Fake News and Facebook, or What can we Learn From the Russians During the Cold War?

In the 1980s, during the Cold War, I read an article the state of news coverage in Russia.

Back then, the media in Russia was state-controlled. 

Bad news about the state was suppressed, and negative news about the West was highlighted.

As a result, you might think that Russians were poorly informed about the world.

Of course, many were. But the researchers also found something surprising.

Because they knew their media was state-controlled, many Russians assumed whatever it published or broadcast was slanted or untrue.

This made many of them diligent about seeking out alternative sources of information, like the BBC or underground newspapers.

In this way, they could either confirm or debunk what they were getting from their media.

It was different in the West. Since we had a free press, we assumed everything we read, heard or saw was the truth.

Much of it was. But some of it wasn’t.

Governments and corporations in the West also lied or bent the truth—like about progress in the war in Vietnam, about the march of Communism around the world, the size and danger posed by the Russian military, or the lack of danger from certain kinds of chemicals or pollutants.

Even cigarettes were safe; all those doctors said so. It was in the newspaper! 

By assuming what we got from the media was always true, we let our guards down.

(We didn’t know, back then, that the CIA used to plant negative stories about governments the U.S. disliked in newspapers in other countries, then get them picked up and republished by American newspapers, from where they would travel to other western nations. Voila! Instant credibility.)

It took the diligent work of activists, or whistle-blowers like Daniel Ellsberg releasing the Pentagon Papers, to help us see the truth about various situations.

That old article about the Russians, the media and the Cold War came back to me recently during the huge debate taking place about Facebook.

In an article on the CBC website, reporter Michael Braga wrote about how people are stealing photos of children off Facebook and passing them off as their own.

In addition to all the other fake news, posts, free offers and such on Facebook, it is “a good reminder of how easy it has become online to pass misinformation off as authentic," he wrote.

And because it is so difficult to police or control, it's also a good reminder of "how the onus has largely shifted, unfairly or not, onto users to sort out what's real and what's not.”

In other words, we can be critical of Mark Zuckerberg all we want, but at the end of the day it’s up to us to be smart about what we like and share.

Of course, this is just simple media literacy: Assume what we read on Facebook, or any other media platform, isn’t true until we can be satisfied that it is.

We need to ask: Does it come from a credible source? Can it be corroborated by a second source? Does it sound too good to be true? (Is WestJet really giving away free airline tickets?)

My own worry is that Facebook has become too big and too successful to ever reform itself.

Maybe governments around the world will impose regulations on it. But until then it’s up to every user to screen out the fake from the true.

Maybe those Russians during the Cold War can be our guide. 

P.S. The rise of "deepfakes"—videos that overlay celebrity faces on to porn stars or make Barack Obama say anything you want him to say—make separating true from false harder all the time. It's a scary world out there.