Fake News: A True History (2019) Movie Script
1
On September the 17th 1903, The
Daily Telegram shared a sad story
with its readers in
Clarksburg, West Virginia.
A dispute over a pet dog
between two immigrant miners
had led to a tragedy.
This programme contains
some strong language.
GUNSHOIt was one of the miners
who took the bullet,
a man called Mejk Swenekafew.
The next day, a rival publication,
The Clarksburg Daily News,
also printed this heart-rending
story of the dog and the shot Slav
but, in fact, they'd been
caught in a brilliant trap laid
by their competitor.
The Clarksburg Telegram had long
suspected The Clarksburg Daily News
of stealing their stories, so
they'd simply made this one up
and put it in as bait.
Just read the victim's name
backwards, "we fake news".
The ruse worked brilliantly.
So, none of it happened,
and no animals were harmed
in the faking of this story.
But what it does show us is
that fake news was a problem
long before our own
uncertain and confused times.
They are the fake,
fake, disgusting news.
In this programme, I
want to see if we can learn
any lessons about today's
fake news crisis from earlier eras,
when new media and new
technology led to new levels of lying.
It was vastly sensationalised
and overblown and it
had a sometimes
malign influence.
I'm heading to the nation that
pioneered mass-market news
in the 19th century, and
also the 21st-century's
information wars.
There's just so much
evil! I'm not trying to...
If you look up my name,
it's disgusting what appears.
And people get hurt
from these things.
I'm looking to history to figure
out what motivates fake news.
I am destroying America
one fake news article at a time.
From propaganda and paranoia...
It's easy to dress up fake news
to make it look as real as possible.
..to profit and politics.
President Trump is a
total and complete dipshit.
One thing I can promise
you, all the news coming
up in this programme will
be fake, and that's the truth.
Back in August 1835,
New Yorkers were thrilled
by a series of
newspaper articles
headlined "great
astronomical discoveries".
The reports described
how a scientist had built
the world's largest telescope
and trained it on the moon.
The surface of the moon was
clearly made of basaltic rock,
but profusely covered
with a flower of deepest red,
and there are herds
of miniature bison.
Those quadrupeds were
sometimes hunted by flying man-bats
and, naturally, the moon
was also home to unicorns.
At this point, dear viewer,
you may have rumbled
that this was fake news.
It's very easy, looking
back from the 21st century,
to feel smug about how much
smarter we are than our ancestors,
but remember, this was an age
of constant scientific invention
and new discoveries, and
it was years before man
would set foot on the moon.
That is, if you believe that
NASA mission DID go to the moon.
The story was serialised over six
days, with new revelations on each,
including some salacious
details about lunar lovemaking.
Crowds thronged here, to
the offices of the newspaper
that broke the story, eager for
each fresh new day's instalment.
One eyewitness commented on
the "almost universal impression
"and expression
of the multitude,
"that of confident wonder
and insatiable credence."
They were fooled!
Duping large numbers of
people all at the same time,
like this, had only
just become possible.
1830s New York was the birthplace
of modern mass-market news media,
and the moon story ran
in the world's first example
of what we'd call a tabloid.
A paper with a very
appropriate name.
I know, it's unthinkable that
any publication called The Sun
wouldn't be scrupulously
accurate in its reporting.
The New York Sun was a
product of new technology,
the steam-powered printing press,
and because the paper was cheaply
mass-produced, it was priced at
a sixth of the cost of most rivals,
just one cent, and,
in another innovation,
it was sold on the city streets.
The Sun offers a new kind
of news for a new readership,
working-class people, urban
people who didn't care about politics.
These are people who were not
used to having a newspaper central
to their lives. And The Sun gave
them news in a small, cheap format
that they could
just pick up and buy.
And did The Sun mind
what they printed was not
necessarily true?
Well, they didn't and
neither did their readers. Yup.
The Sun drew them
in as a kind of a game -
"Read this story,
decide for yourselves,
"it doesn't really matter."
What was more important was
people in the taverns and in the streets
were discussing it, "Did you see
that? Do you believe it or not?"
and then they would
have debates and fights,
and that was really
what it was all about.
The Sun claimed to have obtained
its facts about life on the moon
from an obscure scientific
journal. But after a week of "lunacy",
the New York Herald gleefully
printed a report of its own.
The Sun's source didn't exist.
They'd made the whole thing up.
The Sun, said its
rival newspaper,
"is impudent, unprincipled, mercenary
and low-bred", and worst of all,
"it tells untruths for money."
Can you believe it?
But The Sun was laughing
all the way to the bank.
With the moon story, it achieved
the highest circulation figures
on Earth, and spin-off
pamphlets and engravings
were hugely profitable, too.
Not bad for a paper that
was less than two years old.
It was the first great example
of one of the enduring motives
for faking news - lies sell.
The public doesn't
just want to be informed,
it also wants to be entertained.
It's also cheaper
to make things up,
rather than find things out,
which the proprietors
of America's
new popular press loved.
And they soon
discovered fake news
could help in the pursuit of...
BELL RINGS ..grander ambitions.
In the 1890s, Joseph Pulitzer
was the world's most
powerful media mogul.
This contemporary cartoon
shows the kind of news
with which he made his name.
Later in life, to atone
for this sensationalism,
he used some of the fortune
it had made him to fund
the Pulitzer Prize for
better-quality journalism.
Aspiring to similar wealth
and influence was a younger,
devilish rival, William
Randolph Hearst.
His name lives on to this
day, in a publishing empire
and in New York's Hearst
Tower, which his fortune paid for.
William Hearst imitated Joseph
Pulitzer's successful formula
of crime and celebrity, popular,
attention-grabbing stories
under lurid headlines, a
sort of 19th-century click bait,
but he also felt there
might be a market for stories
of adventure and patriotism.
What could really boost circulation,
he decided, was a good war.
During the 1890s, Cuban rebels
were fighting for independence
from their colonial rulers,
the Spanish Empire.
Hearst's New York Journal
called for a war on Spain,
and to drum up support
he sent staff to Cuba.
Among them, one of
America's leading illustrators,
Frederic Remington.
The artist spent much
of his time in Havana,
drinking cocktails in his hotel.
He telegraphed Hearst,
saying, "Everything is quiet,
"there's no trouble
here, there will be no war.
"I wish to return. Remington."
Hearst is reported to have
wired back, "Please remain.
"You furnish the pictures
and I'll furnish the war."
Although there's no proof
that this oft-repeated exchange
actually occurred, Remington did
produce a highly provocative image
of the sort his
proprietor demanded.
On February the 12th 1897,
Hearst's paper ran a story
about Spanish officials boarding
an American steamship and seizing
a woman they suspected of
spying for the Cuban rebels.
She was then strip-searched.
Pulitzer and Hearst were
in a race to the bottom,
and in this feature,
page two in the Journal,
Hearst had won.
This is titillation
masquerading as outrage
and, of course, the readers loved
it and there were serious questions
asked in Congress. But
what had actually happened
was nothing like
Remington's picture.
The woman hadn't been searched
on deck by a gang of rough men,
but in a private cabin by
one respectable older woman.
Hearst himself had changed
the crucial details of the report,
prompting the
journalist who filed it
to vow never to work
for the proprietor again.
Even the reporter thought
that he had gone too far.
But Hearst didn't care? Hearst
didn't care, Hearst never cared,
and Hearst loved stories
about ladies in danger,
about lustful and horrifying
foreigners of all kinds,
and he sent his reporters
there and kind of directed them
what kind of stories they
were supposed to get.
This paddle steamer isn't in Cuba,
by the way, it's on the Thames.
Less Havana, more Kingston.
Typical BBC - fake cruise.
Another Cuban
story, also set at sea,
was used by both Hearst and
Pulitzer to help tip America into war.
EXPLOSION
On February the 15th 1898,
an explosion ripped apart an
American warship called the Maine,
which had been
harboured near Havana,
causing the loss of 260 lives.
No evidence has ever been found
that the Spanish were responsible,
but in the papers, the
reality that it was probably
an accident got short shrift.
In the Journal, there's
no room for doubt.
"The destruction of the warship
Maine was the work of an enemy."
But there's a fantastic bit
of humbug in the small print.
This is very tiny.
It says, "The captain of the ship
and the consul general both urge
"that public opinion
be suspended
"until they've completed
their investigation."
Well, there's no chance
of that happening,
and everything here says "they
did it" and it's incredibly successful.
It's the first time the paper
sold more than a million copies.
MUSIC: The Stars
And Stripes Forever
Nine weeks later, Pulitzer
and Hearst got the war
they'd been clamouring for,
and America defeated the Spanish
Empire quickly and decisively.
The patriotic hysteria
whipped up by the press
had massive consequences.
1898 was the start of
the USA's ascendancy
into becoming a
global superpower,
yet the war that began all
this might never have happened
without the help of fake news.
The nation that unleashed the
power of fake news in the 19th century
is also where more recent
panic about the subject began.
TRUMP: It's fake
news, it's fake...
I'm telling you,
it's just fake news.
It was during the last race for
the White House that we started
hearing so much about fake news.
The winner's definition of the
term, however, parts company
with the usual meaning.
When President Trump
talks about fake news,
which he has done more or
less constantly since being elected
in 2016, what he means is
real news that he doesn't like.
Your organisation is terrible. I'm
not going to give you a question.
Can you state categorically...? You are fake news.
Sir... Go ahead. Can you state categorically that...?
In Trump's topsy-turvy world, by
denouncing real news as fake news,
he and his supporters allow
real fake news to flourish.
Confused? You're meant to be.
Trump tweets the
phrase regularly
as part of his war on
the mainstream media,
and a frequent target
is The New York Times.
Ironically, a paper that has long
been renowned for its accuracy
owes a massive debt to the
fake news crisis of the 1890s.
