Fake News in the French Elections

most consequential electoral decisions of this generation. So it looks like in the past half we're seeing the numbers from the actual votes, the actual const of the votes from the Interior Ministry, showing that Immanuel mccon could actually be leading twenty three or points three percent four Immanuel mccon. The second and final round of voting is scheduled for

May seven. Candidates from France's mainstream political parties are all out, leaving an independent Emmanuel Macon and Marie Lepin, leader of the National Front, which has been known as a populist right wing party. Our reporter in Paris, Marie ma Wad, describes it like this, It's going from basically a boxing match to a no holds barred ultimate fighting spectacle, if you want to compare it that way. But as election day approaches, we're getting a worrying case of deja vu.

Fake news stories are being read, liked, and shared online in the critical final days as the voters make up their mind about which candidates to back. Here's Maria again one false report um which I think is my favorite because it's the wackiest. It's about how the Lepans were growing marijuana. According to this report, growing marijuana and their basement to make a bit of cash to pay for

their campaign. After the US election, with a public outcry over fake news, social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google said they were going to do something about it. Have they? Hi, I'm Brad Stone and I'm Paga Cary. And this week on Decrypted, we're taking another look at the problem of fake news and whether changes at Facebook, Twitter, and Google have been effective at curbing the reach of

misleading and sometimes outright fabricated stories. These companies are facing their first major test now half a year after they committed to tackling this issue. In the wake of the U S elections, We'll take a look at how much fake news is circulating in France ahead of the vote and talk to expert fact checkers about the search for a real solution. Stay with us. We've been covering the issue of fake news for a few months now. It first blew up as a major concern after the US election.

Regular listeners of this show may remember that we dedicated an episode to the topic last year. For anyone who needs a recap, basically, here's how it went. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, initially tried to brush off the issue. You know, personally, I think the the idea that you know, fake news on Facebook, of which you know it's a it's a very small amount of of of the content UH influenced in the election in any way, I think is a

pretty crazy idea. But very soon after Mark Zuckerberg made those comments, Facebook started coming under enough pressure from enough different quarters that pretty quickly the company had to backpedal. Here's what Justin can, a tech investor and founder of the streaming site Twitch, told us at the time. It's a nonpartisan issue. I think people making decisions based on fake news is not a good idea, right That's that I think everyone can agree that that's actually going to

be bad for American society and discourse in general. Since then, the main social networks have made a few changes. They have partnered with local media on fact checking projects. Just last week, Google made changes to its powerful search algorithm intended to demote links to suspicious websites, and in France, Facebook has deleted as many as thirty thousand accounts linked to fake news. But there hasn't been a major political event to test out these new policies until now. In France,

presidents get elected in two stages. The first round of voting took place on April and narrowed the race down from a field of eleven candidates to the final two. In some ways, the dynamic playing out in France isn't a million miles away from what US vote has experienced last year. On one hand, there's the front runner, Emmanuel Macron. Then there's Marine Lapan, who Macron is facing in the final vote Las Islamists. We called Mary, who's our reporter in Paris you heard from earlier, to give us a

little bit of background on these two. Now, these two candidates disagree on almost everything. Lepin, on one hand, once out of Europe, whereas Macon wants all in. Micon is backing a bunch of free trade agreements, whereas lepan is for protectionism. Marine Leapin has been a figure on Frances far right for some time. A victory for Marine is currently seen as a long shot, but after Brexit in

the election of Donald Trump, anything seems possible. Leapin is definitely an anti euro and anti European candidate and that helped her when the favors of Russia. But who wasn't the only one in the French election who has been calling for a sort of closer tie. But what has tied mainly been closest to to Russia is really this this sort of explicit um move that she made by paying visit to put In. And it's specifically in this context of populism that we're seeing fake news emerge in

