STOPPING FAKE NEWS
The work practices of peer-to-peer counter
propaganda
Maria Haigh, Thomas Haigh, and Nadine I. Kozak
When faced with a state-sponsored fake news campaign propagated over social media, in a
process we dub “peer-to-peer propaganda,” a group of volunteer Ukrainian journalistic activists
turned fact checking into a counter-propaganda weapon. We document the history of StopFake,
describe its work practices, and situate them within the literatures on fact checking and online
news practices. Our study of its work practices shows that StopFake employs the online media
monitoring characteristic of modern journalism, but rather than imitating new stories it applies
media literacy techniques to screen out fake news and inhibit its spread. StopFake evaluates
news stories for signs of falsified evidence, such as manipulated or misrepresented images and
quotes, whereas traditional fact-checking sites evaluate nuanced political claims but assume the
accuracy of reporting. Drawing on work from science studies, we argue that attention of this
kind to social processes demonstrates that scholars can acknowledge that narratives are socially
constructed without having to treat all narratives as interchangeable.
KEYWORDS fact checking; fake news; propaganda; Russia; trolling; Ukraine; virtual teams
Introduction
Russia responded quickly when a popular revolt unseated Ukraine’s pro-Russian president,
Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. Within days its military had seized the Crimean
Peninsula, which Russia almost immediately annexed. In the months that followed, Russia
channeled arms, volunteers, intelligence operatives, and eventually active duty troops into
Eastern Ukraine where they fomented a civil war. This was the story told outside Russia.
Russian media reported a Central Intelligence Agency-engineered coup in which Nazis
seized control of Ukraine and committed atrocity after atrocity. Russia extended its protection
to Crimea after a spontaneous uprising by local militias, and it sent only humanitarian
aid and civilian volunteers to Eastern Ukraine. This divergence of media narratives is not
merely a nationalistic endorsement of Russia’s military campaign, but a crucial part of it.
Russia is fighting a new kind of “hybrid warfare,” or “postmodern warfare,” in which military
actions, propaganda, political activity, and online campaigns are seamlessly combined
(Thomas 2014; Mitrokhin 2015). In 2017, Russia’s defense minister acknowledged the existence
of an information warfare group within its military, saying that “propaganda needs to
be clever, smart and efficient” (Isachenkov 2017).
In this paper, we explore the new kinds of information work devised by StopFake, a
volunteer organization, to fight this weaponization of fake news. Founded by young Ukrainian
journalists in March 2014, StopFake drew selectively on Western practices of “fact
checking,” an increasingly common and prominent activity in which journalists take a
Journalism Studies, 2018
Vol. 19, No. 14, 2062–2087, https://oi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1316681
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
controversial claim and evaluate its truth using publicly available data and the opinions of
experts. StopFake’s mission was to analyze a large volume of information and only publish
what they could prove false. If the claim seemed untruthful, but was impossible to prove, or
appeared to be partially correct, StopFake remained silent. While StopFake appropriated
the cultural authority of fact checking, and appealed to the Western concepts of journalistic
objectivity and civil society which underpin it, its activist character and decision to publish
only debunkings, rather than evaluations, set it apart from Western models such as
PolitiFact (Stencel 2016; Graves 2016a; Graves and Konieczna 2015).
Several authors examined StopFake’s activity as a case of volunteer fact checking and
an information resistance project (Bonch-Osmolovskaya 2015; Cottiero et al. 2015; Pomerantsev
2015; Khaldarova and Pantti 2016). We, in contrast, frame our study of StopFake
within the broader study of online news practices and of fact-checking work. The monitoring
and evaluation activities conducted by StopFake.org have a lot in common with those
practiced by other modern journalists (Boczkowski 2010). Between the spring of 2014 and
the fall of 2015, our period of observation, StopFake’s work practices functioned via email
and social media. A rotating core of 12 people in Kiev, including journalistic, editorial, and
technical staff, coordinated work. A larger international network of online volunteers submitted
stories for evaluation, provided translation services, and worked collaboratively to
locate counter evidence.