A man called Adolph Ochs was
so horrified by the sensationalism
of Pulitzer and Hearst,
he purchased The Times to
provide a more reliable alternative.
It's now run by ex-BBC
head Mark Thompson.
Adolph Ochs bought the
failing New York Times,
it really was failing in the
1890s, with a vision of a different
kind of journalism.
It was going to be accurate,
it was going to be serious,
it was going to be accompanied
by intelligent and civil opinion
from every perspective,
and it changed journalism.
His vision was an idealistic one,
but he made it work financially.
To the surprise of a very cynical
industry, there was a real call
for it, and the story of real news
has been a commercial success story
for most of the time.
But I'm interested because
real news is under attack.
At this moment in time, the
President's trying to define you
as fake news.
Yeah, it's a very interesting
and in some ways rather clever
little trope by Donald Trump that,
you know, you should doubt all news,
that all of this comes from some
agenda, and who's to say what's true
and what's not true? They're not
necessarily even trying to persuade
people to believe their version,
they're just trying to
cast doubt on all of it.
It's sort of an attack on the idea
that we communally share a view
of what might be true.
You could argue
that Donald Trump
and some of the other populist
leaders have decided that reality
may not suit their purpose,
and would therefore
like to cast doubt on it.
In the end, the best journalism
is grounded on an idea
that there are facts, that
things actually happen,
and that although, of course,
every journalist brings some
preconceptions to the
party, notwithstanding that,
you can do a pretty good job
of reflecting the world as it is.
When it comes to
capturing the world as it is,
the written word is only
one of the available tools.
Images have also long
been used to represent reality,
though with these, too,
fakery is always a danger.
At this memorial to
the American Civil War,
artistic tradition brings a familiar
idealised heroism to its subject.
But that conflict was also
one of the first to be portrayed
with a new technology.
Since its invention
in the 1830s,
photography had promised a
new standard of authenticity.
War photographs, like
these by Alexander Gardner,
displayed an unprecedented
level of realism.
He took this photo in 1863,
after the Battle of Gettysburg.
It's a powerful shot, but this
pioneering photojournalist
thought he could achieve
an even more potent image,
so he and an assistant dragged the
dead body of the Confederate soldier
40 yards away from
where he'd actually fallen,
and rearranged it in a
more dramatic setting.
For extra pathos, the corpse's
head has now been turned
to face the camera.
And that's not the fallen soldier's
rifle pointing up to the heavens.
It's a prop that Gardner
carried around with him.
To inspire pity in the viewer,
he's composed the photo
as if it were a painting.
There was an understanding
photography could be flexible.
Nowadays, we wouldn't
accept any of this.
We would not, no, this
would be definitely seen
as an ethical violation,
but at the time,
people were learning the rules
of photography of real situations.
What was acceptable
behaviour for photojournalists
took decades to resolve.
At a meeting of the Photographers'
Association Of America,
one speaker declared he sought,
"Not literal but spiritual
and eternal truth."
He rejected what he called
"the falseness of ultra realism"
and confessed, "I
admire legitimate faking,
"faking which produces
the results desired."
But the photography
of William Mumler,
like this self-portrait,
was felt by many to go way
beyond legitimate faking.
Look at the slightly
blurry woman on the left.
During the 1860s, when Gardner
was rearranging Confederate corpses,
Mumler opened studios
in Boston and New York,
where customers
would sit for him, alone.
But when Mumler delivered the
prints, another figure appeared
in the frame, a ghostly
photo-bomber from beyond the grave,
and many of Mumler's customers
were convinced that the camera
could detect what their
own eyes could not -
the presence of a dear,
departed loved one.
Since America was grieving
on an unprecedented scale
during the Civil War years,
Mumler had no
shortage of clients.
Spiritualism was a growing
movement at the time,
and some thought his work
offered scientific proof of the afterlife.
He was using the mystification
of a new technology,
but it was definitely cheating, and
he would go off and develop them
and come back and say,
"Look, here in this picture,
"over your shoulder, you
know who that is, don't you?"
And the sitter would
say, "Uncle Homer?"
"Yes! Uncle Homer!
It's Uncle Homer!"
It was ludicrous, and that's
where it becomes a little troubling,
cos he preyed on people's real grief
and desire and passion, and he made
a lot of money from it.
The New York authorities arrested
Mumler and charged him with fraud.
And he wasn't the only
one put on trial in 1869.
So was photography itself.
The prosecution called a series
of photographers who put forward
nine different techniques
by which Mumler could've
achieved his results,
and none of them
were supernatural.
Mumler's legal team called a large
number of his satisfied customers,
including a Supreme Court Judge.
These people absolutely
believed what the camera told them,
and they saw no reason
for the law to interfere.
The prosecution hit
back with a star witness,
a man who'd made a fortune
creating fake exhibits for his circuses,
Phineas T Barnum.
On the basis of "it
takes one to know one",
Barnum declared
Mumler a charlatan,
and he made a sensational
photograph of his own.
Hovering over Barnum's
shoulder is President Lincoln,
who had been assassinated
four years previously.
When the judge gave his
verdict, he declared himself,
"Morally convinced that trick
and deception has been practised
"by the prisoner."
These visions of the afterlife
were fake views but, legally,
the prosecution had failed to
prove which fraudulent technique
Mumler had used, so, reluctantly,
the judge had to dismiss the case.
Yet even after the
disgrace of the trial,
Mumler still attracted
select customers.
Three years later, he was
commissioned to take a portrait
of Mary Lincoln, the
widow of Abraham Lincoln,
who, yes, you guessed it,
made a posthumous appearance.
Why would an intelligent woman
believe this was an actual photo
of her dead husband, given
that Barnum had demonstrated
in court how easy it was
to fake this exact scenario?
Presumably, she wanted
to believe that the great man
was still there
to look after her.
After the trauma of seeing
him gunned down in the theatre,
she must have wanted
consolation from any source,
however implausible.
And that is the common thread
with many fake news stories -
people are more likely to believe
a lie if they want it to be true.
And just as Mumler hadn't been
entirely discredited by the trial,
photography hadn't been
entirely vindicated either.
"Who, henceforth, can trust
the accuracy of a photograph?"
wrote a shocked journalist
from the New York World.
"Photographs have been treasured
in the belief they could not lie,
"and now comes the revelation
they can be made to lie,
"and with a most
deceiving exactness."
In the age of Photoshop
and selfie filters,
most people are well aware
of how easy it is to crop out
unflattering details or smooth
away blemishes from a still image.
By contrast, for most of
their history, moving pictures
were seen as more trustworthy.
You basically needed a
Hollywood special effects budget
to create convincing fakes.
So, documentaries, for instance,
just show you human
life the way it really is.
Obviously you would
never find fakery on the BBC,
and I would never mislead you.
UPBEAT CLASSICAL MUSIC REMIX
As you can see, I'm
now ready for Strictly.
And I think you'll agree
I'm an obvious winner.
OK, so I confess, and you
may possibly have suspected,
that wasn't me.
The sequence you just saw was
created by visual artist Eric Drass,
who explores the
effects of technology
on our understanding of truth.
So, this is created using a piece
of software that learns your face,
what's known as deepfake.
The software itself
comes from the internet,
downloaded for free, and
if you've got a teenager
with a super-powerful gaming
computer in their bedroom,
that's just the kind of kit you
need to do this kind of fakery.
Right. Deepfake is generally
used for pornographic clips.
You take the face of a famous
actress and you map it onto the body
of a pornographic star
and you send that out.
Secret sex tape.
Oh, well, I'm delighted you
haven't decided to do that with it!
It immediately seems to be, "Well, I
can put someone in a compromising
"position, I can blackmail
someone"? Absolutely.
Well, this one here of Obama...
We're entering an era in which
our enemies can make it look like
anyone is saying anything
at any point in time.
For instance, they could
have me say things like,
"President Trump is a
total and complete dipshit."
The actor Jordan Peele is able
to not only give a convincing voice,
but he's able to manipulate the
video footage of Obama to match.
But how we move forward...
in the age of information,
is going to be the difference
between whether we survive or
whether we become some kind of
fucked-up dystopia.
Pretty effective. Is the
dystopian vision the correct one?
It's inevitably going to used
for something really grim.
That clip of Obama, we enjoy
the fact that it sounds like him
and looks like him, but we know
it's not because of what he says,
whereas if you make
it something plausible,
it's much more likely
to spread. Yeah.
We all live in our own filter
bubbles and tend to share content
that we agree with, so
if I see a politician I hate
saying something objectionable,
I'm much more likely to pass it on
to my friends and
believe that it's true
because my own world
view is being supported.
And do we have any
defence against that?
The best defence is
to remain suspicious.
But as we keep seeing,
people often aren't suspicious
about things they
want to believe.
And that helps explain the
popularity of a particular type
of fake news online.
Here's an example.
During 2016's
American elections,
the Pope endorsing Trump was the
most shared news
item on Facebook.
It was written as a wind-up,
but was so widely believed
some even think it
swung the election.
This is worrying terrain for me
because the defence used by several
of the most controversial
sources of fake news
is that they are
producing satire.
One of the leading offenders,
who keeps fictionally bumping
off Hillary Clinton in ludicrous ways,
is a former construction
worker, called Christopher Blair.
A purveyor of fake
news, that's me.
Right. I'm glad you're laughing.
VOICEOVER: His most popular
stories have been read by millions,
including one reporting that Obama
has made a fortune in royalties
from the word "Obamacare".
Every once in a while,
a post will go viral.
It means that the headline plus
the featured image plus the story
elicited an emotional response
from a whole bunch of people,
and if you get a million page views
on something and you have ads,
you're going to make some money
on it. Do we make a lot of money?
Sometimes. There have been times
when I made a whole bunch of money.
Typically, no, we
make next to nothing.
I'm interested in the
people who read it.
I make it my business to mess
with not necessarily just people
who have different political
views, but political extremists
on the other side, the
"alt-right" is what we call them.
