Tag Archives: fake news

Linking higher education skills to everyday life through the ‘Fake or Real News?’ workshop 

Anna Hetherton, Access Officer for the Adult and Community strand of Birkbeck’s Access and Engagement department, shares details of the ‘Fake or Real News?’ Digital Information Skills Workshop that Access and Engagement have developed 

As the Adult & Community team in the Access and Engagement department of Birkbeck, it is our role to foster relationships with community partners and adult learning groups to provide relevant and fulfilling learning opportunities to those in the boroughs of Camden and Newham. By collaborating closely with these partners, we are able to combine key priorities of residents to create a useful and novel outreach project. 

A common theme identified across the adult learning sector was the number of adults who had been digitally upskilled, out of necessity, over the lockdown period. Many people were using smart phones and the internet for longer periods of time and in a different way than they had expected. Although many organisations had successfully stepped up to support people by providing technology and tutorials, there was still a gap in learning how to navigate information once people gained access to the online world.  

As the public moved life online, so did scammers, news outlets, retailers and businesses. With the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine there was an influx of information sharing, news, and of course – fake news. Partners identified that low vaccine uptake was a key priority within both target boroughs and was directly impacted by fake news.  

In response, the ‘Fake or Real News’ workshops were created. These workshops are light touch, drop-in sessions that address these themes, relate higher education to everyday life and give people tangible tools to help them navigate information online.  

A screenshot of a virtual meeting showing a slide asking the question 'Where do we get information from'

Participants discuss where we receive information in an online session.

 The importance of conversation
As with all our work, we take a holistic, strengths-based approach. The session does not aim to “give” participants a skill they are lacking, but to bring focus to a skill they use every day and give that skill recognition and a space to put it into practice.  

Using real life case studies and videos, participants practice the tangible steps to analysing a piece of information outlined the workshop. This always brings about thought provoking and fruitful discussions. Since September, we have run this workshop over ten times for different audiences, and no two discussions have been the same. Participants bring stories from their own lives to the table – perhaps a scam they came across or two conflicting articles on their newsfeed. This process sees participants complicate the world of online information, cultivating nuance. Personal anecdotes are valued and woven into the discussion as evidence and a key part of the workshop, showing attendees they are already critical thinkers. Even shy participants become involved with interactive elements like a quiz involving an online dating orangutan. As the workshop evolves, we have found new ways to spark conversation and debate in these sessions. 

A table on which lots of paper is spread. People sit around the table.

Is this misinformation or disinformation? Participants explore the different types of fake news.

One activity uses real life case studies of fake news and challenges the participants to think about the intention and impact of the pieces. Did they mean to cause harm? Were they trying to sell us something? The debate and the conflicting opinions urge participants to inadvertently think critically, challenge their own perceptions and put across their opinions in a logical structured way. 

Realising classroom skills
Ultimately, the goal of the Access and Engagement team is to break down the barriers people face to higher education. Through our Fake or Real News? workshops participants: 

  • Realise and practice their critical thinking skills 
  • Increase confidence in a classroom setting and group discussion 
  • Witness how lived experience belongs in classrooms, and in turn understand that learning is for everyone 
  • Consider next steps in learning and skill development 
  • (In some cases) engage with an online learning environment 
Four workshop participants smiling and holding their certificates of completion.

Participants receive their certificate of completion at the end of a workshop in Newham. 

During one workshop, a participant looked at the opening slides and stated, “I think this might be a bit beyond me”. They approached the content cautiously, but once the conversations and activities began, they realised that they could engage thoroughly, because their own experience and skillset was everything they needed. It is this shift in mindset that these workshops aim to achieve. By the end, this same participant said “brilliant… everyone should do this”. 

 

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Murdoch’s access to British prime minister shows media power still in hands of the few

This article was written by Dr Justin Schlosberg from Birkbeck’s Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies and Professor Des Freedman from Goldsmiths, University of London. It was originally published on The Conversation

In 1996, when the web was in its infancy, the American technology writer Nicholas Negroponte predicted that the coming digital revolution would facilitate a “cottage industry of information and entertainment providers”. Twenty years on and the story of “fake news”, which had wide currency during the US election, and was found emanating from basements, cafes and computer labs in the small Macedonian city of Veles would appear to prove Negroponte correct.

Except that we are living in an era when vast sections of our media, both “old” and “new”, are controlled by a tiny number of giant corporations, most of which dominate their particular sectors and face minimal competition.