In addition to changing practices in newsrooms around the world, the internet also
allows for citizen participation in news reporting. Modern online infrastructure, such as
inexpensive Web hosting and open source content management systems, makes it
much easier for volunteers to collaborate online and to produce a professional-looking
website. Allan (2006, 52) notes that with the internet, “a multitude of users could harness
the power of distributed information to connect with one another in meaningful dialogue,”
leading to citizen involvement in reporting on events including Hurricane Katrina and the
London bombings. Reese et al. (2007, 276) found a complementary relationship between
mainstream journalists and citizen media. Indeed, they note “the blogosphere weaves
together citizen and professional voices in a way that extends the public sphere beyond
the boundaries policed by the traditional news media.” This was the case with StopFake,
a project that combined journalists trained at the leading journalism school in Ukraine, concerned
citizens located around the world with needed language or technical skills, and
content both accessed through, and disproved by information found on, the internet.
Fact Checking as a Social Process
StopFake’s distinctive contribution has been to adapt the idea of “fact checking” as a
tool to counter a concerted foreign propaganda campaign. Fact-checking organizations
usually evaluate isolated claims made by domestic politicians on behalf of domestic audiences.
StopFake has adapted the technique to challenge a state-sponsored campaign of
systematic misrepresentation, providing its results to Russian and Western audiences as
well as domestic consumers.
Fact checking in the United States rests on an assumption that the public will trust
journalistic objectivity, but challenges the idea that journalists should report rival claims
without evaluating them. For decades, Western journalists argued their work revolved
around core ethical values, at the center of which was the value of objectivity, to be
“free from values and ideology” (Gans 2004, 182). The Society of Professional Journalists
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2063
(2014) insists journalists should endeavor to be “accurate and fair” and that they should
report the truth, verifying information before using it in a story. However, in practice the
Western journalistic commitment to “objectivity” has often gone along with a reluctance
to take sides in reporting controversial topics, instead reporting the arguments made by
each side. Fact checking evolved from a tool of amateur bloggers into an established
part of professional journalism embodying “distinct elements of ‘accountability’ journalism
as well as ‘explanatory’ or ‘service’ journalism” (Graves 2016b, 95). According to Graves,
“objectivity as conventionally practiced resists making factual challenges to official
claims” (215).
American fact checkers, such as PolitiFact, typically take a claim from a political
speech or opinion piece and ask academic experts to evaluate it. The result is summarized
with a ranking. While “True” and “False” are options, claims are often ranked as “Mostly
True” or “Mostly False” and, on occasion, as “Pants on Fire” (Graves 2016b). The precise
rating often hinges on analysis of intent. A claim might be technically true but misleadingly
presented, or true only according to an unconventional measure of economic growth. This
form of fact checking relies on broader institutions of liberal Western democracy that are
not fully developed within Ukraine: journalists critique the claims of a particular politician
within the context of ostensibly apolitical expert opinion.
StopFake, despite adopting the identity of “fact checking,” is doing something rather
different. This reflects a difference between the kinds of claims evaluated by PolitiFact and
those evaluated by StopFake. American fact checking was designed to keep politicians
honest, not to counter the systematic and coordinated work of a state-backed propaganda
machine. PolitiFact focuses on specific political claims, but assumes that the journalists
reporting them are doing so accurately and honestly. In contrast, StopFake evaluates the
work of journalists, looking for misleading stories based on fabricated evidence. Its volunteers
stress that they work only on “facts” and pay no attention to opinions, a contrast with
the PolitiFact approach of canvassing expert opinions. StopFake, rather than rating some
claims as true and others false, never posted items the team could not disprove. Each evaluation
posted on the site has a title beginning with the word “Fake.” While PolitiFact focuses
on interpretation, more basic questions generally concerned StopFake: Was this photograph
taken when and where the story claims? Is the person quoted identified correctly?
Does the story mistranslate or misrepresent information in the source on which it claims
to be based?