OK, so tell me how
you actually do it.
So, you take Obama, Clinton,
Pelosi, and attach something to it,
a crime, an injury, a death,
and add something as silly
as possible to make sure
that some reasonable person
is going to be able to say,
"I don't know about this."
How do you feel about the
people who do believe it?
Because I'm terribly worried
that you would put a story out
and that becomes part of their world
view, and you've done that. Right.
Every article has
the word "satire" in it.
It's before the title,
after the title again.
The entire operation is satire.
But why do they believe it, then?
What is it? An emotional response?
Confirmation bias, 100%.
It's so easy to just pass
something along that confirms
what you believe.
I'm serving them what they want.
The number-one comment
that we get on our pages,
"I hope this is true."
I'm still not entirely
convinced that stories
like these don't have
real-world consequences,
especially in our
politically polarised times.
Is your conscience clear?
Oh, I sleep very well at night.
I don't believe that I'm doing
anything different from the people
who sell the
supermarket tabloids.
Do you believe if there was,
you know, the next election,
and you were out there in force,
you could change minds either way?
No, I don't believe I can change
minds. People who share my headlines
out into cyberspace without
reading them, without looking at them,
things like that, they were
going to vote for Donald Trump.
They weren't sitting on some fence
waiting for my satire to push them
over to the dark side.
That's not the way this works.
Unfortunately, they
are lower-information,
lower-educated, ignorant people.
My goal is to say,
"Why are you so dumb?"
Now, the magazine I edit has itself
been accused of being fake news.
An American university
put us on a media black list,
basically cos they didn't
understand when we were serious
and when we were joking.
As we keep seeing, just because
something looks like news,
that doesn't mean it is.
And that critical attitude
is also central to any
investigative journalism.
Rule number one has to be,
"Is this from a reliable source?"
Take, for example, a book
that's getting five-star reviews
and purports to be
"a shocking expose".
"A must-read if
you want the truth."
"Essential to understanding the
Hidden Hand by which the world
"is governed and led."
"This is propably," probably,
"one of the books that's
"going to be banned, so
buy it when it's still possible."
At the moment, it's certainly
not difficult to get hold of.
Just one click and it
can be at your door.
The Protocols Of The Learned
Elders Of Zion purports to reveal
the detailed plans with
which a Jewish elite
will take over the world,
starting with finance,
politics, and the media.
Spoiler alert -
there is no such plot.
This is an idiotic and
largely incomprehensible
anti-Semitic conspiracy theory,
which was comprehensively
debunked nearly 100 years ago.
What is unbelievable is that
it's so freely available now
and so many people still
choose to believe it's true.
But then, I would
say that, wouldn't I?
Because the press is
already entirely in their hands.
Baseless preconceptions..
BELL RINGS
..and irrational
obsessions... BELL RINGS
..have spawned some of
the most malign fake news.
A Russian newspaper,
in 1903, first brought to life
the Elders Of Zion.
They were blamed for
spreading "decadent capitalism"
and "dangerous democracy"
in order to undermine the Tsar.
A few years later, the
Protocols were used as proof
that the Communist revolution
had been dreamt up by Jews,
who'd also instigated
the First World War.
The Protocols updated anti-Semitism
for the age of the mass media,
making prejudice seem more
legitimate by presenting it as news.
The introduction to the early
editions claimed that the minutes
of this Jewish plot had been stolen
from a secret meeting and passed
to the publisher by someone
who mysteriously died.
It sounds like classic undercover,
investigative journalism,
but it's simply lies
disguised as leaks.
Yet despite clearly recycling
ancient, offensive stereotypes,
people across Europe still chose
to believe that this book was true.
In Britain, it prompted serious
calls for an official enquiry
into the alleged conspiracy.
In 1921, however, The Times
published a series of articles
which showed how long
passages of the Protocols had in fact
been copied, more or less word
for word, from an old French novel,
one which had nothing
to do with Judaism.
The sinister Elders Of Zion
were shown to be entirely fictitious.
They were fake Jews.
This was encouraging evidence
that journalism can correct lies
as well as spread them.
And the reality
is that nowadays,
journalists have to do
more and more of this.
When I started, the main
job was finding new stories.
Now, more and more time is
spent debunking fake stories.
Depressingly, even when
you lay out the facts clearly
and comprehensively,
as The Times does here,
sometimes it's still not enough.
The most pernicious thing
about conspiracy theories
is how they persist, even after
they've been thoroughly discredited.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
When the Nazis came to
power, Joseph Goebbels declared
the Protocols could still
be put "to very good use",
and so, by the 1930s,
the book was being studied
in German classrooms.
Goebbels didn't
care it was forged.
What mattered, he said, was
"the inner, not the factual truth
"of the Protocols".
Goebbels' boss had used a
different argument when he praised
the Protocols in Mein Kampf.
Hitler did concede that some
German newspapers had reported
that the Protocols were forgery,
but these "groans and moans",
he argued, were actually "evidence
in favour of their authenticity".
"If these newspapers say
they're fake, they must be true."
Basically, he's telling
his followers not to believe
in the mainstream media.
70 years after the defeat of
the Nazis, the Protocols live on,
notably in the Islamic world.
Here it is in 2019
at a Cairo book fair.
Online, anti-Semitism sits
alongside hatred of every religious,
ethnic or minority
group imaginable.
Fake news stories on Facebook
fuelled violence against Muslims
in Burma, while in India,
people have been lynched
as a result of lies
spread on WhatsApp.
And back in Washington,
this pizzeria suffered grim,
real-world consequences
from online conspiracy theories.
I've come to meet its
owner, James Alefantis.
If you look up my name
now, on any platform... Yeah.
..it's disgusting what appears.
If you look up the name of the
restaurant, it's pretty bad, too.
YouTube and Instagram and
everything is filled with just... lies.
This story began in 2016,
when WikiLeaks released e-mails
from Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Among them was an exchange
about James supplying pizza
for a Democrat
fundraising dinner.
That was all conspiracy
theorists needed
to spin some
fantastical accusations.
So, you find out that you are
online being described as running
an enormous paedophile
ring, based, as far as I can see,
on the fact that Comet Ping Pong
and cheese pizza has the initials CP,
which is the same
as child pornography.
I mean, this is the level
of the evidence, isn't it?
People think that
Comet Ping Pong,
which is a
family-friendly restaurant,
is the centre of a place
where Hillary Clinton
and these political people
were either kidnapping children
and selling them, in order to
retain their immense wealth,
or sacrificing them
in ritualistic sacrifices,
or sexually abusing them.
There was a big thing about
this place was operating
with a basement?
They claim there are tunnels
leading from this to the White House
and that Obama is travelling
here to Comet in secret tunnels
from the White House. And you
pointed out there's not a basement.
It's difficult to exaggerate
just how mad this is.
In the beginning, we thought, this
is just an online something. Yeah.
And until it broke through, out
of this online computer screen
and into the real world,
we were basically OK.
The headline is
"Pizzagate is real".
The only question is, exactly
what is it? But something...
American shock jock Alex Jones
recklessly broadcast the theory
to a much wider
audience through his show.
There's just so much evil...
In a trademark rant,
he urged his followers
to investigate further.
It's up to you to research
it for yourself, but...
And one of them duly
drove from North Carolina
to the Washington restaurant.
It was December 4th and a
man walked in the front door
into a crowded dining room
filled with families eating,
carrying a loaded,
large AR-15 assault rifle,
walked through this dining
room here, down this bar.
VOICEOVER: Of course, he couldn't
find the basement full of horrors,
because it didn't exist.
This gunman went to this
one locked spot and at this point
he shoots his AR-15...
He lets off his rifle?
Yes, into this door,
and the bullets went
into our computer system
here. Can I have a look? Yeah.
Just check. And there's our
computer system still there,
and our messy closet.
But no secret basement.
So he realised that
there's nothing there.
Yeah, and immediately laid down
his weapons and he surrenders
to the police.
And he ended up just
shooting a computer. Yeah.
I like the symbolism of that!
He shot the only thing that
had actually spread the trouble
in the first place.
Did he say anything?
Later, in an interview, he said
maybe the intel wasn't 100%.
One of the great
understatements.
Luckily, no-one here was killed,
but as the judge said in this case,
many people could have.
I still get lots of threatening
messages and the conspiracy theory
continues very strongly online.
They claim that this gunman is a
false flag and that Hillary Clinton
or I had hired him to distract
from our heinous crimes.
Why is it so hard to argue
with this sort of fake news?
I mean, you come up with a complete
and utter rebuttal of all the things
they say, and they
believe it anyway.
There is no
appropriate response.
If someone calls you the
worst thing in the world,
and you say, I'm not that
thing, it's obviously evidence
that you are that thing. Yeah.
It's not disprovable, because
the truth isn't what it's about.
The truth doesn't matter.
This place is a powerful testament
to the damage that can be caused
by malicious individuals,
but potentially even more corrosive
is another category of fake news.
On April the 17th 1917,
as the First World War
dragged gruellingly along,
British newspapers
carried a horrifying story.
This is the discovery
behind enemy lines
of a kadaververwertungsanstalt,
which The Times
helpfully translates
as a corpse exploitation
establishment.
A factory was extracting fat
from the bodies of dead soldiers
to be used in the manufacture
of soap, pig food and explosives.
The report cited German documents
and gave some grisly details.
A great cauldron, where human
flesh is steamed for six to eight hours.
It's specific, it's repulsive
- and, yes, it's fake.
There are occasions
where fake news
has been undertaken with the full
knowledge of the state and justified
as being in the
national interest.
BELL RINGS
And it's not just
nasty dictators
who get up to such dirty tricks.
Sometimes, the
good guys do it, too.
So if it's our lot responsible,
is that OK?
The corpse factory story
was signed off and spread
around the world from here.
In 1917, the Foreign Office
housed the innocuous-sounding
Department of Information.