France just the way it did in the US. Here's Jonathan Ditsch, he's the CEO of Bacamo Social and he's been tracking online discussions relating to the French election. In just the past several months, we've seen h a quarter of a million, I think a quarter of a million references in French social media just with the keyword fake news um, and that would be those references be mentioned

like in Facebook and Twitter or something like that. So if you imagine, those are just the people talking about it and then the reach that goes out from that. But that's just what the traditional media outlets are saying about fake news. Here's how much actual content he's seeing. When we measured this for the time period between the beginning of November and a couple of days into April, that reframe and alternative section encompassed about one quarter of

all of the links shared during that time. Just for context there, reframe and alternative content is what Jonathan classifies as potentially fake or deliberately misleading news that's opposed to other kinds of content like news articles from traditional news

organizations or material coming directly from the campaign. The words reframe an alternative are are euphemisms for something that's very dangerous, and the fact that Jonathan dis just saying that perhaps one quarter of all links shared during this time are fake news is pretty scary. And on top of that, Jonathan says a really significant portion of fake or junk news stories relating to the French election have some kind

of link to Russian websites and news sources. We characterize a site as having Russian influence if it links to Russia Today or spot nick News or even maybe one of the Russian newspapers. I mean, those are all indications that the site may have Russian influence. We also see in the sites that are in the reframing section it's about them, that that have links to Russian driven sources. In what we call the alternative section, it's about them.

It's hard not to want to know is this a delivered strategy from the Russians, What if any effect is it having on voters? And the truth is it's really hard to say. It's hard to hard to hard to really know that for sure. But we do know that this content is being published in French around topics that are relevant for the French election. And is that sufficient

to say it? I don't know, But it's almost impossible to distinguish whether that's really overt action or it's just a sympathy, if you will, for that point of view, as in the US election, there's a lot of smoke here. Clearly, Russian President Vladimir Putin has a stake in the French elections. He'd like to see Western Europe further destabilized, which helps him extend Russia's power and his influence on the world stage.

But even if it's not connected to Russia, it appears that we fall for these fake news stories pretty easily, and it doesn't take much for them to go viral. He's marry again. Most of these fake posts, and most of these hoaxes or stories that look plausible or are meant to look plausible, um, they're very often a deformed version of a real fact. And the all there, of course, is that people who are not ill intentioned will fall for them and they'll start sharing them around because it

looks like a rumor that could maybe be true. But Brad, if you think a quarter of all links sounds like a large number, and I did while I was reporting this story, just wait until you hear how much fake news US voters were exposed to before the election. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsor. You know where you want to be. Red Hat has the broad portfolio of open source technologies to get you there.

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Before the break, we heard there's actually a lot of fake or misleading news being shared on French social media just days before the country has to choose its next president. But even though the numbers in France may seem high, it turns out it's about half the amount of fake news that US voters were exposed to before the November twenty sixteen presidential election. My name is clem up in Disigo, and I'm at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University

of Oxford. Clementine has been working on what she calls junk news. That's a kind of catch all term for news that is definitely misleading, if not entirely fake. The free count with the US election, For instance, we studied the case of Michigan UM. In Michigan, we found as much fake news as professional news share them tweet tour in the days leading up to the US election. So compared to that, UM and in French voters were sharing way bitter credit to news on Twitter than the U

s vooters. That is as much fake news as professional news. So that's one junk news article for every credible story oh Man. As a journalist, I find that to be very distressing. Why was it so much worse than the US. Well, for one thing, social media companies have been taking the fake news issue more seriously, so it's possible that some

of their efforts are actually helping right. Facebook and Google have introduced a whole host of new measures since the US election to do things like limit the amount of money fake news sites can make through advertising. Google took a few different steps um. The first was to try and remove as many fake news types as it could from Google ad sence UM, which is the way that a lot of these people made money right by loading their their fake news sides with with ads. That's Alexios Manzarles.