During the Cold War, philosopher Karl Popper put the idea of the “open society” at
the heart of the Western liberal struggle against totalitarianism, linking political openness
to scientific inquiry (Popper 2013). Popper’s parallel work in the philosophy of science disputed
the earlier assumption that experiments could prove scientific claims correct, but
insisted that any scientific claim could potentially be disproved if a counter example was
found, a process he dubbed “falsification.” StopFake engaged in a similar project: the systematic
testing and falsification of claims made in news reports. The techniques it uses
cannot prove a story true but might, in the view of StopFake, prove it fake.
This insistence that responsible journalists work only with “facts” may nevertheless
startle readers who question whether facts ever can be fully separated from opinions, or
doubt that anything can be unequivocally proven. Michael Schudson has shown that journalistic
objectivity is a relatively recent invention. Schudson (2001, 149) notes that “‘Objectivity’
is at once a moral ideal, a set of reporting and editing practices, and an observable
pattern of news writing.” As Schudson (2003) explains, reporters give meaning to the
2064 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
facts by constructing a narrative. This narrative can assist readers to inform themselves, but
it can, at moments, deliberately or unintentionally mislead or misinform. The rise of explicitly
partisan, entertainment-oriented news outlets such as Fox News may suggest that this
attachment to objectivity has run its course. After the 2016 US presidential election, references
to a “post-fact era” have become commonplace.
Scholars have shown that journalists reproduce the political, economic, and social
viewpoints of the community in which they live. Indeed, Herman and Chomsky (1988,
305) argue that while journalists view themselves as objectively reporting events, they
and the organizations for which they work, perform a “system-supportive propaganda function”
due to the corporate ownership of news media, the reliance on government and corporate
information as sources, national values, as well as the advertising-supported nature
of media in the West. As such, information passes through successive filters, leaving only a
“cleansed residue” on the pages of the morning newspaper (Herman and Chomsky 1988).
McChesney (2012, 683) agrees, arguing that government and corporate sources limit the
range of “legitimate debate.”
From this viewpoint there might seem to be little to choose between the coverage of
Ukraine provided by Russia Today, on the one hand, and by the BBC or New York Times, on
the other. After all, most Soviet propaganda tactics were used at times by, or even originated
in, Western countries, though they took on a different character as part of a systematic
and totalitarian state apparatus (Kenez 1985, 251–252). Boyd-Barrett (2015) examines
Western narratives around the Ukraine crisis. He argues that the Western media was
itself engaged in propaganda work, by framing the dispute in ways that supported the political
and foreign policy goals of the Western powers. Noting systematic divergences
between narratives favored by Western journalism and those propagated in the Russian
media (and in some “alternative” Western publications), he asserts that their
clash inevitably tends towards the destabilization of the hegemonic Western discourse,
not in the sense that it entitles an analyst to declare what is “true” or “false,” but in the
sense of being able to detect the play of ideology amidst apparent contradiction,
paradox and hypocrisy.
A scholar following Boyd-Barrett, determined to deny either side the privileged position
of objectivity or moral superiority, might admit no distinction between the StopFake
volunteers, working to advance one set of geopolitical interests, and their sisters in the
Russian troll factories (discussed below) who serve another. We take a different perspective.
Instead of looking broadly at two sides in a war, and thus characterizing national media
practices in the manner of, for example, Nygren et al. (2016), our interest is in the phenomenon
of fake news distribution and in the work practices of a specific group attempting to
fight its spread. Recognizing that both kinds of information work are driven by geopolitical
concerns does not, in itself, commit us to the conclusion that their products are equivalent.
Neither do we assume that the work of the Russian troll factories is propaganda, and therefore
untrue, and that the work of StopFake is virtuous counter propaganda, and therefore
true. Instead, we offer a micro-level study of information work practices grounded in
science studies and ethnographic methods. The trolls reportedly work quickly to fill a
quota and produce output that betrays little concern for truth, or even plausibility,
whereas we will show below that the work of StopFake proceeded carefully and centered
on a hunt for evidence fulfilling specific and quite rigorous criteria.
