Fake News and Information Professionals’ Codes of Ethics [review]

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to discuss concepts related to Fake News. The study includes the different meanings of Fake News, along with related information disorders. It also includes an analysis of information professionals’ ethical codes in relation to information disorders and ethical behaviours regarding information management. The speed and ease with which Fake News can be disseminated has implications for these information professionals. The literature review explore some of the different taxonomies and typologies of Fake News published by the following authors: Aznar (2019), Froehlich (2017), Verstraete, Bambauer and Bambauer (2017) and Wardle and Derakshan (2017). Methodologically, this paper analyzes the information professionals’ codes of conduct for the main organizations and associations, in a thoughtful manner. These codes of conduct include those published by the International Federation of Libraries (IFLA, 2017), the American Library Association (ALA, 2017), the Association for Information Sciences and Technology (ASIS&T, 1992), and the Society of Professional Journalists (Society of Professional Journalists, 2014). We also discuss guidelines to avoid unethical behaviours relating to information. The conclusions inferred from this study are that Fake News impacts many different disciplines, such as economics and science. However, information professionals, through their codes of conduct and aided by technology, can help society prevent the spread of Fake News.

Key words: Fake News, information professionals, disinformation, ethical codes, codes of conduct.

Resumen

El objetivo de este artículo es debatir los conceptos relacionados con las Fake News. Estos conceptos están relacionados con los diferentes significados de las noticias falsas, el trastorno informativo, así como analizar códigos éticos de los profesionales de la información frente a los desórdenes informativos y al comportamiento ético con respecto a la gestión de la información. La rapidez y facilidad con las que se pueden difundir las noticias falsas tiene implicaciones en estos profesionales. En la revisión de la literatura se exploran las diferentes taxonomías y tipologías de Fake News publicadas por los siguientes autores: Aznar (2019), Froehlich (2017), Verstraete, Bambauer y Bambauer (2017) y Wardle y Derakshan (2017). Así, se debate de forma reflexiva los códigos de conducta de las principales organizaciones y asociaciones de estos colectivos. Metodológicamente se analiza de manera reflexiva la información de los códigos profesionales de conducta de los profesionales de la información para las principales organizaciones y asociaciones. Se analizan los códigos publicados por la Federación Internacional de Bibliotecas (IFLA, 2017) y otras entidades también relevantes como la Asociación Americana de Bibliotecas (ALA, 2017), la Asociación de Ciencias de la Información y Tecnología (ASIS&T, 1992) y Sociedad de periodistas profesionales (Society of Professionals Journalists, 2014). Se muestra también unas pautas para evitar comportamientos no éticos con la información. Las conclusiones que se derivan de este estudio es que las Fake News impactan en muy diversos ámbitos como la economía o la ciencia. No obstante, los profesionales de la información mediante sus códigos de conducta pueden ayudar a la sociedad a evitar la diseminación de noticias falsas, pero también ayudados por la tecnología.

Palabras clave: Fake News, profesionales de la información, desinformación, códigos éticos, códigos de conducta.

---

Introduction

The dissemination of fake news generally involves one or more different goals for spreading them. The first goal encompasses using news to damage someone’s reputation with false, biased, or misleading information. Another is earning money through advertisi ng based on click-bait techniques (Alvarez, 2017). These two examples show that fake news may have different uses and faces.

The internet and social media in particular, allow the end user to easily and quickly disseminate any type of information in several different forms. Additionally, many institutions and information professionals such as members of the media, journalists, political parties, politicians, or financial companies are constantly facing fake news. As literature shows, social media is heavily utilized to spread fake news. For example, a study in the United States showed that 55% of the population believed that false social media profiles are responsible for the spread of Fake News (Richter, 2019).

Fake news tends to alter the reality of a story, and consequently it is difficult to change a receiver’s mind once it has been altered. False news can provide a feeling of familiarity and truthfulness based on the illusory truth paradigm (Jackson, 2019). This sense of truthfulness enables the consumption of this sort of content.

