And it is with gratitude to the Berkman Klein team

and to Urs Gasser, particularly, that I

say, welcome to a discussion that I

promise will have answers--

at least suggestions-- as well as, oh my gosh!

What do we do?

So "fake news" is a phrase that, now, no one

is quite sure what it means.

But we're all worried about it.

And we will spend a little bit of time talking about,

what do we mean by it?

What has it come to mean?

But we're going to spend most of the time together talking

about, what are tools that are available or could be made

available to help people sort through the floods

of information and the democratization of access

to information that makes it very hard to know what's true

and what's not true.

And then, of course, there's not anything new at all

about propaganda and lies.

We've always had them.

Now we just have more access to them.

So one of my favorite cartoons shows

in the antique world of Xerox machines, someone

going to the Xerox machine and making a copy of something

and saying, send it to the world!

Now, at the time, that was a funny cartoon.

But now, with the internet and digital possibilities,

anybody can send anything, basically, to the world.

And I think that's the context that we're

going to be addressing.

I will say something briefly about each person

when I introduce them.

And I'm immediately turning to J. Nathan Matias, who

is very importantly involved in the Berkman Klein Center

for Internet and Society here.

And he's also involved in the MIT Center for Civic Media.

And he's a PhD candidate at MIT.

And he's going to kick us off.

What do we mean when we say fake news?

What do you mean?

J. NATHAN MATIAS: So when people think about fake news,

we often look back to that moment

when Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed did this amazing report

about Macedonian teenagers who were creating fake articles

and earning thousands of dollars a month.

In fact, one of my favorite fake news headlines is, quote,

"After election, Obama passes executive order

banning all fake news outlets."

Which, of course, was itself fake news.

But the reality is much more complex.

It's much more common to see something

like a recent Breitbart article entitled

"California's recipe for voter fraud on a massive scale."

There's recent work by Yochai Benkler and the folks

at the Media Cloud team here at Harvard

that shows that often what we get

are powerful political entities creating information

that has, maybe, a kernel of truth,

but it's really disinformation.

They mix truths with familiar falsehoods and logics

of the paranoid to make something that is not

just believable but something that, maybe,

when you go to Google, because they're

the only people writing about it,

you might feel like you're fact checking it.

Because you see 10 other links from

similarly-connected organizations saying

the same thing, even though it's something closer

to disinformation.

It goes beyond what can actually be claimed.

Because in the case, for example, of California,

their motor voter laws are things

that are similar to what other states have already

implemented.

And there's not really been evidence

that those kinds of things lead to voter fraud.

So there's this problem where we have a wide variety

of disinformation.

And people are concerned about how that information spreads

on social media.

There are fears about filter bubbles.

There are fears about the use of algorithms,

whether it's Google Search or whether it's

Facebook's news feed, that might influence

how these things spread.

And in my research, I've done work

to help understand what we as citizens can do

and what the public can do to better understand

those algorithms and influence how they work for the better.

MARTHA MINOW: Great.

We're going to hear more about that soon.

So An Xiao Mina is an expert on memes.

And she's a writer who looks at global internet and network

creativity.

And here, as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center,

she's studying language barriers in the technology stack,

because the interest in diverse communities

is a big development of her work.

She leads the product team at Meedan,

which is building digital tools for journalists

and translators.

And she co-founded Civic Beat, a research

collective focused on the creative side

of civic technology.

What do you mean by fake news?

AN XIAO MINA: So I think, when we

think about fake news, often--

this is my perspective as a product manager

working with journalists.

Often, in these communities, we always

use air-quotes, "fake news, fake news."

And in many ways, this is an implicit acknowledgement

that this phrase has come to mean so many things

to become almost meaningless.

It's an umbrella term for so many other words,

other phenomenon.

So the problem of fake news starts to seem intractable,

because it has such a diffuse meaning.

And I really appreciate Claire Wardle's breakdown

of fake news.

She looks at different types of fake news, anything from satire

and parody to misleading content to really manipulated content

and, then, fully-fabricated content,

and then also breaks down different motivations,

everything from parody to the goal of punking to actually

spreading propaganda.

And when we look at these different techniques,

when we really break down fake news,

we can start to think about different strategies

and different techniques for addressing

the wide variety of problems under this umbrella.

So I think there's a different range

of strategies for when an Onion article becomes cited as fact--

which is a frequent phenomenon, especially in global contexts

where a global newspaper, a newspaper outside of the US,

might misunderstand the context of The Onion

and then cite that as news--

versus our strategies for dealing

with state-sponsored propaganda botnets.

So as we break down these different motivations

and techniques, it also helps us think about breaking down

our strategies.

The other thing about their frameworks around fake news

is also the very word "fake news."

It orients us towards an orientation towards truth

and falsehood.

When often, the reason that things spread

is not about truth or falsehood but about affirmation.

We talk about the internet as an information superhighway.

It's one of the early metaphors for the internet.

In many ways, it's like an affirmation superhighway.

People are looking for validation of perspectives

and deeper cultural logic.

So I tend to agree with researcher Whitney Phillips.

Her framework around this is suggesting

that we think about it as folkloric news or folk news.

Because it orients us less towards truth and falsehood,

which is still important, but more towards motivations

for sharing and participation and how

that reinforces deeper cultural logics.

And I guess that's-- my third point here is,

as we think about solutions for this fake news problem,

it's also thinking about short-term and long-term

solutions.

In product management, we often think about,

what is the immediately addressable problem versus what

is the long-term issue here?

And this issue around cultural logics, I think,