In fact, the British Empire's
HQ for disinformation.
The staff within these walls knew
full well that the enemy was not
turning corpses into
bombs and bars of soap.
The piece in The Times
hinged on official references
to processing cadavers.
But the German word
for cadaver in this context
clearly meant animal carcasses,
not human bodies -
and they were aware of it.
But the Ministry of
Information chose to ignore this
and let that fact be
lost in translation.
The story caused global
outrage, particularly in China,
where the dead are
especially venerated.
British spies believed the corpse
factory lie was what persuaded
the Chinese to abandon
their previous neutrality
and join the war on Germany.
So, could the government
claim to be justified
in weaponising this story?
After years of slaughter in
the trenches, some people
believed Britain should try
anything which might help to finally
win the war.
The caricature of
the barbaric Hun
was frequently used to
stiffen resolve at home,
and since the Germans really
did commit some atrocities,
surely it didn't matter if not
every story about them was true?
On the other hand, doesn't lying
make us as bad as the enemy?
Stafford Cripps, who served
in Churchill's War Cabinet
a generation later, said
of black propaganda,
"If this is the sort of thing
needed to win the war,
"why, I'd rather lose it."
The trouble is, lies have
unforeseeable consequences.
25 years after the corpse factory
story, Germans really did build
industrial facilities to
process human bodies.
But earlier reports of the
Holocaust were disbelieved because,
as one American diplomat put
it, they sounded too much like
"leftover horror
tales of the last war."
That's one of the biggest
problems with fake news -
it makes people
doubt the truth as well.
If, say, in the future, a dictator
had weapons of mass destruction,
who would believe the government
or the journalist who said so?
The British state no longer runs
disinformation campaigns abroad,
or at least, so we're told.
But other states are less
squeamish about propaganda.
We know Russia has paid
for online advertisements,
including these, to influence
elections in America and Europe.
It is estimated over 350 million
unsuspecting voters have seen
the material, which pretends to be
posted by concerned local citizens.
And in 2018, in response to
accusations they'd sent Novichok
to Salisbury, the Kremlin took
to Twitter and its noisy polemical
TV channel, Russia Today.
And to top all that off,
the British insisted...
They put forward 46 alternative
theories for whodunnit and why.
Contradictions everywhere.
This is the type of disinformation
which most worries our politicians.
There is a deliberate strategy
from the Russians to try
and influence news and opinion
in other countries, and elections
as well, through
these techniques.
I think principally to divide
communities and societies,
to turn people
against each other.
We've seen them putting out
all sorts of conspiracy theories
about things like the Skripal
poisoning in Salisbury.
And do you think this is effective,
you know - they're not hugely
convincing, are they?
They're not, but their purpose is
not necessarily to persuade you
of an alternative truth, it's to
make you disbelieve everything,
so you no longer know
what's true or not true.
And I think they are glad to see
that sort of chaos being unleashed.
You led an investigation,
a Parliamentary
investigation into fake news.
So, how scared should we be?
I think we should
be scared by this.
Not just by the fact that I think
fake news is crowding out real news
on social media and people
find it often very difficult to
distinguish between what
is fake and what's real.
And alongside that, about half the
people in this country consume news
from a social media feed, and
that feed could easily be gained
by bad actors who want to change
what you think and what you see.
Without any... There is no regulator
that can stop that happening.
And that means, I think,
that our democracy,
our society, is open to massive
abuse by anyone who wants to invest
their resources in doing it.
I mean, that's the diagnosis
- we should be frightened,
democracy is at
risk. What do we do?
If you take, for example,
the Russians buying adverts
on social media
to target Americans
in the American
presidential election,
those ads were approved by
the Facebook ad-check team.
This is someone
committing a federal offence
by using foreign money to try
and influence voters in America.
And when we asked
Facebook about this, they said,
"If we'd been told this was going
on, we would have looked into it
"and done something about it and
cooperated with the investigation."
So it's your fault for not
telling us? Exactly, so...
The company with the most
complex research teams in the world.
If you ran a bank like that, you'd
lose your licence. If you said,
"I can see someone is laundering
money, but no-one asked me about it,
"so I didn't do anything."
So, in that situation, the only
people that could really intervene
are the companies that
are providing the technology.
The British Museum, that
traditional temple to truth,
might seem an unexpected
destination for a history of fake news.
But at the end of the 19th century,
people here were confronted
with the same question Parliament
is grappling with in the 21st century -
what can be done
about fake news?
For 140 years, this was the
home of the British Library.
The reading room was built
to be a cathedral of knowledge,
and obliged by law to keep
a copy of every British book,
and as many foreign
ones as possible, as well.
But in 1893, someone discovered
fake news on these shelves.
What happened next has uncanny
parallels with much more recent
debates about the internet.
Do people have the
right to be forgotten,
and who should be held
responsible for fake news about them?
The victim of the fake news in
question was a remarkable American
called Victoria Woodhull, who
campaigned for female suffrage,
and in 1872, was the first
woman ever to run to be president.
The contentious material originated
from that time and from New York,
where Woodhull was also the
editor of her own newspaper.
Arguing for sexual freedom
and against male hypocrisy,
Woodhull published an expose
about a famous preacher of the day,
Henry Ward Beecher, who
was having an adulterous affair.
For exposing the truth about
the great and well-connected
clergyman Beecher, she found
herself smeared by fake news reports.
Papers and pamphlets
accused her of being a drunk,
the mistress of a gambling
den, or the queen of prostitutes.
It's really easy to shut down
a woman by calling her a slut,
it instantaneously takes
away all her credibility.
It really works. It has
worked for generations.
You always criticise uppity women
for being sexually unconventional,
you smear them with whatever
is seen as bad in the context
of the times, and she was
smeared with all of that... Yeah.
..because she was challenging these
very entrenched and important mores,
she was assaulted.
Woodhull was made out
to be the devil, literally.
And to escape the media
storm, she fled to Britain.
But when she discovered the
lies about her were preserved
for posterity in the
British Museum,
she and her husband sent
them a letter of complaint.
They accused the Library of
"bringing within the
reach of the public,
"obscene and
defamatory literature."
What Victoria wanted was
for the offending publications
to be taken down off
the shelves permanently.
This caused great concern
to the chief librarian,
who the next day wrote,
"The trustees will not,
"I'm sure, sanction the principle
that a book is to be withdrawn
"merely because
it is objected to.
"Such a principle might
have very extensive
"and very undesirable
consequences."
He believed, of course,
that a library shouldn't be
in the business of banning
books, nor of censoring history.
But Victoria was not a woman
who took no for an answer and,
incredibly, she decided to
sue the British Museum for libel.
At a High Court hearing in 1894,
the museum's lawyer
warned of the consequences
if Victoria proved victorious.
He estimated that the library
would need to employ 110 experts
in libel law to inspect
the 315,000 new books
added to the
collection every year.
Surely, he argued,
no library could be expected to
fact-check the books on its shelves?
Set against these
arguments, however,
was the persuasive
testimony of Victoria herself.
And the jury... sensationally
found in her favour.
However, on appeal,
the museum won.
Clearly, they hadn't actually
published the material
that Victoria objected to,
neither had they originated it.
The judge ruled that librarians must
not be found guilty by association.
This was an important verdict
for freedom of information.
And, to this day, most people
would agree that libraries
should not be held
liable for their contents.
But should the principle apply
to all sites that store information?
The British Museum's arguments
have been put forward more recently
by the giants of Silicon Valley.
They say they can't be expected
to fact-check what's on their sites
and they are not
publishers, merely platforms.
Tech companies have a responsibility
because they are not just making
the content available to you,
they are curating what you see.
You are seeing content that's been
selected for you by the tech company
because it thinks that's what
you're most interested in. Yes.
Which is very different
from a library. Indeed.
It's a system that's been designed
to make money for the platforms
out of advertising. Though
the technology that's being used
to direct you towards
the perfect pair of trainers
could also be used to direct you
towards radicalised hate speech,
disinformation, other harmful
content as well, and I think we
should call the tech companies out on
this and say they can do more to stop it.
# We're half-awake
# In a fake empire... #
Given so many people are
online so much of the time,
and so much of what's
out there isn't true,
I believe there are potentially
very real threats from fake news.
The more hatred and vitriol
that shows up on these platforms,
the more people are engaged,
and the more revenue they receive.
So they have monetised
hatred and fake news is the way
they've done it? Yes. And
people get hurt from these things.
But all is not yet lost.
I think we can draw some
hope and some inspiration
from how previous eras
dealt with their crises of trust.
Back in the 1890s, the arrival
of superfast printing presses
and advertising created a
crazy period in the media.
You know, highly
exaggerated journalism arrived.
Now, we're seeing some of
the similar things with digital,
the immediacy of
digital, its global reach,
again makes it prey to all
sorts of distortions and abuse.
If you are an optimist, you say
history suggests that what happens
is people get used to this,
they take it with a pinch of salt,
they calm down and eventually
you get a kind of new equilibrium.
If we are to have genuine
grounds for such optimism,
we do need to be ruthless
about a tendency all of us have,
and one we've seen time and
again in the past and the present.
We have to stop
believing news stories
just because we
want them to be true.
I'm not saying don't
believe in anything -
that's exactly what the
peddlers of fake news would love,
the idea that no-one even
cares what the truth is any more.
But there are still such
things as objective facts,
events either did
or didn't happen.
Not everything is
a matter of opinion.
So I'm not arguing for
a more cynical public,
I want a more sceptical public,
who question the new social media
in the same way they do
the old mainstream media.
Who is telling me this and why?
And do they actually
know anything about it?
In short, you have to be very
critical about who you trust.
Apart from me, obviously.
MUSIC: Fake Empire
by The National
# Turn the light
out, say goodnight
# No thinking for a little while
# We're half-awake
# In a fake empire
# We're half-awake
# In a fake empire... #
On September the 17th 1903, The
Daily Telegram shared a sad story
with its readers in
Clarksburg, West Virginia.