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2065
The same questions of truth and objectivity are central to science studies, a field in
which scholars have devised epistemological frameworks to acknowledge the obvious
fact that knowledge is socially constructed without adopting a position of extreme relativism
in which truth claims are equally valid. As Graves (2016c) has observed, “fact checkers,
investigative journalists and scientists [all deal] with controversies in which not just facts
but rules for determining them are in question.” Fact checking, like science, “affords a
view of the way material, social, and discursive contexts structure factual inquiry” (3).
Traditional positivist philosophers of science assumed that objective truth existed
and could be discovered by following a scientific method, which we might compare to
the rhetoric of professional journalists. As a reaction to this, the radical philosopher Paul
Feyerabend insisted that there was no scientific method for the production of truth, that
objectivity was an illusion, and that therefore all forms of knowledge were equivalent
(Feyerabend 1975). We might compare this to the position of Boyd-Barrett.
Later, more socially oriented scholars distrusted both positions. They reinterpreted
scientific truth claims as the product of social processes, studying work processes ethnographically
(Latour and Woolgar 1979). They historicized the invention of scientific truth
(Shapin 1994) just as Schudson (2003) historicized the invention of journalistic objectivity.
They rejected the assumption that belief in claims we agree with should be explained
through appeals to the natural world whereas belief claims we disagree with should be
explained causally, instead arguing for a “symmetrical” approach in which all beliefs
were explained causally (Bloor 1991). In the same way, the commonalities between the
information work of propaganda and conventional journalism, and between the work of
trolling and online counter propaganda, would benefit from a symmetrical examination
grounded in social practices.
Yet most in the science studies field would not conflate the idea that science is a set
of social processes with the idea that all possible claims or beliefs are interchangeable. By
looking at how claims are constructed, and buttressed against challenges, science studies
moved beyond simply arguing that all truth claims are socially constructed, and so serve
social interests, to look more deeply at the ways in which different social processes
produce truth claims with different characteristics. For example, the specific social processes
by which scientific truth claims are constructed give them a different relationship
to the natural world than those put forward by religious or political authorities (Latour
1988). Latour documented the enormous care taken by scientists to build networks of
human and non-human resources, such as laboratory equipment, publications, and experimental
results, to bolster their published claims. Scientists construct these evidential chains
with possible challenges in mind, reinforcing their weak spots in their narratives to survive
attacks from their peers. Journalists likewise construct published narratives, working with
constraints mandating the collection, evaluation, and presentation of particular kinds of evidence.
This does not make their work products unbiased or objective, but it does allow
them to survive simple challenges of the kind that StopFake applies when screening for
fake news.
Studying StopFake
Our research employs mixed qualitative methods to gather data about StopFake.org’s
work processes and products. We were interested in studying how StopFake.org
conducts its information work, conducting detailed study and analysis of this single
2066 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
organization (Cresswell 1998) and how the group made editorial decisions. The data presented
here were compiled over 18 months, from the spring of 2014 until August 2015,
using a variety of approaches. First, and earliest, we read the English- and Russian-language
websites of the organization closely for data about the untrue stories, or “fakes,” that StopFake.org
chose to debunk. This elicited a stream of stories that the group identified as fake,
but did not explain how and why the group chose these stories over others. For that we
needed informants inside the organization. In late March 2015, two members of StopFake.org
traveled to the United States. We participated in public events with the two StopFake.org
editors and carried out extensive unstructured interviews with them.
StopFake.org, whose volunteers were, during our period of observation, spread
across Ukraine and around the world, conducted much of its work virtually through
email and social media. As such, traditional ethnographic approaches, where the researcher
physically participates in a group or community, were not possible. Therefore, we employed
the more recent qualitative research methodology of internet-based ethnography to
analyze the information work practices of StopFake.org participants online. Markham
(2003, 52) states that these research practices allow researchers to “study cultural phenomena
mediated through Internet-related technologies for communication.” One of the
editors provided us with access to the organization’s closed Facebook group. We closely
read the text of StopFake.org’s internal material from its closed Facebook group to determine
the work flow amongst the organization’s volunteers and how StopFake.org selected
different stories to rebut.