I'm the director of the International fact Checking Network at pointer UM. We are a loose alliance of hundred or so fact checking organizations around the world. Alexios has also been working with Facebook. Facebook after much pr shaming, came to a decision in December UM that both sort of attacked the financial side of it UM by making sure or trying to make sure that fake news sides couldn't boost UM, they couldn't use their advertising assistance, but also

couldn't boost posts on Facebook. Facebook has been doing more than just targeting ad revenue. They've developed tools to help us a spot fake news when it appears in their news feed. We know that people don't want to be lied to or deceived on our platform, and that is a role we take a d percent responsibility for. This is Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer. He's addressing a crowd of people at Facebook's developer conference called F eight.

This was launched in France. It's called Perspectives. So if you find a story and feed, or you read an article about a topic, when you return, you're presented with the points of view of all of the French candidates on that topic. This isn't just the candidate that you are you've connected with. This is all the candidates and it's a pattern that we think is super interesting because

it's presenting a complete story. Because this feature has been working well in France, Facebook is looking at making it more widely available. Google has also made changes to its search results. In particular, there's a new fact check tag that publishers can add to news stories, and it's supposed to be visible in the list of search results. Here's Marie.

Facebook and Google. They've teamed up with local newspapers in a project called cross Check, which spots hoaxes and flexed them to readers online with the help of local journalists. So far, it seems that initiatives like cross check have been well received, but I do have some concerns about whether these kinds of projects can really address the fake news issue at scale. A story could go viral in minutes or hours, but fact checking is a more time

consuming process. By the time a story gets debunked, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people might have already read it and believed it. Cross Check spotted all the fakes that I previously talked about, and I guess that attests to some success of that initiative. Of course, the challenge for social media is getting rid of a fake story quickly enough that it doesn't leave a mark in voters minds after making the rounds. And that's not all, Alexio says.

There's some evidence that articles debunking fake news don't actually get back to that same group of people who read the false story in the first place. I think we've seen um some indicating that hoax has spread faster and the neer than their corrections. M but I haven't seen anything truly reliable on who gets fake news and who doesn't. There's been some work from Balta Coot, Chalky at the I, M T and Luka that claims that these are really

two separate audiences. Um, I don't you know. I I could see that being the case, but I think we need more and more research to prove that. Another issue with the spread of fake news is bought. These are automated accounts that can spue out thousands of tweets or posts in a single day. Facebook recently deleted thirty thou of these accounts, and Twitter has been active here too. Twitter is uh is quite responsive to these, to these

questions of of chank news circulating over the platform. UM so yeah, it's also I mean, the question is also whether you can automate the detection of faith news. Um so this is also something that the project is going on, or you can automately automatically sign votes and automated accounts in order to to take a decision maybe to close the accounts. That was Clementine. Again. At the same time,

we do have to be careful. It's too soon to really know how much of an impact these measures are having. As Alexio said, it hasn't yet been studied carefully, so we can't rule out this one simpler explanation. The term faith news didn't exist in the French social media dialogue before roughly the end of the US elections, and now it has come out of nowhere to represent a massive, massive part of the discussion. That's Jonathan again. He's the

consultant in Paris who studies online conversations. Right. Part of the answer might be that we're just more aware of the issue now, so perhaps we're less likely to be taken in by a fake news story. And the answer probably also has something to do with how much the public trusts their media institutions. Here in the US. Surveys have suggested that number is depressingly low. But there is

still this tricky issue of foreign meddling in elections. Because it can be so hard to figure out who first published a story or where it came from, it's easy for websites associated with foreign governments to circulate their version of the story. Here's Jonathan again. We've also seen stories which seemed to emanate from foreign sources that are designed to to try to create a more sympathetic point of view. Um. You know, to take some of the stories about about

