Another day, another occurrence that threatens the truth.
It seems that nowadays you can’t turn on your phone without learning of some new AI spewing misinformation, of media overlords laughing in the face of impartiality and tech giants disregarding their responsibility to their users.
This begs the question: Have we ushered in an era of misinformation?
Political Journalism & Partiality
Fact-checking is crucial when presenting the news to ensure reports are accurate and objective. It obliterates bias and minimises the risk of spreading misinformation that may distort how the story is being told. A survey from Pew Research Centre found that 75 per cent of respondents across 38 countries agreed that it’s never acceptable for a news organisation to be politically biased. However, evidence suggests that the popularity of opinion-led political journalism, which often sees journalists manipulating facts to better their argument, has risen in recent years.
Take GB News, a right-leaning news channel. Since its inception in 2021, the channel has attracted several political-personalities-turned-presenters, including Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson. If this all sounds rather questionable to you, then you’re not alone. It is one of the UK’s most complained-about channels.
Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC), a website dedicated to addressing misinformation within journalism, labelled GB News a ‘biased and questionable’ source in 2021 due to a lack of credibility and transparency about its significant right-leaning stance. MBFC also found ‘numerous failed fact checks’ in GB News’ reporting, with presenters making false statements on topics ranging from asylum seekers to renewable energy to COVID.
In 2024, media watchdog Ofcom found that GB News repeatedly breached Section Six of the Broadcasting Code during the run-up to the general election, by allowing politicians to act as newsreaders and making it impossible for the news to be presented with due impartiality. This eventually culminated in Ofcom imposing more serious sanctions on GB News, including a £100,000 fine in October, after Rishi Sunak was given an uncontested platform to speak on the success of his Government. These breaches are monumental. When a reporter comes face-to-face with a politician, especially one as high-profile as a prime minister, it is their duty to correct their lies and hold them accountable. Without challenging misinformation, journalism merely becomes an echo chamber that reinforces certain ideologies.
Despite these failings, the channel has overtaken Sky News in popularity according to its latest viewing figures, whilst its website boasts a digital audience of 51.9 million.
Apple & AI
If certain news channels are guilty of spreading misinformation, then AI is only adding fuel to the fire. At first, there was a buzz of excitement in the air when Apple unveiled its use of AI to summarise the day’s headlines in one notification. The atmosphere soon soured when this new feature was plagued by ‘hallucinations’ and began generating inaccurate headlines such as ‘Luke Littler Won PDC World Championship’ before the match had begun, ‘Luigi Mangione Shoots Himself’ — he didn’t — and ‘Starmer Backs Farmers,’ which wrongly suggested he’d changed his stance on the controversial inheritance tax shake-up. Other forms of AI are just as susceptible to hallucinations, as a recent study by the BBC discovered.
Apple served misinformation on our lock screens and, what’s worse, these false statements were positioned next to the logos of the BBC and Sky News (amongst others), without clarifying that these headlines were generated by AI, making people mistrust credible news sources. The AI arms race has proven that big tech firms care more about being ‘the first’ than protecting users’ rights to reliable information.
As Laura Davidson, general secretary of the National Union for Journalists, says: ‘With each story inaccurately shared, Apple positions itself amid actors spreading harmful misinformation.’
Meta & Moderation
Never before have I seen a move illicit so much public outcry. Just hours after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was abandoning the use of third-party moderators in the US, journalists and industry professionals alike flocked online to mourn the loss of its state-of-the-art fact-checking program. We’re in ‘a new era of lies,’ declared Chris Stokel-Walker, whilst Emily Bell lamented Meta’s ‘war against facts and truth.’
Now, Facebook and Instagram will be kept in check by Community Notes. Community Notes is a way of moderating social media posts, whereby ordinary users, instead of professional fact-checkers, leave notes correcting inaccurate or misleading remarks made online. Other users can then vote on submitted notes, and those that meet a certain threshold will appear beneath the original post. Studies into how effective a fact checker is found that notes halved the number of shares an inaccurate post got, and increased the likelihood that the author would delete the post by 80 per cent.
Is this enough though? No. With such a large amount of misinformation online, not every inaccurate post can be reviewed and not every relevant note will have enough votes to appear online. Even those that receive enough votes typically take between seven and 70 hours to show up, long after posts have potentially been viewed by thousands of people. Because of this, many industry experts believe the Community Notes system ‘mostly fails to combat misinformation.’
However, Tom Stafford, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, thinks more people should recognise that ‘building in a commentary layer on top of the raw feed of social media posts’ is a positive step towards change.
‘Despite limitations, in speed and reach, and vulnerabilities to biases or abuse, Community Notes is a fundamentally legitimate approach to moderation,’ Stafford says, although even he admits that Community Notes ‘should not be the only component’ of tech firms’ moderation systems.
’Defining Issue of Our Age’
These are not insignificant changes that will only affect a tiny portion of the population. GB News has over 70,000 viewers a month. Over one billion people own an Apple iPhone. And Facebook and Instagram have over five billion monthly active users worldwide. Unless media and tech giants uphold their responsibility to tackle misinformation, grave repercussions will follow. As Channel 4’s landmark study on ‘Truth and Trust’ concludes, how we ‘learn to judge fact, fiction and fairness’ may become ‘the defining issue of our age.’
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