Data gathered from the public StopFake.org sites, the private Facebook group, the
public presentations of the two editors, and the unstructured, face-to-face interviews
was triangulated to increase the reliability of the findings. We then coded all Englishlanguage
fake reports issued by the group in its first 18 months to give a quantitative perspective
on the kinds of evidence used to declare news fake. This mixture of methods
allows us to combine material from online and “real”-world settings to further our understanding
of the work practices of StopFake.org participants.
Countering Peer-to-peer Propaganda
StopFake is a young organization, founded in March 2014 by recent graduates of the
National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy’s journalism school. In interviews with us and
in their public presentations, StopFake’s founding volunteers presented their reaction to
Russian coverage of the occupation as the collision of idealistic, Western-influenced journalistic
professionalism with cynical Russian propaganda. For example, in February 2014 thousands
of soldiers, wearing green uniforms unmistakably similar to those of the Russian
military, surrounded key sites around Crimea such as airports and government buildings.
Russian officials claimed that they were spontaneously organized groups of local citizens.
Russian television channels, widely distributed within Ukraine, likewise insisted that the
“green men” were not Russians (Shevchenko 2014). Only after Russia annexed Crimea
did its President, Vladimir Putin, admit that the green men had been Russian special
forces (RT.com 2014).
StopFake’s founders describe being shocked by these blatant departures from the
norms of journalistic practice they had been taught. Their narrative stresses their naïvety:
the StopFake editors at first complained to the Russian journalists and media organizations
involved, sending evidence in the hope of securing retractions. Prior to the conflict, Russian
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2067
media were widely disseminated in Ukraine, in part as a result of investments made in
Ukraine by Russian media groups (Szostek 2014). The Russian media ignored these
requests, and the organizing team came together via a closed Facebook group. They registered
the StopFake.org domain on March 2, 2014 and put up an online form for readers to
submit dubious news stories for evaluation. Origin narratives tend to be somewhat stylized
versions of reality, but we observed that StopFake’s most active volunteers were indeed
recent journalism school graduates, whose impression of journalistic norms came more
from textbooks and inspiring professors than from prolonged immersion in news organizations.
Their commitment to upholding journalistic objectivity, through the defense of facts
in the face of lies, is a commitment to an imagined version of Western media practice.
Indeed, we were startled that our informants did not seem to be aware that some American
media have more than a little in common with Russia Today.
StopFake’s organizational structure and information work practices were created
rapidly, and in response to a very specific set of media practices. Its counter-propaganda
mission is, in some ways, quite novel and in others entirely familiar. A new kind of propaganda
offensive gave rise to a new kind of counter propaganda, both reliant on social
media. So to understand StopFake we must first explore what was, and was not, new
about the Russian information offensive launched in 2014.
A century ago states were already funding propaganda campaigns as an integral part
of their war-fighting missions. Kenez, in his definitive work on Soviet propaganda, The Birth
of the Propaganda State, concluded that propaganda was seamlessly integrated within the
larger Soviet system (Kenez 1985). Totalitarian governments traditionally exercised direct
control over national media. Government officials created press releases, gave briefings,
approved news stories, and issued posters, films, and books supporting the state’s position
(Kenez 1985; Pipes 1995). Soviet journalists served an ideological state mission, while at the
same time developing their own journalistic practices and following their own agendas
(Wolfe 2005). Soviet media consumers likewise developed their own methods of deciphering
its content (Mickiewicz 2008).
Russia has made a similar investment in mass media propaganda to steer public
sentiment in one direction or another. Petrov, Lipman, and Hale (2014) have stressed the
extent to which Russia’s government remains reliant on high domestic approval to retain
its legitimacy. For 17 months, including our entire period of observation, Ukraine dominated
the news headlines on Russian television and government allied newspapers.