There are several motivations for the creation and consumption of fake news. Some of the root causes of fake news include online communication, economic aspects (Blanco -Herrero & Arcila – Calderón, 2019), the lack of a centralized control mechanism for news consumption on social media platforms, and a decreasing trust of media (Budak, 2019). For instance, in Finland 59% of the population surveyed places trust in media, but in the United States only 32% seem to trust the news media, which is close to the levels of Slovakia (33%) or Malaysia (31%) (Watson, 2019).

Bearing that in mind, it seems that the smaller budgets for traditional media to verify information and produce more rigorous work, together with a lack of online conten t control has enabled the spread of fake news.

In economic terms, fake news has a low cost of production and a high rate of dissemination because of how cheaply the content can be shared with millions of people (Khodabakhsh, Busch & Ramachandra, 2018; Landon-Murray, Mujkic & Nussbaum, 2019). Technology will continue to reduce the cost of creating and spreading fake news, and rapid advances in artificial intelligence (hereafter AI) will bring different and likely even faster approaches, effects, and form of content delivery. One example of this approach are the deepfakes, consisting of a modified video using AI.

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of information disorder and unethical information, as well as a discussion of the codes of conduct o f information professionals and suggested guidelines for avoiding unethical information behaviour in relation to information disorder.

---

(…)

---

Citation

Boté-Vericad, Juan-José (2020). Fake News and Information Professionals’ Codes of Ethics. Telos: revista de Estudios Interdisciplinarios en Ciencias Sociales, 22 (3), Venezuela. (Pp.567-578). DOI: www.doi.org/10.36390/telos223.07

---

Links

• Full text article
  • PDF download
  • Interactive version (digital paper)
• Journal website

