1997 SPECIAL REPORT: “FAKE NEWS ON THE INTERNET“

Many of the early, optimistic assumptions about how the internet would create a public sphere with greater openness, transparency and accuracy have been battered by how it has actually been used and abused, according to Frank Pasquale, professor of law at the University of Maryland. During a talk, The Automated Public Sphere, last week at Berlin’s digital culture festival Re:publica, Pasquale said that fake news stories, the spread of propaganda, secret sponsors behind what we see and read, and hashtag flooding (using hashtags to flood searches on a topic) had all damaged utopian ideas about the public benefits of the internet. “We were told the internet would empower everyone and reduce the dominance of mainstream media, but it has also encouraged extremism,” he says. “It promised openness, but lets influence go unchecked and unmonitored” because it is difficult to figure out who is actually funding and supporting many websites. He also notes that academic researchers have established that tens of t