Stopping Fake News

Abstract

When faced with a state-sponsored fake news campaign propagated over social media, in a process we dub “peer-to-peer propaganda,” a group of volunteer Ukrainian journalistic activists turned fact checking into a counter-propaganda weapon. We document the history of StopFake, describe its work practices, and situate them within the literatures on fact checking and online news practices. Our study of its work practices shows that StopFake employs the online media monitoring characteristic of modern journalism, but rather than imitating new stories it applies media literacy techniques to screen out fake news and inhibit its spread. StopFake evaluates news stories for signs of falsified evidence, such as manipulated or misrepresented images and quotes, whereas traditional fact-checking sites evaluate nuanced political claims but assume the accuracy of reporting. Drawing on work from science studies, we argue that attention of this kind to social processes demonstrates that scholars can acknowledge that narratives are socially constructed without having to treat all narratives as interchangeable.

KEYWORDS:

• fact checking
• fake news
• propaganda
• Russia
• trolling
• Ukraine
• virtual teams

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank our informants within StopFake, the anonymous reviewers, Lucas Graves for his comments on an earlier version of this article, Christine Evans for her insights into Soviet media, and Dean Tomas Lipinski for support given to this research by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Russian officials deny the existence of these trolls and investigators have been unable to trace the ownership of the front companies that employ them (Chen 2015). To distinguish between state and elite private interests is challenging in modern Russia, which was succinctly summarized within titles of recent books as a “kleptocracy” (Dawisha 2014) or “mafia state” (Harding 2011) in which only enterprises allied with the ruling elite are allowed to stay in business, while government officials earn huge sums as executives of nominally private businesses. Thus, the question of whether state accounts ultimately fund the trolls is less important than the observed reality that their messaging is closely coordinated with that of state-controlled broadcast and print media.

2. Agency Record, October 13, 2012 (http://www.tribunahoje.com/noticia/42601/brasil/2012/10/13/skinheads-fas-de-hitler-sao-detidos-apos-briga-em-sp.html).

3. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-photo-used-to-depict-almaty-scuffle/.

4. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-bukovinian-romanians-demand-autonomy/.

5. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/how-to-identity-a-fake/.

6. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-ukrainian-fighting-vehicle-entering-donetsk-with-a-swastika/.

7. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-jewish-people-are-leaving-kiev-because-of-the-anti-semitism-of-the-new-government/.

8. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-american-missiles-found-in-luhansk/.

9. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/lies-crucifixion-on-channel-one/ and http://www.stopfake.org/en/the-crucifixion-of-a-3-year-old-the-u-s-helped-kiev-shoot-down-flight-17-and-other-tales-the-kremlin-media-tell/.

10. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-the-infamous-heroine-of-the-slaviansk-boy-s-crucifixion-report-found-among-the-victims-of-the-explosion-in-donetsk/.

11. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-ukrainian-media-reports-on-starvation-in-russia/.