A dispute over a pet dog
between two immigrant miners
had led to a tragedy.
This programme contains
some strong language.
GUNSHOIt was one of the miners
who took the bullet,
a man called Mejk Swenekafew.
The next day, a rival publication,
The Clarksburg Daily News,
also printed this heart-rending
story of the dog and the shot Slav
but, in fact, they'd been
caught in a brilliant trap laid
by their competitor.
The Clarksburg Telegram had long
suspected The Clarksburg Daily News
of stealing their stories, so
they'd simply made this one up
and put it in as bait.
Just read the victim's name
backwards, "we fake news".
The ruse worked brilliantly.
So, none of it happened,
and no animals were harmed
in the faking of this story.
But what it does show us is
that fake news was a problem
long before our own
uncertain and confused times.
They are the fake,
fake, disgusting news.
In this programme, I
want to see if we can learn
any lessons about today's
fake news crisis from earlier eras,
when new media and new
technology led to new levels of lying.
It was vastly sensationalised
and overblown and it
had a sometimes
malign influence.
I'm heading to the nation that
pioneered mass-market news
in the 19th century, and
also the 21st-century's
information wars.
There's just so much
evil! I'm not trying to...
If you look up my name,
it's disgusting what appears.
And people get hurt
from these things.
I'm looking to history to figure
out what motivates fake news.
I am destroying America
one fake news article at a time.
From propaganda and paranoia...
It's easy to dress up fake news
to make it look as real as possible.
..to profit and politics.
President Trump is a
total and complete dipshit.
One thing I can promise
you, all the news coming
up in this programme will
be fake, and that's the truth.
Back in August 1835,
New Yorkers were thrilled
by a series of
newspaper articles
headlined "great
astronomical discoveries".
The reports described
how a scientist had built
the world's largest telescope
and trained it on the moon.
The surface of the moon was
clearly made of basaltic rock,
but profusely covered
with a flower of deepest red,
and there are herds
of miniature bison.
Those quadrupeds were
sometimes hunted by flying man-bats
and, naturally, the moon
was also home to unicorns.
At this point, dear viewer,
you may have rumbled
that this was fake news.
It's very easy, looking
back from the 21st century,
to feel smug about how much
smarter we are than our ancestors,
but remember, this was an age
of constant scientific invention
and new discoveries, and
it was years before man
would set foot on the moon.
That is, if you believe that
NASA mission DID go to the moon.
The story was serialised over six
days, with new revelations on each,
including some salacious
details about lunar lovemaking.
Crowds thronged here, to
the offices of the newspaper
that broke the story, eager for
each fresh new day's instalment.
One eyewitness commented on
the "almost universal impression
"and expression
of the multitude,
"that of confident wonder
and insatiable credence."
They were fooled!
Duping large numbers of
people all at the same time,
like this, had only
just become possible.
1830s New York was the birthplace
of modern mass-market news media,
and the moon story ran
in the world's first example
of what we'd call a tabloid.
A paper with a very
appropriate name.
I know, it's unthinkable that
any publication called The Sun
wouldn't be scrupulously
accurate in its reporting.
The New York Sun was a
product of new technology,
the steam-powered printing press,
and because the paper was cheaply
mass-produced, it was priced at
a sixth of the cost of most rivals,
just one cent, and,
in another innovation,
it was sold on the city streets.
The Sun offers a new kind
of news for a new readership,
working-class people, urban
people who didn't care about politics.
These are people who were not
used to having a newspaper central
to their lives. And The Sun gave
them news in a small, cheap format
that they could
just pick up and buy.
And did The Sun mind
what they printed was not
necessarily true?
Well, they didn't and
neither did their readers. Yup.
The Sun drew them
in as a kind of a game -
"Read this story,
decide for yourselves,
"it doesn't really matter."
What was more important was
people in the taverns and in the streets
were discussing it, "Did you see
that? Do you believe it or not?"
and then they would
have debates and fights,
and that was really
what it was all about.
The Sun claimed to have obtained
its facts about life on the moon
from an obscure scientific
journal. But after a week of "lunacy",
the New York Herald gleefully
printed a report of its own.
The Sun's source didn't exist.
They'd made the whole thing up.
The Sun, said its
rival newspaper,
"is impudent, unprincipled, mercenary
and low-bred", and worst of all,
"it tells untruths for money."
Can you believe it?
But The Sun was laughing
all the way to the bank.
With the moon story, it achieved
the highest circulation figures
on Earth, and spin-off
pamphlets and engravings
were hugely profitable, too.
Not bad for a paper that
was less than two years old.
It was the first great example
of one of the enduring motives
for faking news - lies sell.
The public doesn't
just want to be informed,
it also wants to be entertained.
It's also cheaper
to make things up,
rather than find things out,
which the proprietors
of America's
new popular press loved.
And they soon
discovered fake news
could help in the pursuit of...
BELL RINGS ..grander ambitions.
In the 1890s, Joseph Pulitzer
was the world's most
powerful media mogul.
This contemporary cartoon
shows the kind of news
with which he made his name.
Later in life, to atone
for this sensationalism,
he used some of the fortune
it had made him to fund
the Pulitzer Prize for
better-quality journalism.
Aspiring to similar wealth
and influence was a younger,
devilish rival, William
Randolph Hearst.
His name lives on to this
day, in a publishing empire
and in New York's Hearst
Tower, which his fortune paid for.
William Hearst imitated Joseph
Pulitzer's successful formula
of crime and celebrity, popular,
attention-grabbing stories
under lurid headlines, a
sort of 19th-century click bait,
but he also felt there
might be a market for stories
of adventure and patriotism.
What could really boost circulation,
he decided, was a good war.
During the 1890s, Cuban rebels
were fighting for independence
from their colonial rulers,
the Spanish Empire.
Hearst's New York Journal
called for a war on Spain,
and to drum up support
he sent staff to Cuba.
Among them, one of
America's leading illustrators,
Frederic Remington.
The artist spent much
of his time in Havana,
drinking cocktails in his hotel.
He telegraphed Hearst,
saying, "Everything is quiet,
"there's no trouble
here, there will be no war.
"I wish to return. Remington."
Hearst is reported to have
wired back, "Please remain.
"You furnish the pictures
and I'll furnish the war."
Although there's no proof
that this oft-repeated exchange
actually occurred, Remington did
produce a highly provocative image
of the sort his
proprietor demanded.
On February the 12th 1897,
Hearst's paper ran a story
about Spanish officials boarding
an American steamship and seizing
a woman they suspected of
spying for the Cuban rebels.
She was then strip-searched.
Pulitzer and Hearst were
in a race to the bottom,
and in this feature,
page two in the Journal,
Hearst had won.
This is titillation
masquerading as outrage
and, of course, the readers loved
it and there were serious questions
asked in Congress. But
what had actually happened
was nothing like
Remington's picture.
The woman hadn't been searched
on deck by a gang of rough men,
but in a private cabin by
one respectable older woman.
Hearst himself had changed
the crucial details of the report,
prompting the
journalist who filed it
to vow never to work
for the proprietor again.
Even the reporter thought
that he had gone too far.
But Hearst didn't care? Hearst
didn't care, Hearst never cared,
and Hearst loved stories
about ladies in danger,
about lustful and horrifying
foreigners of all kinds,
and he sent his reporters
there and kind of directed them
what kind of stories they
were supposed to get.
This paddle steamer isn't in Cuba,
by the way, it's on the Thames.
Less Havana, more Kingston.
Typical BBC - fake cruise.
Another Cuban
story, also set at sea,
was used by both Hearst and
Pulitzer to help tip America into war.
EXPLOSION
On February the 15th 1898,
an explosion ripped apart an
American warship called the Maine,
which had been
harboured near Havana,
causing the loss of 260 lives.
No evidence has ever been found
that the Spanish were responsible,
but in the papers, the
reality that it was probably
an accident got short shrift.
In the Journal, there's
no room for doubt.
"The destruction of the warship
Maine was the work of an enemy."
But there's a fantastic bit
of humbug in the small print.
This is very tiny.
It says, "The captain of the ship
and the consul general both urge
"that public opinion
be suspended
"until they've completed
their investigation."
Well, there's no chance
of that happening,
and everything here says "they
did it" and it's incredibly successful.
It's the first time the paper
sold more than a million copies.
MUSIC: The Stars
And Stripes Forever
Nine weeks later, Pulitzer
and Hearst got the war
they'd been clamouring for,
and America defeated the Spanish
Empire quickly and decisively.
The patriotic hysteria
whipped up by the press
had massive consequences.
1898 was the start of
the USA's ascendancy
into becoming a
global superpower,
yet the war that began all
this might never have happened
without the help of fake news.
The nation that unleashed the
power of fake news in the 19th century
is also where more recent
panic about the subject began.
TRUMP: It's fake
news, it's fake...
I'm telling you,
it's just fake news.
It was during the last race for
the White House that we started
hearing so much about fake news.
The winner's definition of the
term, however, parts company
with the usual meaning.
When President Trump
talks about fake news,
which he has done more or
less constantly since being elected
in 2016, what he means is
real news that he doesn't like.
Your organisation is terrible. I'm
not going to give you a question.
Can you state categorically...? You are fake news.
Sir... Go ahead. Can you state categorically that...?
In Trump's topsy-turvy world, by
denouncing real news as fake news,
he and his supporters allow
real fake news to flourish.
Confused? You're meant to be.
Trump tweets the
phrase regularly
as part of his war on
the mainstream media,
and a frequent target
is The New York Times.
Ironically, a paper that has long
been renowned for its accuracy
owes a massive debt to the
fake news crisis of the 1890s.
A man called Adolph Ochs was
so horrified by the sensationalism
of Pulitzer and Hearst,
he purchased The Times to
provide a more reliable alternative.