Saturation coverage lifted only in October 2015, when attention shifted to Syria to
prepare public opinion for Russia’s intervention there (BBC 2015).
The general content of Russian propaganda still appears to follow a top-down
method, as talking points set by officials close to Putin are propagated almost instantly
throughout the Russian mediasphere (AP 2013). Putin’s allies exert enormous influence
over the Russian media and control all Russian television networks. Russia’s government
still tolerates some independent voices in niche media such as the Ekho Moskvy radio
station, Novaya Gazeta alternative newspaper, and online video producer Telekanal
Dozhd. Overall, however, Reporters Without Borders ranked Russia as only 148 out of
180 countries assessed for its World Press Freedom Index for 2016.
Putin does not direct a state machine with anything like the bureaucratic ubiquity of
the old Communist Party. Indeed, Roudakova (2017) argues that Soviet journalism took the
idea of truth telling seriously, despite interpreting this in a distinctive way and applying it
selectively. In her account, the real crisis in journalistic authority exploited by Putin’s regime
2068 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
came with the dismantling of this system in the 1990s. The production and dissemination of
propaganda to support its talking points has been distributed. Russia’s governing elite
employs large numbers of internet trolls, who set up social media accounts in which
they place ordinary-seeming comments and personal news, punctuated by streams in
which they express the talking points of the day in their own words (Pomerantsev 2013;
Chen 2015).1
Others then view and share these posts and unknowingly contribute their
own social capital to the spread of propaganda. As Mejias and Vokuev (2017) note, “Citizens
themselves actively participate in their own disenfranchisement by using social media to
generate, consume or distribute false information.”
We call this “peer-to-peer propaganda,” and argue that this reliance on trolls and
bloggers changes the way propaganda is experienced, and the options available to
counter it. Ordinary people experience the propaganda posts as something shared by
their own trusted friends, perhaps with comments or angry reactions, shaping their own
opinions and assumptions.
The challenge of combating enemy propaganda, often called “counter propaganda,”
is as old as propaganda itself (Hall 1976; Risso 2007). Counter propaganda, the work of government
employees or closely supervised contractors, pursued with radio broadcasts into
enemy territory, the printing of materials disputing enemy claims, and the airdrop of leaflets.
Yet today this work is being done by volunteers more effectively than by governments,
in part because the propaganda being countered is spread as much by social media and by
seemingly independent media outlets as by obviously state-controlled media.
Propaganda spread online, by trusted friends or by fake accounts, is most obviously
countered by a rival social media operation and so StopFake relies largely on social media
for the dissemination of its material. The column on the right of each page of its website
features large tile icons to follow its output on various platforms, including Facebook,
Google Plus, Pinterest, Twitter, VKontakte, and YouTube. The icons also display the
number of followers on each platform, which as of November 2016 totaled more than
179,000. A bar at the bottom of each story allows one-click sharing to social media.
StopFake also attempts to give ordinary Ukrainians the skills to consume media more
critically. From the beginning of 2015, information literacy, media literacy workshops, and
lectures offered in collaboration with IREX Ukraine, The Ukrainian Media Partnership
Program, became an essential part of StopFake’s work (MediaLiteracy 2015). This tackles
a problem that extends far beyond Ukraine. A widely reported study discovered that
even Stanford University students, elite members of the generation often called “digital
natives” because of their presumed skill in the online environment, had little ability to
detect fake stories and would assess online reports purely from internal content rather
than seeking external verification (Stanford History Education Group 2016).
Trolls Without Borders
StopFake is a multilingual site. Its stories have consistently been published in two
languages: Russian and English. This reflects the multiple constituencies targeted by the
Russian propaganda offensive. Russian-language propaganda reached both Ukrainians
and Russians as Russian is the most widely spoken language in Ukraine. Prior to the war,
Russian television channels were among the most popular in Ukraine. Russian social
media platforms and other Web outlets are similarly popular in Ukraine, and many Ukrainians
have friends and family on the Russian side of the border. When Russian agents
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2069
began their takeover of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, one of their first actions was to seize
control of television transmitters, replacing Ukrainian channels with state-controlled
Russian channels (Nemtsov 2015). When StopFake.org was originally launched, most
visits came from inside Ukraine and about a quarter from Russia.
