing or, better yet, a positive reward to those striving to produce good quality content.
Beehive News was designed with that solution in mind. It assesses thousands of articles daily and in real time, published by diverse newspapers from all sides of political spectrum spread across the world. Those articles are grouped together by topic so readers can easily choose the most reliable ones to read. Ratings are done by unbiased algorithms that separate fact-based contextual articles from emotionally-charged news, complemented by a large and smartly organised collective of people: all readers can contribute to ratings, but those who read more and a more balanced mix of news have more weight (just like in a hive, each does their part pollinating the world with better content). Those ratings are not binary – they don’t label articles as true or false, biased or unbiased – but rather offer a scale of trustworthiness, or the likelihood that an article can be trusted. By doing that, Beehive News also creates a mechanism of accountability that directs resources to those producing good quality content, and thus sponsors good-quality journalism and fosters financial sustainability in the industry once again.
Beehive News is a fully independent and purpose-driven organisation, not in any way connected to any newspapers, corporations or political parties. It was idealised, developed and tested by strategy advisors, misinformation-specialised journalists, psychologists and a range of other professionals that came together over the years to study the signs of misinformation and the alternatives to overcome this immense contemporary problem – many as volunteers and some, like me, leaving everything behind to dedicate to this cause.
Of course, even Beehive News will come under scrutiny. Not only is this fine, but an inherent part of the democratic process. Whereas we won’t disclose the exact rules behind our algorithms to prevent players from cheating the system, we will always be entirely open about the objective criteria in them. After all, making good news is not a secret: objective, fact-based articles that aren’t emotionally charged, provide context and transparency for their facts and numbers and sufficiently demonstrate causality will always score higher.
Join the hive today using the buttons below and become you too an active collaborator of a world where we can trust information.