It's now run by ex-BBC
head Mark Thompson.
Adolph Ochs bought the
failing New York Times,
it really was failing in the
1890s, with a vision of a different
kind of journalism.
It was going to be accurate,
it was going to be serious,
it was going to be accompanied
by intelligent and civil opinion
from every perspective,
and it changed journalism.
His vision was an idealistic one,
but he made it work financially.
To the surprise of a very cynical
industry, there was a real call
for it, and the story of real news
has been a commercial success story
for most of the time.
But I'm interested because
real news is under attack.
At this moment in time, the
President's trying to define you
as fake news.
Yeah, it's a very interesting
and in some ways rather clever
little trope by Donald Trump that,
you know, you should doubt all news,
that all of this comes from some
agenda, and who's to say what's true
and what's not true? They're not
necessarily even trying to persuade
people to believe their version,
they're just trying to
cast doubt on all of it.
It's sort of an attack on the idea
that we communally share a view
of what might be true.
You could argue
that Donald Trump
and some of the other populist
leaders have decided that reality
may not suit their purpose,
and would therefore
like to cast doubt on it.
In the end, the best journalism
is grounded on an idea
that there are facts, that
things actually happen,
and that although, of course,
every journalist brings some
preconceptions to the
party, notwithstanding that,
you can do a pretty good job
of reflecting the world as it is.
When it comes to
capturing the world as it is,
the written word is only
one of the available tools.
Images have also long
been used to represent reality,
though with these, too,
fakery is always a danger.
At this memorial to
the American Civil War,
artistic tradition brings a familiar
idealised heroism to its subject.
But that conflict was also
one of the first to be portrayed
with a new technology.
Since its invention
in the 1830s,
photography had promised a
new standard of authenticity.
War photographs, like
these by Alexander Gardner,
displayed an unprecedented
level of realism.
He took this photo in 1863,
after the Battle of Gettysburg.
It's a powerful shot, but this
pioneering photojournalist
thought he could achieve
an even more potent image,
so he and an assistant dragged the
dead body of the Confederate soldier
40 yards away from
where he'd actually fallen,
and rearranged it in a
more dramatic setting.
For extra pathos, the corpse's
head has now been turned
to face the camera.
And that's not the fallen soldier's
rifle pointing up to the heavens.
It's a prop that Gardner
carried around with him.
To inspire pity in the viewer,
he's composed the photo
as if it were a painting.
There was an understanding
photography could be flexible.
Nowadays, we wouldn't
accept any of this.
We would not, no, this
would be definitely seen
as an ethical violation,
but at the time,
people were learning the rules
of photography of real situations.
What was acceptable
behaviour for photojournalists
took decades to resolve.
At a meeting of the Photographers'
Association Of America,
one speaker declared he sought,
"Not literal but spiritual
and eternal truth."
He rejected what he called
"the falseness of ultra realism"
and confessed, "I
admire legitimate faking,
"faking which produces
the results desired."
But the photography
of William Mumler,
like this self-portrait,
was felt by many to go way
beyond legitimate faking.
Look at the slightly
blurry woman on the left.
During the 1860s, when Gardner
was rearranging Confederate corpses,
Mumler opened studios
in Boston and New York,
where customers
would sit for him, alone.
But when Mumler delivered the
prints, another figure appeared
in the frame, a ghostly
photo-bomber from beyond the grave,
and many of Mumler's customers
were convinced that the camera
could detect what their
own eyes could not -
the presence of a dear,
departed loved one.
Since America was grieving
on an unprecedented scale
during the Civil War years,
Mumler had no
shortage of clients.
Spiritualism was a growing
movement at the time,
and some thought his work
offered scientific proof of the afterlife.
He was using the mystification
of a new technology,
but it was definitely cheating, and
he would go off and develop them
and come back and say,
"Look, here in this picture,
"over your shoulder, you
know who that is, don't you?"
And the sitter would
say, "Uncle Homer?"
"Yes! Uncle Homer!
It's Uncle Homer!"
It was ludicrous, and that's
where it becomes a little troubling,
cos he preyed on people's real grief
and desire and passion, and he made
a lot of money from it.
The New York authorities arrested
Mumler and charged him with fraud.
And he wasn't the only
one put on trial in 1869.
So was photography itself.
The prosecution called a series
of photographers who put forward
nine different techniques
by which Mumler could've
achieved his results,
and none of them
were supernatural.
Mumler's legal team called a large
number of his satisfied customers,
including a Supreme Court Judge.
These people absolutely
believed what the camera told them,
and they saw no reason
for the law to interfere.
The prosecution hit
back with a star witness,
a man who'd made a fortune
creating fake exhibits for his circuses,
Phineas T Barnum.
On the basis of "it
takes one to know one",
Barnum declared
Mumler a charlatan,
and he made a sensational
photograph of his own.
Hovering over Barnum's
shoulder is President Lincoln,
who had been assassinated
four years previously.
When the judge gave his
verdict, he declared himself,
"Morally convinced that trick
and deception has been practised
"by the prisoner."
These visions of the afterlife
were fake views but, legally,
the prosecution had failed to
prove which fraudulent technique
Mumler had used, so, reluctantly,
the judge had to dismiss the case.
Yet even after the
disgrace of the trial,
Mumler still attracted
select customers.
Three years later, he was
commissioned to take a portrait
of Mary Lincoln, the
widow of Abraham Lincoln,
who, yes, you guessed it,
made a posthumous appearance.
Why would an intelligent woman
believe this was an actual photo
of her dead husband, given
that Barnum had demonstrated
in court how easy it was
to fake this exact scenario?
Presumably, she wanted
to believe that the great man
was still there
to look after her.
After the trauma of seeing
him gunned down in the theatre,
she must have wanted
consolation from any source,
however implausible.
And that is the common thread
with many fake news stories -
people are more likely to believe
a lie if they want it to be true.
And just as Mumler hadn't been
entirely discredited by the trial,
photography hadn't been
entirely vindicated either.
"Who, henceforth, can trust
the accuracy of a photograph?"
wrote a shocked journalist
from the New York World.
"Photographs have been treasured
in the belief they could not lie,
"and now comes the revelation
they can be made to lie,
"and with a most
deceiving exactness."
In the age of Photoshop
and selfie filters,
most people are well aware
of how easy it is to crop out
unflattering details or smooth
away blemishes from a still image.
By contrast, for most of
their history, moving pictures
were seen as more trustworthy.
You basically needed a
Hollywood special effects budget
to create convincing fakes.
So, documentaries, for instance,
just show you human
life the way it really is.
Obviously you would
never find fakery on the BBC,
and I would never mislead you.
UPBEAT CLASSICAL MUSIC REMIX
As you can see, I'm
now ready for Strictly.
And I think you'll agree
I'm an obvious winner.
OK, so I confess, and you
may possibly have suspected,
that wasn't me.
The sequence you just saw was
created by visual artist Eric Drass,
who explores the
effects of technology
on our understanding of truth.
So, this is created using a piece
of software that learns your face,
what's known as deepfake.
The software itself
comes from the internet,
downloaded for free, and
if you've got a teenager
with a super-powerful gaming
computer in their bedroom,
that's just the kind of kit you
need to do this kind of fakery.
Right. Deepfake is generally
used for pornographic clips.
You take the face of a famous
actress and you map it onto the body
of a pornographic star
and you send that out.
Secret sex tape.
Oh, well, I'm delighted you
haven't decided to do that with it!
It immediately seems to be, "Well, I
can put someone in a compromising
"position, I can blackmail
someone"? Absolutely.
Well, this one here of Obama...
We're entering an era in which
our enemies can make it look like
anyone is saying anything
at any point in time.
For instance, they could
have me say things like,
"President Trump is a
total and complete dipshit."
The actor Jordan Peele is able
to not only give a convincing voice,
but he's able to manipulate the
video footage of Obama to match.
But how we move forward...
in the age of information,
is going to be the difference
between whether we survive or
whether we become some kind of
fucked-up dystopia.
Pretty effective. Is the
dystopian vision the correct one?
It's inevitably going to used
for something really grim.
That clip of Obama, we enjoy
the fact that it sounds like him
and looks like him, but we know
it's not because of what he says,
whereas if you make
it something plausible,
it's much more likely
to spread. Yeah.
We all live in our own filter
bubbles and tend to share content
that we agree with, so
if I see a politician I hate
saying something objectionable,
I'm much more likely to pass it on
to my friends and
believe that it's true
because my own world
view is being supported.
And do we have any
defence against that?
The best defence is
to remain suspicious.
But as we keep seeing,
people often aren't suspicious
about things they
want to believe.
And that helps explain the
popularity of a particular type
of fake news online.
Here's an example.
During 2016's
American elections,
the Pope endorsing Trump was the
most shared news
item on Facebook.
It was written as a wind-up,
but was so widely believed
some even think it
swung the election.
This is worrying terrain for me
because the defence used by several
of the most controversial
sources of fake news
is that they are
producing satire.
One of the leading offenders,
who keeps fictionally bumping
off Hillary Clinton in ludicrous ways,
is a former construction
worker, called Christopher Blair.
A purveyor of fake
news, that's me.
Right. I'm glad you're laughing.
VOICEOVER: His most popular
stories have been read by millions,
including one reporting that Obama
has made a fortune in royalties
from the word "Obamacare".
Every once in a while,
a post will go viral.
It means that the headline plus
the featured image plus the story
elicited an emotional response
from a whole bunch of people,
and if you get a million page views
on something and you have ads,
you're going to make some money
on it. Do we make a lot of money?
Sometimes. There have been times
when I made a whole bunch of money.
Typically, no, we
make next to nothing.
I'm interested in the
people who read it.
I make it my business to mess
with not necessarily just people
who have different political
views, but political extremists
on the other side, the
"alt-right" is what we call them.