Table 1, an August 7, 2015 snapshot from Google Analytics, shows that by mid-2015
almost half of all visitors came from Russia and that the site was one of the 10,000 most
frequently visited by Russian internet users. The prevalence of Russian visitors suggests
that StopFake is having some success in reaching those most exposed to Russian
propaganda.
The Russian-language content on StopFake has always been the most popular, but
the editors chose English because of its huge global reach. While the Russian government’s
propaganda campaign has followed the classic effort to shape public opinion, culture, and
perceived reality within the confines of a nation state (Barghoorn 1964; Ellul 1973; Kenez
1985; Pipes 1995; Herf 2006), it has also, due to the internet and to the deregulation of
Western media ownership, been aggressively projected by Russia into the Western
media sphere (Fredheim 2015). The state-owned Russia Today channel, carried widely in
Western countries (Cohen 2014) as a result of subsidies provided by Moscow to cable
and satellite operators (Zavadski 2015), mimics the form but not the journalistic practices
of conventional news channels such as CNN. Russia’s government has adopted newer
media technologies, including the creation of Sputniknews.com in late 2014, which
reports in 13 languages and claims to “point the way to a multipolar world that respects
every country’s national interests, culture, history and traditions” (Sputnik International
2015).
In the West, the object of the Russian campaign has been as much to create the
appearance of uncertainty as to convince its targets of the complete truth of the Russian
narrative (Pomerantsev 2014). Snyder (2014) observed that Russian propaganda about
the Ukrainian crisis has employed two effective frames, first that the Ukrainian revolutionaries
were fascists and second that the Ukrainian crisis was a geopolitical struggle between
Russia and the United States. For example, Putin himself has repeatedly referred to
Ukraine’s army as a “foreign legion,” to support the idea that it serves the interests of
Western powers rather than those of Ukrainians (Gaufman 2015; RT.com 2015). Here too,
social media has played an important part. Research has shown that online comments
play a crucial role in determining readers’ responses to online stories (Kareklas, Muehling,
and Weber 2015). English-speaking trolls crowd out reasoned discussion in the comments
sections of articles on Ukraine posted by Western media sites such as The Guardian (Seddon
2014). Shifting public opinion would deter Western governments from intervening in the
conflict.
TABLE 1
StopFake visitors by country (selected) for August 2015
Country Visitors (%) Rank in country
Russia 49.2 9555
Ukraine 22.4 3877
Belarus 3.4 9700
United States 3.4 318,007
2070 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
StopFake was an immediate international success, attracting thousands of daily visitors.
Its work was quickly recognized in Ukraine and in the West, including coverage in the
mainstream press as well as academic journalism (Chimbelu 2014; Tomkiw 2014; Haynes
2015; Pomerantsev 2015; Van der Schueren 2015). Traffic to the English-language pages
was more variable than to the Russian edition, spiking when a story went viral or when a
foreign news service profiled StopFake. Other languages, including French, Spanish, and
even Esperanto, have come and gone with the enthusiasm of volunteer translators.
After the initial surge of interest around Russia’s occupation of Crimea, traffic has
ebbed and flowed along with international coverage of the Ukraine crisis. Spikes in
traffic visible in Figure 1 occurred as Russian-backed forces seized control of much of
Eastern Ukraine in the late spring of 2014, when a government offensive recaptured
most of this territory that summer, and when Russian troops intervened to impose a stalemate.
A series of ceasefire agreements reduced the intensity of fighting for much of 2015,
after which the conflict slipped from international headlines and the number of visitors to
StopFake.org stabilized at a lower level, reflecting the “fatigue” that sets in during coverage
of any long-running news story (Hoskins and McLouglin 2010).