Take the local news sector which only recently argued that an arbitration system as proposed by Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act would undermine plucky community-based titles and weaken local democracy. The problem is that five conglomerates account for 80% of all local newspaper titles while the remaining 58 publishers account for just 20% of titles.

Or take the UK’s supposedly competitive national newspaper market where five companies – largely presided over by tax exiles and media moguls – control 90% of daily circulation. If you take online readership into account, which bumps the Guardian up the rankings, then six companies fall into this category.

The situation is even more dire when it comes to the increasingly profitable digital world. Yes, it’s possible to argue that there is a cottage industry of, for example, app and video game developers. But distribution – the means by which content actually becomes available to consumers – is subject to serious bottlenecks because of the grip exerted by dominant companies.

So while there may be thousands of digital start-ups, they have to face the fact that Apple and Spotify alone account for 63% of the global streaming market and that Facebook is fast becoming the most popular digital platform for news. Meanwhile Google has some 90% of global desktop search and Google and Facebook together account for around two-thirds of all digital advertising in the US. According to the Financial Times, 85 cents of every dollar spent on digital advertising in America went to those two companies in the first quarter of last year – evidence of “a concentration of market power in two companies that not only own the playing field but are able to set the rules of the game as well”.

Setting the agenda

One of the great misconceptions, however, is that the bewildering market power wielded by the likes of Google and Facebook has come at the expense of the mainstream press and broadcasters. Established, reputable, professional news organisations and the “real news” that they produce, are apparently losing the ever evolving struggle for eyeballs.

It is a misconception because it conflates decline in the traditional market for news with a weakening of gate-keeping and the influence of editorial agendas. Although commercialism and agenda have always been closely intertwined, they have never been the same thing. Ironically, the power vacuum left by evaporating profits and retreating corporate investors in news publishers has put many newsrooms back in the hands of extremely wealthy individuals, from local oligarchs in Eastern Europe like Lajos Simicska in Hungary to dot.com billionaires such as Jeff Bezos.

Mainstream press dominated by six big companies who control 85% of uk circulation. Lenscap Photography

The missing piece of the puzzle is the complex ways in which Google, Facebook and Twitter are, if anything, reinforcing the agenda-setting power of the mainstream news brands. Google’s news algorithm, for instance, gives priority weighting to news providers with scale, volume and those who cover topics that are widely covered elsewhere.

The problem with fakery is not so much the cottage news industry, but dominant algorithms and ideologically polarised audiences that are supposedly enabling it to flourish. It is, after all, nothing new: the tabloid press will certainly not be remembered for being champions of truth-telling. The problem is more to do with the failure of those very news brands that Google considers “reliable sources” to offer a meaningful corrective to fakery – and, worse, their tendency to amplify it.

trump

As for the post-truth politics of Trump, it wasn’t his provocative and offensive “tweets” that enabled him to burst on to the mainstream political scene, but the way in which mainstream news networks were, from the outset, hanging on his every word. The more offensive, provocative, outlandish the comment – the bigger the lie – the more newsworthy it became. Twitter gave him a platform, but mainstream news provided the microphone, and it is amplification – the ability to be heard – that is the major currency of agenda power.

Media elite

We are, therefore, witnessing not the demise of concentrated “voice”, but its resurgence in more subtle ways.

murdoch

What can be done about this? We can hardly rely on our elected governments when they seem more comfortable to bow down to digital giants and media barons than to challenge them. For example, the latest research carried out by the Media Reform Coalition and the campaign group 38 Degrees shows that there has been an increase in the number of private meetings between representatives of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and government ministers ahead of Murdoch’s bid to take full control of Sky, the UK’s largest broadcaster.

In September 2016 alone, News Corp’s chief executive, Robert Thompson, had back-to-back meetings with the prime minister, Theresa May, the chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond, and the culture secretary, Karen Bradley. May even found time to meet with Murdoch that month during a one night trip to New York.

The major problem facing our democracy isn’t the subterranean digital activities of Macedonian teenagers corrupting a supposedly pure news environment. Instead, it’s the fact that we have a media culture that is dominated by billionaire proprietors and elite insiders and a political culture that is too fearful of this media power ever to challenge it. “Fake news” may be grabbing the headlines but we shouldn’t forget about the concentrated market power that has allowed it to thrive.The Conversation

 

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