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.
GUNSHOT
It 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... #