---

References

• Abril-Ruiz, Angel. (2019). El IP d mi dpto (@sruizdemaya) decía q una publicación no tenía valor si no aportaba nuevo conocimiento. Aquí va algo nuevo :) > la lista de investigadores españoles por no de artículos retractados—Más de 1280 han sido «pillados» y creciendo #ResearchMisconduct #ManzanasPodridas. Extracted from https://twitter.com/aabrilru/status/1107262500112945156
• Adams, Helen & Harris, Christopher. (2018). Net Neutrality: Why It Matters to School Librarians. Extracted from https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Net+Neutrality%3A+Why+It+Matters+to+School+L ibrarians.-a0537982243
• Alvarez, Barbara. (2017). Public Libraries in the Age of Fake News. Extracted from http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2017/01/feature-public-libraries-in-the-age-of-fakenews/
• American Library Association. (2017). Professional Ethics. Tools, Publications & Resources. Extracted from http://www.ala.org/tools/ethics
• Association for Information Science and Technology. (1992). ASIS&T Professional Guidelines. Extracted from https://www.asist.org/about/asist-professional-guidelines/
• Aznar, Hugo. (2019). Information Disorder and Self-Regulation in Europe: A Broader NonEconomistic Conception of Self-Regulation. Social Sciences. Volume 8, No. 10.
• Switzerland. (Pp. 280-295). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8100280
• Benson, Megan. (2019). Teaching information literacy: Combating fake news through libraryfaculty collaboration. Journal of New Librarianship. Volume 4, No. 2. United Stated. (Pp. 538–541). DOI: https://doi.org/10.21173/newlibs/8/8
• Berghel, Hal. (2017). Lies, Damn Lies, and Fake News. Computer. Volume 50, No. 2. United States. (Pp. 80–85). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2017.56
• Blanco-Herrero, David, & Arcila-Calderón, Carlos. (2019). Deontología y noticias falsas: Estudio de las percepciones de periodistas españoles. El Profesional de la Información. Volume 28, No. 3. Spain. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2019.may.08
• Budak, Ceren. (2019). What Happened? The Spread of Fake News Publisher Content During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The World Wide Web Conference. San Francisco. United States. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313721
• Bullock, David; Mittenzwei, Klaus & Josling, Timothy. (2019). Social Welfare Effects of Transparency and Misinformation in a Political Economy. Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics. Volume 51, No. 3. United States. (Pp. 485–494). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/aae.2019.17
• Cook, John; Lewandowsky, Stephan & Ecker, Ullrich. (2017). Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence. PLOS ONE. Volume 12, No. 5. United Kingdom. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175799
• Froehlich, Thomas. (2017). A Not-So-Brief Account of Current Information Ethics: The Ethics of Ignorance, Missing Information, Misinformation, Disinformation and Other Forms of Deception or Incompetence. BiD: Textos Universitaris de Biblioteconomia i Documentació. Volume 39. Spain. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1344/BiD2017.39.8
• Fung, Isaac; Fu, King-Wa; Chan; Chun-Hong, Chan, Shing, Benedict, Chi-Ngai, Cheung; Abraham, Thomas & Tse, Zion. (2016). Social Media’s Initial Reaction to Information and Misinformation on Ebola, August 2014: Facts and Rumors. Public Health Reports. Volume 131, No. 3. United States. (Pp. 461–473). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/003335491613100312
• Gibson, Amelia; Chancellor, Renate; Cooke, Nicolle; Park, Sarah; Lee, Shari and. & Shorish, Yasmeen. (2017). Libraries on the frontlines: Neutrality and social justice. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Volume 36, No. 8, United Kingdom. (Pp. 751-766). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-11-2016-0100
• Granik, Mykhailo & Mesyura, Volodymyr. (2017). Fake news detection using naive Bayes classifier. 2017 IEEE First Ukraine Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (UKRCON). Kyiv. Ukraine. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/UKRCON.2017.8100379
• Guzmán, Sebastián. (2015). “Should I Trust the Bank or the Social Movement?” Motivated Reasoning and Debtors’ Work to Accept Misinformation. Sociological Forum. Volume 30, No. 4. United States (Pp. 900–924). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12201
• Hobbs, William & Roberts, Margaret. (2018). How Sudden Censorship Can Increase Access to Information. American Political Science Review. Volume 112, No. 3. United States (Pp. 621–636). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055418000084
• Houtman, Eveline & Wall, Margaret. (2019). Information disorder: Helping students to think critically about the news. TRY+ Library Staff Conference. Toronto. Canada. Extracted from http://hdl.handle.net/1807/94747
• International Federation of Library Associations. (2016). IFLA Code of Ethics for Librarians and other Information Workers (full version). Extracted from https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11092
• Jackson, Daniel. (2019). Ethics in fake news: Combatting the illusory truth effect with corrections. Master Thesis. Towson University. United States. Extracted from http://hdl.handle.net/11603/12914
• Kaur, Kanchan; Nair, Shyam; Kwok, Yenni; Kajimoto, Masato; Chua, Yvonne; Labiste, Diosa; Soon, Carol; Jo, Hailey; Lin, Lihyun; Le, Trieu & Kruger, Anne. (2018). Information Disorder in Asia and the Pacific: Overview of Misinformation Ecosystem in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Research report. The university of Hong-Kong. Hong-Kong. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3134581