OK, so tell me how
you actually do it.
So, you take Obama, Clinton,
Pelosi, and attach something to it,
a crime, an injury, a death,
and add something as silly
as possible to make sure
that some reasonable person
is going to be able to say,
"I don't know about this."
How do you feel about the
people who do believe it?
Because I'm terribly worried
that you would put a story out
and that becomes part of their world
view, and you've done that. Right.
Every article has
the word "satire" in it.
It's before the title,
after the title again.
The entire operation is satire.
But why do they believe it, then?
What is it? An emotional response?
Confirmation bias, 100%.
It's so easy to just pass
something along that confirms
what you believe.
I'm serving them what they want.
The number-one comment
that we get on our pages,
"I hope this is true."
I'm still not entirely
convinced that stories
like these don't have
real-world consequences,
especially in our
politically polarised times.
Is your conscience clear?
Oh, I sleep very well at night.
I don't believe that I'm doing
anything different from the people
who sell the
supermarket tabloids.
Do you believe if there was,
you know, the next election,
and you were out there in force,
you could change minds either way?
No, I don't believe I can change
minds. People who share my headlines
out into cyberspace without
reading them, without looking at them,
things like that, they were
going to vote for Donald Trump.
They weren't sitting on some fence
waiting for my satire to push them
over to the dark side.
That's not the way this works.
Unfortunately, they
are lower-information,
lower-educated, ignorant people.
My goal is to say,
"Why are you so dumb?"
Now, the magazine I edit has itself
been accused of being fake news.
An American university
put us on a media black list,
basically cos they didn't
understand when we were serious
and when we were joking.
As we keep seeing, just because
something looks like news,
that doesn't mean it is.
And that critical attitude
is also central to any
investigative journalism.
Rule number one has to be,
"Is this from a reliable source?"
Take, for example, a book
that's getting five-star reviews
and purports to be
"a shocking expose".
"A must-read if
you want the truth."
"Essential to understanding the
Hidden Hand by which the world
"is governed and led."
"This is propably," probably,
"one of the books that's
"going to be banned, so
buy it when it's still possible."
At the moment, it's certainly
not difficult to get hold of.
Just one click and it
can be at your door.
The Protocols Of The Learned
Elders Of Zion purports to reveal
the detailed plans with
which a Jewish elite
will take over the world,
starting with finance,
politics, and the media.
Spoiler alert -
there is no such plot.
This is an idiotic and
largely incomprehensible
anti-Semitic conspiracy theory,
which was comprehensively
debunked nearly 100 years ago.
What is unbelievable is that
it's so freely available now
and so many people still
choose to believe it's true.
But then, I would
say that, wouldn't I?
Because the press is
already entirely in their hands.
Baseless preconceptions..
BELL RINGS
..and irrational
obsessions... BELL RINGS
..have spawned some of
the most malign fake news.
A Russian newspaper,
in 1903, first brought to life
the Elders Of Zion.
They were blamed for
spreading "decadent capitalism"
and "dangerous democracy"
in order to undermine the Tsar.
A few years later, the
Protocols were used as proof
that the Communist revolution
had been dreamt up by Jews,
who'd also instigated
the First World War.
The Protocols updated anti-Semitism
for the age of the mass media,
making prejudice seem more
legitimate by presenting it as news.
The introduction to the early
editions claimed that the minutes
of this Jewish plot had been stolen
from a secret meeting and passed
to the publisher by someone
who mysteriously died.
It sounds like classic undercover,
investigative journalism,
but it's simply lies
disguised as leaks.
Yet despite clearly recycling
ancient, offensive stereotypes,
people across Europe still chose
to believe that this book was true.
In Britain, it prompted serious
calls for an official enquiry
into the alleged conspiracy.
In 1921, however, The Times
published a series of articles
which showed how long
passages of the Protocols had in fact
been copied, more or less word
for word, from an old French novel,
one which had nothing
to do with Judaism.
The sinister Elders Of Zion
were shown to be entirely fictitious.
They were fake Jews.
This was encouraging evidence
that journalism can correct lies
as well as spread them.
And the reality
is that nowadays,
journalists have to do
more and more of this.
When I started, the main
job was finding new stories.
Now, more and more time is
spent debunking fake stories.
Depressingly, even when
you lay out the facts clearly
and comprehensively,
as The Times does here,
sometimes it's still not enough.
The most pernicious thing
about conspiracy theories
is how they persist, even after
they've been thoroughly discredited.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
When the Nazis came to
power, Joseph Goebbels declared
the Protocols could still
be put "to very good use",
and so, by the 1930s,
the book was being studied
in German classrooms.
Goebbels didn't
care it was forged.
What mattered, he said, was
"the inner, not the factual truth
"of the Protocols".
Goebbels' boss had used a
different argument when he praised
the Protocols in Mein Kampf.
Hitler did concede that some
German newspapers had reported
that the Protocols were forgery,
but these "groans and moans",
he argued, were actually "evidence
in favour of their authenticity".
"If these newspapers say
they're fake, they must be true."
Basically, he's telling
his followers not to believe
in the mainstream media.
70 years after the defeat of
the Nazis, the Protocols live on,
notably in the Islamic world.
Here it is in 2019
at a Cairo book fair.
Online, anti-Semitism sits
alongside hatred of every religious,
ethnic or minority
group imaginable.
Fake news stories on Facebook
fuelled violence against Muslims
in Burma, while in India,
people have been lynched
as a result of lies
spread on WhatsApp.
And back in Washington,
this pizzeria suffered grim,
real-world consequences
from online conspiracy theories.
I've come to meet its
owner, James Alefantis.
If you look up my name
now, on any platform... Yeah.
..it's disgusting what appears.
If you look up the name of the
restaurant, it's pretty bad, too.
YouTube and Instagram and
everything is filled with just... lies.
This story began in 2016,
when WikiLeaks released e-mails
from Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Among them was an exchange
about James supplying pizza
for a Democrat
fundraising dinner.
That was all conspiracy
theorists needed
to spin some
fantastical accusations.
So, you find out that you are
online being described as running
an enormous paedophile
ring, based, as far as I can see,
on the fact that Comet Ping Pong
and cheese pizza has the initials CP,
which is the same
as child pornography.
I mean, this is the level
of the evidence, isn't it?
People think that
Comet Ping Pong,
which is a
family-friendly restaurant,
is the centre of a place
where Hillary Clinton
and these political people
were either kidnapping children
and selling them, in order to
retain their immense wealth,
or sacrificing them
in ritualistic sacrifices,
or sexually abusing them.
There was a big thing about
this place was operating
with a basement?
They claim there are tunnels
leading from this to the White House
and that Obama is travelling
here to Comet in secret tunnels
from the White House. And you
pointed out there's not a basement.
It's difficult to exaggerate
just how mad this is.
In the beginning, we thought, this
is just an online something. Yeah.
And until it broke through, out
of this online computer screen
and into the real world,
we were basically OK.
The headline is
"Pizzagate is real".
The only question is, exactly
what is it? But something...
American shock jock Alex Jones
recklessly broadcast the theory
to a much wider
audience through his show.
There's just so much evil...
In a trademark rant,
he urged his followers
to investigate further.
It's up to you to research
it for yourself, but...
And one of them duly
drove from North Carolina
to the Washington restaurant.
It was December 4th and a
man walked in the front door
into a crowded dining room
filled with families eating,
carrying a loaded,
large AR-15 assault rifle,
walked through this dining
room here, down this bar.
VOICEOVER: Of course, he couldn't
find the basement full of horrors,
because it didn't exist.
This gunman went to this
one locked spot and at this point
he shoots his AR-15...
He lets off his rifle?
Yes, into this door,
and the bullets went
into our computer system
here. Can I have a look? Yeah.
Just check. And there's our
computer system still there,
and our messy closet.
But no secret basement.
So he realised that
there's nothing there.
Yeah, and immediately laid down
his weapons and he surrenders
to the police.
And he ended up just
shooting a computer. Yeah.
I like the symbolism of that!
He shot the only thing that
had actually spread the trouble
in the first place.
Did he say anything?
Later, in an interview, he said
maybe the intel wasn't 100%.
One of the great
understatements.
Luckily, no-one here was killed,
but as the judge said in this case,
many people could have.
I still get lots of threatening
messages and the conspiracy theory
continues very strongly online.
They claim that this gunman is a
false flag and that Hillary Clinton
or I had hired him to distract
from our heinous crimes.
Why is it so hard to argue
with this sort of fake news?
I mean, you come up with a complete
and utter rebuttal of all the things
they say, and they
believe it anyway.
There is no
appropriate response.
If someone calls you the
worst thing in the world,
and you say, I'm not that
thing, it's obviously evidence
that you are that thing. Yeah.
It's not disprovable, because
the truth isn't what it's about.
The truth doesn't matter.
This place is a powerful testament
to the damage that can be caused
by malicious individuals,
but potentially even more corrosive
is another category of fake news.
On April the 17th 1917,
as the First World War
dragged gruellingly along,
British newspapers
carried a horrifying story.
This is the discovery
behind enemy lines
of a kadaververwertungsanstalt,
which The Times
helpfully translates
as a corpse exploitation
establishment.
A factory was extracting fat
from the bodies of dead soldiers
to be used in the manufacture
of soap, pig food and explosives.
The report cited German documents
and gave some grisly details.
A great cauldron, where human
flesh is steamed for six to eight hours.
It's specific, it's repulsive
- and, yes, it's fake.
There are occasions
where fake news
has been undertaken with the full
knowledge of the state and justified
as being in the
national interest.
BELL RINGS
And it's not just
nasty dictators
who get up to such dirty tricks.
Sometimes, the
good guys do it, too.
So if it's our lot responsible,
is that OK?
The corpse factory story
was signed off and spread
around the world from here.
In 1917, the Foreign Office
housed the innocuous-sounding
Department of Information.
