Newsrooms gear up to cover 2020 misinformation

With a little more than a year to go before the 2020 election, U.S. newsrooms are gearing up for what they expect will be a deluge of misinformation aimed at influencing, dividing and confusing voters.

The efforts fall, roughly, into two categories: Covering misinformation as a beat to alert readers to hoaxes and trends in false information; and learning or improving verification skills to ensure that news stories don’t reproduce or amplify falsehoods.

In an example of the former, The Washington Post last month announced that it had assigned reporter Isaac Stanley-Becker to what it called a new “digital democracy” beat focused on “the largely unregulated and increasingly dominant role of the internet in driving U.S. politics.” One of his early pieces was a smart take on how Republicans who express concern about President Donald Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are becoming targets of disinformation campaigns.

This summer, The New York Times, in a piece laying out its fact-checking operation and its plans to cover online disinformation, said that it will again create a “tip line” readers can use to flag material they think is intended to mislead. A similar venture during the midterms resulted in about 4,000 submissions, it said.

And, of course, our newsletter co-author Daniel Funke recently launched a new misinformation beat for (Poynter-owned) PolitiFact, focusing on falsehoods from and about the 2020 candidates’ campaigns.

We saw similar efforts to bolster coverage of misinformation before the 2018 midterms, but the presidential cycle is expected to bring new methods and intensity to the manipulation attempts.

In the verification space, the nonprofit First Draft has launched a program it calls “Together Now” to train newsrooms across the country in responsible reporting on misinformation.

“We see examples every day of problematic content winding its way into news reports,” said Aimee Rinehart, First Draft’s director of partnerships and development. She said it’s no longer sufficient for newsrooms to have one specialized forensics team to spot fakes — all journalists have to be trained in skills like reverse-image searches.

“Disinformation actors are working double time to fool the night and weekend crews,” she said. “Newsrooms can no longer rely on a 9-to-5 news cycle.”

Storyful, a social media intelligence and news agency, is doing work in both categories – helping its newsroom partners report on misinformation and also identifying manipulations.

The company, owned by News Corp, recently launched a unit called Investigations by Storyful that will partner with news organizations to use its social media analysis – data about what people are doing and saying online – to identify trends, including problematic ones.

An example, said Darren Davidson, Storyful’s editor-in-chief, was a recent Wall Street Journal story exposing how people are getting around Facebook’s ban on selling guns in its marketplaces by pretending to just sell the gun cases. But the gun cases are posted at inflated prices, an indication that the postings have become “code” for the sale of actual guns. After the Journal’s story, 15 senators called on Facebook to halt the practice.

Storyful will also work with newsrooms to help identify fake content or verify that photos and videos on social media are legitimate, which will be a particular need in the 2020 campaign, Davidson said in a phone interview.

“There’s a lot of concern in newsrooms about being gamed or conned as the election cycle ramps up,” he said.

Have you heard of other news organizations staffing up their misinformation teams? Let us know at factually@poynter.org.