• Khodabakhsh, Ali; Busch, Christoph & Ramachandra, Raghavendra. (2018). A Taxonomy of Audiovisual Fake Multimedia Content Creation Technology. 2018 IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR). Miami. United States. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MIPR.2018.00082
• Kyung, Hangsoo & Marquardt, Carol. (2018). Disseminating Misinformation through Business Press. Research report. University of Hawai’i at Manoa. United States. Extracted from http://hdl.handle.net/10125/59319
• Landon-Murray, Michael; Mujkic, Edin & Nussbaum, Brian. (2019). Disinformation in Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy: Impacts and Ethics in an Era of Fake News, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence. Public Integrity. Volume 21, No. 5. England (Pp. 512–522). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2019.1613832
• Leetaru, Kalev. (2019). A Reminder That ‘Fake News’ Is An Information Literacy Problem—Not A Technology Problem. Forbes. Extracted from https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/07/07/a-reminder-that-fake-newsis-an-information-literacy-problem-not-a-technology-problem/
• Lopez-Borrull, Alexandre; Vives-Gràcia, Josep & Badell, Joan-Isidre. (2018). Fake news, ¿amenaza u oportunidad para los profesionales de la información y la documentación? El Profesional de la Información. Volume 27, No. 6. Spain (Pp. 1346–1356). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2018.nov.17
• Manzanero, Nelson & Ramírez, Miguel (2018). Diálogos sobre educación democrática: Mirada intercultural de la formación de ciudadanos latinoamericanos. Telos Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinarios en Ciencias Sociales. Volume 20, No. 1. Venezuela. (Pp. 101–128). DOI: https://doi.org/10.36390/telos201.06
• Neri, Abrahan, Ramos, Santiago; & Caro, Felix. (2020). Herramientas google en el aprendizaje de matemática financiera en los estudiantes universitarios. Telos Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinarios en Ciencias Sociales. Volume 22, No. 2. Venezuela (Pp. 429–444). DOI: https://doi.org/10.36390/telos222.13
• Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2016). PISA 2015 Results (Volume I): Excellence and Equity in Education, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264266490-en
• Peña, Marysergia. (2017). Vista de Democracia representativa y participación ciudadana en Venezuela (1958-2015). Telos Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinarios En Ciencias Sociales. Volume 19, No. 1. Venezuela (Pp. 3–26).
• Qutab, Saima; Myers, Michael & Gardner, Lesley. (2019). Information disorder in the glam sector: The challenges of crowd sourced contributions. ECIS 2019 Proceedings. 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Stockholm & Uppsala, Sweden. Extracted from https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2019_rip/37/
• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2018). Digital News Report 2018. Extracted from https://agency.reuters.com/content/dam/openweb/documents/pdf/newsagency/report/dnr-18.pdf/
• Richter, Felix. (2019). Infographic: Who’s Responsible for Spreading Disinformation? Statista Infographics. Extracted from https://www.statista.com/chart/18540/responsibilityfor-spreading-disinformation/
• Rosenstiel, Tom. (2013). Six questions that will tell you what media to trust. Extracted from https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/six-critical-questions-can-useevaluate-media-content/
• Rubio, Jaime. (2017). Isabel Coixet no ha escrito la carta ‘a todos mis amigos internacionales’ sobre Cataluña. Extracted from https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2017/10/03/articulo/1507040548_973881.html
• Schneider, Leonid. (2018a). Zombie scientist Sonia Melo awarded by AstraZeneca. Extracted from https://forbetterscience.com/2018/05/03/zombie-scientist-sonia-meloawarded-by-astrazeneca/
• Schneider, Leonid. (2018b). Another dead scientist framed with manipulated data?. Extracted from https://forbetterscience.com/2018/07/04/another-dead-scientist-framed-withmanipulated-data/
• Sellnow, Timothy; Parrish, Adam & Semenas, Lauren. (2019). From Hoax as Crisis to Crisis as Hoax: Fake News and Information Disorder as Disruptions to the Discourse of Renewal. Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research. Volume 2, No. 1. United States (Pp. 121-142). DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.30658/jicrcr.2.1.6 Society of Professionals Journalists. (2014). SPJ Code of Ethics. Extracted from https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
• Tattersall, Andy. (2018). In the era of Brexit and fake news, scientists need to embrace social media. LSE Brexit. Extracted from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/08/31/in-theera-of-brexit-and-fake-news-scientists-need-to-embrace-social-media/
• Verstraete, Mark; Bambauer, Derek & Bambauer, Jane. (2017). Identifying and Countering Fake News. Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3007971.
• Wardle, Claire & Derakhshan, Hossein. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making. Research report. Council of Europe. Extracted from https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-towardan-interdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html/
• Wardle, Claire. (2018). Information Disorder: The Essential Glossary. Extracted from https://firstdraftnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/infoDisorder_glossary.pdf/
• Watson, Amy. (2019). Trust in news media worldwide 2019. Extracted from https://www.statista.com/statistics/308468/importance-brand-journalist-creatingtrust-news/