In fact, the British Empire's
HQ for disinformation.
The staff within these walls knew
full well that the enemy was not
turning corpses into
bombs and bars of soap.
The piece in The Times
hinged on official references
to processing cadavers.
But the German word
for cadaver in this context
clearly meant animal carcasses,
not human bodies -
and they were aware of it.
But the Ministry of
Information chose to ignore this
and let that fact be
lost in translation.
The story caused global
outrage, particularly in China,
where the dead are
especially venerated.
British spies believed the corpse
factory lie was what persuaded
the Chinese to abandon
their previous neutrality
and join the war on Germany.
So, could the government
claim to be justified
in weaponising this story?
After years of slaughter in
the trenches, some people
believed Britain should try
anything which might help to finally
win the war.
The caricature of
the barbaric Hun
was frequently used to
stiffen resolve at home,
and since the Germans really
did commit some atrocities,
surely it didn't matter if not
every story about them was true?
On the other hand, doesn't lying
make us as bad as the enemy?
Stafford Cripps, who served
in Churchill's War Cabinet
a generation later, said
of black propaganda,
"If this is the sort of thing
needed to win the war,
"why, I'd rather lose it."
The trouble is, lies have
unforeseeable consequences.
25 years after the corpse factory
story, Germans really did build
industrial facilities to
process human bodies.
But earlier reports of the
Holocaust were disbelieved because,
as one American diplomat put
it, they sounded too much like
"leftover horror
tales of the last war."
That's one of the biggest
problems with fake news -
it makes people
doubt the truth as well.
If, say, in the future, a dictator
had weapons of mass destruction,
who would believe the government
or the journalist who said so?
The British state no longer runs
disinformation campaigns abroad,
or at least, so we're told.
But other states are less
squeamish about propaganda.
We know Russia has paid
for online advertisements,
including these, to influence
elections in America and Europe.
It is estimated over 350 million
unsuspecting voters have seen
the material, which pretends to be
posted by concerned local citizens.
And in 2018, in response to
accusations they'd sent Novichok
to Salisbury, the Kremlin took
to Twitter and its noisy polemical
TV channel, Russia Today.
And to top all that off,
the British insisted...
They put forward 46 alternative
theories for whodunnit and why.
Contradictions everywhere.
This is the type of disinformation
which most worries our politicians.
There is a deliberate strategy
from the Russians to try
and influence news and opinion
in other countries, and elections
as well, through
these techniques.
I think principally to divide
communities and societies,
to turn people
against each other.
We've seen them putting out
all sorts of conspiracy theories
about things like the Skripal
poisoning in Salisbury.
And do you think this is effective,
you know - they're not hugely
convincing, are they?
They're not, but their purpose is
not necessarily to persuade you
of an alternative truth, it's to
make you disbelieve everything,
so you no longer know
what's true or not true.
And I think they are glad to see
that sort of chaos being unleashed.
You led an investigation,
a Parliamentary
investigation into fake news.
So, how scared should we be?
I think we should
be scared by this.
Not just by the fact that I think
fake news is crowding out real news
on social media and people
find it often very difficult to
distinguish between what
is fake and what's real.
And alongside that, about half the
people in this country consume news
from a social media feed, and
that feed could easily be gained
by bad actors who want to change
what you think and what you see.
Without any... There is no regulator
that can stop that happening.
And that means, I think,
that our democracy,
our society, is open to massive
abuse by anyone who wants to invest
their resources in doing it.
I mean, that's the diagnosis
- we should be frightened,
democracy is at
risk. What do we do?
If you take, for example,
the Russians buying adverts
on social media
to target Americans
in the American
presidential election,
those ads were approved by
the Facebook ad-check team.
This is someone
committing a federal offence
by using foreign money to try
and influence voters in America.
And when we asked
Facebook about this, they said,
"If we'd been told this was going
on, we would have looked into it
"and done something about it and
cooperated with the investigation."
So it's your fault for not
telling us? Exactly, so...
The company with the most
complex research teams in the world.
If you ran a bank like that, you'd
lose your licence. If you said,
"I can see someone is laundering
money, but no-one asked me about it,
"so I didn't do anything."
So, in that situation, the only
people that could really intervene
are the companies that
are providing the technology.
The British Museum, that
traditional temple to truth,
might seem an unexpected
destination for a history of fake news.
But at the end of the 19th century,
people here were confronted
with the same question Parliament
is grappling with in the 21st century -
what can be done
about fake news?
For 140 years, this was the
home of the British Library.
The reading room was built
to be a cathedral of knowledge,
and obliged by law to keep
a copy of every British book,
and as many foreign
ones as possible, as well.
But in 1893, someone discovered
fake news on these shelves.
What happened next has uncanny
parallels with much more recent
debates about the internet.
Do people have the
right to be forgotten,
and who should be held
responsible for fake news about them?
The victim of the fake news in
question was a remarkable American
called Victoria Woodhull, who
campaigned for female suffrage,
and in 1872, was the first
woman ever to run to be president.
The contentious material originated
from that time and from New York,
where Woodhull was also the
editor of her own newspaper.
Arguing for sexual freedom
and against male hypocrisy,
Woodhull published an expose
about a famous preacher of the day,
Henry Ward Beecher, who
was having an adulterous affair.
For exposing the truth about
the great and well-connected
clergyman Beecher, she found
herself smeared by fake news reports.
Papers and pamphlets
accused her of being a drunk,
the mistress of a gambling
den, or the queen of prostitutes.
It's really easy to shut down
a woman by calling her a slut,
it instantaneously takes
away all her credibility.
It really works. It has
worked for generations.
You always criticise uppity women
for being sexually unconventional,
you smear them with whatever
is seen as bad in the context
of the times, and she was
smeared with all of that... Yeah.
..because she was challenging these
very entrenched and important mores,
she was assaulted.
Woodhull was made out
to be the devil, literally.
And to escape the media
storm, she fled to Britain.
But when she discovered the
lies about her were preserved
for posterity in the
British Museum,
she and her husband sent
them a letter of complaint.
They accused the Library of
"bringing within the
reach of the public,
"obscene and
defamatory literature."
What Victoria wanted was
for the offending publications
to be taken down off
the shelves permanently.
This caused great concern
to the chief librarian,
who the next day wrote,
"The trustees will not,
"I'm sure, sanction the principle
that a book is to be withdrawn
"merely because
it is objected to.
"Such a principle might
have very extensive
"and very undesirable
consequences."
He believed, of course,
that a library shouldn't be
in the business of banning
books, nor of censoring history.
But Victoria was not a woman
who took no for an answer and,
incredibly, she decided to
sue the British Museum for libel.
At a High Court hearing in 1894,
the museum's lawyer
warned of the consequences
if Victoria proved victorious.
He estimated that the library
would need to employ 110 experts
in libel law to inspect
the 315,000 new books
added to the
collection every year.
Surely, he argued,
no library could be expected to
fact-check the books on its shelves?
Set against these
arguments, however,
was the persuasive
testimony of Victoria herself.
And the jury... sensationally
found in her favour.
However, on appeal,
the museum won.
Clearly, they hadn't actually
published the material
that Victoria objected to,
neither had they originated it.
The judge ruled that librarians must
not be found guilty by association.
This was an important verdict
for freedom of information.
And, to this day, most people
would agree that libraries
should not be held
liable for their contents.
But should the principle apply
to all sites that store information?
The British Museum's arguments
have been put forward more recently
by the giants of Silicon Valley.
They say they can't be expected
to fact-check what's on their sites
and they are not
publishers, merely platforms.
Tech companies have a responsibility
because they are not just making
the content available to you,
they are curating what you see.
You are seeing content that's been
selected for you by the tech company
because it thinks that's what
you're most interested in. Yes.
Which is very different
from a library. Indeed.
It's a system that's been designed
to make money for the platforms
out of advertising. Though
the technology that's being used
to direct you towards
the perfect pair of trainers
could also be used to direct you
towards radicalised hate speech,
disinformation, other harmful
content as well, and I think we
should call the tech companies out on
this and say they can do more to stop it.
# We're half-awake
# In a fake empire... #
Given so many people are
online so much of the time,
and so much of what's
out there isn't true,
I believe there are potentially
very real threats from fake news.
The more hatred and vitriol
that shows up on these platforms,
the more people are engaged,
and the more revenue they receive.
So they have monetised
hatred and fake news is the way
they've done it? Yes. And
people get hurt from these things.
But all is not yet lost.
I think we can draw some
hope and some inspiration
from how previous eras
dealt with their crises of trust.
Back in the 1890s, the arrival
of superfast printing presses
and advertising created a
crazy period in the media.
You know, highly
exaggerated journalism arrived.
Now, we're seeing some of
the similar things with digital,
the immediacy of
digital, its global reach,
again makes it prey to all
sorts of distortions and abuse.
If you are an optimist, you say
history suggests that what happens
is people get used to this,
they take it with a pinch of salt,
they calm down and eventually
you get a kind of new equilibrium.
If we are to have genuine
grounds for such optimism,
we do need to be ruthless
about a tendency all of us have,
and one we've seen time and
again in the past and the present.
We have to stop
believing news stories
just because we
want them to be true.
I'm not saying don't
believe in anything -
that's exactly what the
peddlers of fake news would love,
the idea that no-one even
cares what the truth is any more.
But there are still such
things as objective facts,
events either did
or didn't happen.
Not everything is
a matter of opinion.
So I'm not arguing for
a more cynical public,
I want a more sceptical public,
who question the new social media
in the same way they do
the old mainstream media.
Who is telling me this and why?
And do they actually
know anything about it?
In short, you have to be very
critical about who you trust.
Apart from me, obviously.
MUSIC: Fake Empire
by The National
# Turn the light
out, say goodnight
# No thinking for a little while
# We're half-awake
# In a fake empire
# We're half-awake
# In a fake empire... #