Macolm's alleged hidden accounts overseas banking. This is something that's been rubbished um by traditional media, and yet it continues to exist uh in the reframing in alternative media sources. There are allegations of more substantial Russian medaling in the French elections too. For example, the reports that Russian max cyber groups managed to breach the Mark Kron campaign. That's not unlike what happened last year when Russian hack has

infiltrated the Democratic National Committee. Here's our reporter in Paris, Marie. Some experts have said, you know, it's hard to pin down who's behind these cyber attacks, but they look like they've been perpetrated by the same group that tried to infiltrate the Democratic Party in the US, and a group called the pond Storm, which some people have said is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getting a handle on fake

news isn't just important for France. There's a general election coming up in June in the UK and then Germany federal elections of scheduled for September plus, there is a ton of fake news that has nothing to do with politics. Watch out for the health advice you're reading about on

the web. There is definitely fake news and other topics, and I would think that health specialists have a particularly strong grip on how widespread fake news about um cures or or alleged cures to all kinds of ailments are on the internet. I remember seeing some of these on Zeka, for instance. But bringing it back to politics, there are some encouraging signs that the public is becoming more aware

of what they're reading and sharing online. I asked Jonathan whether he saw a spike in the number of fake news articles being shared before the first round of voting in France, which took place on April, and he told me, actually, we saw the opposite. What we saw is that there is a greater sharing of traditional and campaign UH links from the traditional media and campaign sources over the month of April UH. And that's actually been a fairly steady

increase over the past couple of months. And so what that means now is, whereas it might have been about one in every four links was from these reframing or alternative sites, now it's just under one in every five. Jonathan says he's seeing more articles being shared on average per account, and he's seeing more accounts sharing articles, so traditional media stories are rising as a portion of the total, and platforms like Facebook and Google will be refining their

tools all the time. For example, spamming used to be common on both sites. It's loss of a problem today, or at least we're all better at ignoring it, And it seems like both companies are tackling fake news the same way. Although interestingly, Alexios was very clear that while a lot of the content is being distributed on Facebook and Google, um so therefore they have an important stake in the outcome, these companies shouldn't have to take all

the responsibility. But this is really a job for everyone. It's a job for high school teachers who need to teach the digitally native not to be digitally naive. It's a job for fact checkers who need to make sure they're reaching beyond their bubbles. It's a job for media organizations to double up, double down, sorry on their own fact checking processes before they published things, and to be

more honest about corrections. So I do think this is not there's no silver bullet, and Jonathan had similar views. He put it to me like this, The real reason why people are susceptible to this is because they don't feel like their stories being told and they don't feel like they're hearing something that's relevant to them. P I. I I do agree with Alexios and Jonathan. It is everybody's responsibility to get educated and maybe be a little bit

skeptical about the stories they read. But I gotta say I feel like Google and Facebook have an extra responsibility here. Their success has destabilized the traditional media. We've seen it all across the world, and you know the fact that it is open to vacuum for these less uh you know, trusted news sources to come in and then in some cases mislead people. It's tough to handle, particularly being a member of the press. I think these companies, you know,

they've taken a passive attitude. They've gone and said, well, we're going to address bad things when we see them, we'll get them off the network. And that's frankly not good enough. The velocity of news and sharing moves so quickly now you almost have to prevent it from ever taking hold in the first place, and we've seen the destructive outcome that fake news can have. I think I agree with you. We wouldn't tolerate this kind of content

being distributed on any other platform. So um, I think if we're applying standards across the board, the web needs to catch up to whatever the outcome in France, one hopes that people are making their decisions based on real news instead of date news. And with that, that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. You can record a voice message and send it to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Pia

Gattari and I'm at brad Stone. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show on Apple podcast or wherever you normally listen. While you're there, please leave us a rating and review. It really helps more listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Akuta, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson. A big thanks to Marie ma Wad for contributing from Paris, and to our new reporter Nico Grant, who helped with a big chunk of the reporting and research for today's show,

Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week. Decrypted is brought to you by red Hat, whose broad portfolio of open source technologies for the enterprise helps you get from where you are to where you want to be. Red Hat the open technology to help you realize your vision. Learn more at red hat dot com, slash opent tech