Fake news has been around for a very long time — see “yellow journalism” from the 1800s — but in this day and age, trying to contain rumours and sensationalized news is like playing whack-a-mole, and the victims are readers and other consumers of media.

As the coronavirus spread throughout the world this week, along with fears of it infecting people here in Richmond, there was no shortage of false rumours circulating on social media — some of it taking legitimate news stories and twisting them at times into something totally bizarre.

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Already more than a week ago (Jan. 21), as fears over coronavirus were starting to ramp up, a WeChat headline proclaimed in Chinese: “Breaking News! The first case of deadly coronavirus has been confirmed in Vancouver! The person who was infected with the disease is Asian ethnicity.”

The story got 28,600 hits but it was actually a CBC story that confirmed the first coronavirus case in the U.S. and it definitely didn’t say that a case was confirmed in Vancouver.

Another recent story posted by a news aggregator — a website that pulls together stories from different media outlets, called “self-media” in Chinese — to WeChat based on a Richmond News article skewed a cannabis-related story with a sensational headline: “Is Richmond going to be destroyed? It smells even worse than farts. More than 1,200,000 kilograms of weed shrouded the city, driving 100,000 Chinese Canadians crazy? What should we do to save (our) children?”

Meanwhile, the News headline read: “Richmond pushes for cannabis air emissions standards,” focusing on health and environmental concerns about emissions from cannabis operations — and there was definitely no comparison to the smell of flatulence.

On WeChat, which has almost a billion users, news aggregators in China largely take content from other media and twist their stories to sensationalize them.

But there are also Chinese-language news aggregators in Canada.

A Richmond News story about cannabis emissions was translated into Chinese for a self-media site, with a headline talking about cannabis smelling worse than farts.

Trust in news corroded

When content is skewed and twisted, it corrodes the basis of trust with the audience that media depend on to run their operations, explained Kirk LaPointe, editorial vice-president with Glacier Media Group, the parent company of the News, and a journalism professor at UBC.

“It can mean that (the audience’s) general view of the media, its general calibre and its general trustworthiness get all lumped in together and we all pay the price essentially for the weakest link in the chain,” LaPointe said.

While journalists spend a lot of time reading and consuming news, analyzing its content and sources, the general public doesn’t have time to do a deep dive into every story they read and they rely on consuming news stories quickly.

“If someone shares a disturbing piece with them, they don’t then turn around and say, well, I need to validate this, or I need to look at the source of it or I need to do all the due diligence that we talk about in the craft,” LaPointe said. “It’s stuck with them.”

The News has seen dozens of its articles twisted by websites purporting to be news organizations.

These news aggregators are allowed by WeChat to publish eight articles per day and, more importantly, they are also able to sell advertising on their pages when they reach a certain number of clicks, thereby getting ad revenue.

Ads for Canadian organizations can be found plastered on these sites.

The articles that are being used on these news aggregator sites are being written — and paid for — by legitimate, often mainstream media companies like the News as well as other media outlets, for example, Global, CTV and CBC.

LaPointe said the more reputable media organizations are most often targeted because they’re the most trusted.

However, there tends to be a feeling of vulnerability or helplessness in the industry on how to combat content appropriation effectively, he added.

“It can be days before you recognize it’s been done, by which time there’s a large batch of people who’ve consumed it and your effort to get the content taken down and scrubbed can take some time,” LaPointe said. “All the while, an errant report is out there.”

Salacious details added

Richmond-based news aggregator West Canada Weekly recently reposted a News story about a woman who was interrogated for 90 minutes at the airport because she brought back money given to her by her Chinese boyfriend — which the Canadian Border Services Agency apologized to her about after being contacted by the News.

But in their posting, West Canada Weekly added salacious details to the headline, saying she was stripped by the border agents — a completely fabricated detail.

When the skewed story was posted to WeChat, the headline read: “Crazy! Richmond white girl has been stripped naked at YVR. Finding a Chinese boyfriend should be humiliated?”

West Canada Weekly claim they don’t falsify news content, but sometimes they write stories in an “interesting, understandable and vivid way.”

A News story about a Chinese woman who had to pay for the cleanup after her tenant had a meth lab in her house (“Update: Richmond council denies fee reduction after meth lab cleanup”) was taken by a Chinese-language news aggregator and sensationalized with the headline on WeChat declaring: “Being a landlord in Canada is so difficult! Richmond-Chinese woman encounters a drug dealer tenant. Her house has been destroyed and she needs to pay $800,000 (bill).”

While much of the content on the self-media sites is sensational news — crime, drugs — there were also stories posted before the recent federal election that sensationalized election stories and issues and targetted high-profile candidates.

The views on these stories were in the thousands with comments after them about not supporting these candidates in the election.

A game of “whack-a-mole”

Trying to keep up with “fake news” like this is like playing whack-a-mole, LaPointe explained.

While there are legal tools to fight plagiarism, he said, for example, copyright law, anti-piracy legislation and intellectual property laws, these can be expensive fights for small amounts of compensation.

LaPointe feels, though, that there is some of movement among social media platforms to cut back on fake news appearing on their sites.

“They don’t want to be purveyors of fake news and plagiarize material,” he said.

Both media organizations and the audience have fallen prey to these news aggregators with technology racing ahead of the audience, LaPointe said.

“The larger companies are saying the same thing, which is we need to get our arms around this issue,” he added.