By David Jenkin
There is something very troubling about hoax news reports. Society’s trust in the media can easily be undermined through dishonesty, and in a tense political climate, that trust is all the more valuable. Yet South Africa is seeing a proliferation of hoax news online, with some even reaching viral levels despite lacking the slightest foundation of truth.
There are varying degrees of severity when it comes to inaccurate reporting, which can essentially be divided into three catagories – incompetent or lazy reporting recycling inaccuracies, sensational yet fictitious reports created purely to attract traffic (a form of clickbait), and the more malicious variety of politically-motivated slander.
The clickbait An obvious, but especially serious, example of a clickbait hoax was seen recently with a story that went viral in the week before the local elections, popping up on Facebook feeds around the country and abroad. The report alleged that 80 000 pre-marked ballot papers had been found by police in a routine traffic stop and two suspects had been arrested, suggesting that vote rigging was in progress. The story even featured invented quotes from non-existent police sources.
Many took the story at face value, illustrated by the roughly 20 000 likes it received on
Facebook, despite the site where it originally appeared applying the tags “gossip” or “satire” as a disclaimer. The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) was not amused and released a statement to remind the public that it was an offence under Section 69 of the Municipal Electoral Act for anyone to make intentionally false statements with the intention of disrupting or influencing an election.
The damage such reports can do in terms of the fear and mistrust created was neatly illustrated in a comment posted by a reader on a
Business Tech story that discredited the ballot report as a hoax. The user wrote “I dunno… I still believe this is a likely scenario to have happened that is now being covered up.”
Author and columnist, Tom Eaton,
likened such reports to “shouting ‘bomb!’ on a crowded bus.” He writes; “Nobody could believe that telling a lie, without irony, subtext or humour, to cause fear and potentially trigger a violent response, could ever qualify as satire. And yet that's what I'm seeing, almost every day, on the internet.”
The prospect of criminal charges from the IEC has not slowed the ‘gossip’ pedlars in question, who, at the time of publishing, were promoting a story about Jacob Zuma giving Oscar Pistorius a temporary pardon to compete in the Paralympics (including fake quotes from Zuma), Julius Malema accidentally voting for the wrong party, and another about Chinese restaurants in Pretoria being granted permission to sell dog meat.
The slander Eaton shares with his readers a darker theory of the forces at work behind the rise of counterfeit news: “For what it's worth, I believe that South Africa's current outbreak is more sinister than commercial click-baiting. I have a feeling that whoever is responsible is making a small fortune from clicks but a large fortune from powerful paymasters who have mandated them to muddy the waters with a campaign of intense, fairly co-ordinated disinformation.”
The hallmarks of a political agenda behind some dubious news sites is quite obvious. Most notable is the absence of negative stories about a specific political party, while others are over-represented. They present a heavily filtered version of the news, rich with emotive language, hyperbole and poor grammar. Most troubling are apparently deliberate efforts to re-word statements and frame events in a way that reflects a specific agenda.
One example of this can be seen in an article that brands DA leader Mmusi Maimane a liar in the headline, owing to the fact that he was not old enough to have voted for Nelson Mandela in 1994 as they alleged he had claimed to have done when addressing a crowd in Soweto in July. Other sources, however, reported that Maimane never mentioned the year in which he voted. From that same speech, IOL quoted him as saying, “I was 13 when Madiba was sworn in as president... When I had an opportunity to vote for the first time, I voted for Madiba.”
Some MPs quickly claimed that his statement made no sense, correctly pointing out that he would never have been old enough to vote for Nelson Mandela.
However, anyone reading between the lines of Maimane’s comments could understand this and know that wasn’t what he meant. The dubious online article thus appeared, crossing from the first category of poor journalism, recycling conjecture, into the third – slander.
He was quoted as saying: “I voted for Madiba in 1994 because the ANC was better when Nelson Mandela was at the helm of the party,” wording, with the inclusion of a date, which does not appear in any other report. Maimane himself later addressed the controversy, stating categorically that he had never said he voted in 1994.
Online journalism the accountable way Writing for
News24 on the rise of fake news, Jenna Etheridge explains that, whether or not fake news sites are exorcising their right to free speech with disseminating views, or poor attempts at satire, a lack of accountability is a big problem. “Most media houses subscribed to good journalistic practice through the press code and were accountable to complaints directed through the press ombudsman,” she writes. “Recourse was harder where sites were hosted on anonymous domains or blog sites.”
Irma Green, national group editor for Caxton’s community newspapers, says that even in an age where social media has made every citizen a potential ‘journalist’, newsrooms are responsible for fact-checking before reporting. “We should not be first, we should be right, is the motto. There are, however, more pressures on newsrooms today to break news. Using the information that is ‘out there’ can potentially lead to the publication of false reports,” she says.
Green concludes; “There is a lot of news out there in cyber space and the online user needs to make their own decision about which platforms they want to use or not use.”
Have you noticed an upsurge of hoax news online? Tell us in the comments below.
*Please note that we have not provided links to the controversial sites in question in an effort to avoid supplying them with traffic.
**Image courtesy of Tristan Schmurr