StopFake Editorial Processes
The online form for submission of “fake” stories initially garnered approximately 200
submissions a day, some from traditional media websites, others from social media. Web
and social media exposure brought more volunteers to the Facebook page to help with
the project. Links to sources claiming to refute information in the putative fake story
accompanied some submissions. In its early days, a loosely structured StopFake network
of approximately 40 volunteers worked on identifying potential “fakes.” Each would pick
one or two claims to further investigate, sharing their evidence to see if others agreed
that the original story had been unambiguously disproved.
As its work practices developed, editors increasingly identified stories by systematic
media monitoring rather than relying on submissions from the website. Russian media
sources routinely monitored by StopFake included NTV (НТВ), Вести (Vesti), РИА
Новости (RIA News), Русская Весна (Russian Spring), Новороссия (Novorossiya), Антифашист
(Antifascist), Украина.Ру (Ukraina.ru), and Звезда (Zvezda). The team also monitored
FIGURE 1
Daily numbers of sessions from early 2014 to mid-2015, as charted by Google Analytics
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2071
selected Ukrainian media outlets, including Channel 1+1, Inter TV Channel, and Channel 5
(which is owned by Ukraine’s current president and was critical of the former government).
We found that the work of StopFake editors had many parallels with ordinary journalistic
practices in the online era as described by Boczkowski (2010). The modern journalist is
constantly scanning the media environment. Boczkowski explored the information work of
two Argentinian newsrooms, where journalists continually monitored the product, including
the websites, blogs, newspapers, and television news, of their competitors. News outlets
wanted to ensure that they had all the important stories covered so that readers would not
have a reason to go elsewhere. Monitoring by journalists thus led to practices of imitation
amongst the news outlets, leading to the standardization of news content across the
outlets. Phillips (2010) similarly found that British newspapers imitate the copy of their competitors,
but also reuse the copy of other news organizations without attribution. Phillips
notes:
Today news can be immediately “scraped” off the site of a rival and re-organized a little.
The intensity of competition on the Internet, coupled with the lack of technical or temporal
barriers to making use of information lifted from elsewhere, means that it is difficult
for any news organization to retain exclusivity for more than a few minutes. (Phillips 2010,
375)
StopFake’s journalists carried out the same process of scanning, but instead of trusting
and imitating each new story they ignore stories that appear to be true or they cannot
definitively identify as fake. There is an inherent asymmetry between this activity and the
process of rapid imitation described by Boczkowski. Evaluating takes more work than imitating,
while disseminating is quicker and surer than disrupting. Initially all the work for the
StopFake project was done after volunteers’ work hours and on the weekends. As in many
volunteer organizations, some participants dropped out over time while others increased
their commitment. One month into the project, one journalist quit her job and lived on
her savings for nearly a year while fully devoting herself to the project. The remaining volunteers
developed a more rigid division of labor, with the most active serving as editors. By
mid-2014, a core group of six people, known as editors, had the rights to post content to the
website and to edit existing pages. StopFake’s only budget came from online donations
averaging around $200 a month. The network of volunteers included another group producing
weekly video digests, two translators for the English version of the site, one Englishspeaking
editor, and two server administrators, one in Ukraine and the other in the
United States.
Sometimes the process of reviewing a story and publishing a rebuttal went very
quickly. StopFake’s internal archive shows that on December 7, 2014 one of the editors
had discovered what claimed to be a “secret memo” from Ukrainian Security Services
with the instructions for conducting secret operations in Donbas to undermine civilian
support for the separatists on Russkaya Vesna. She shared it with the group. Another volunteer
examined it and noticed right away that someone unfamiliar with the Ukrainian
language had penned the memo as even the letterhead for the Security Services was misspelled.
The same day, StopFake volunteers uploaded the story on the site.
When StopFake volunteers did not find evidence that met its criteria, they usually
would not post the story. StopFake editors uploaded new stories to the website at most
once a day. During our period of observation, only the chief editor did this, after consultation
with other editors to make sure that the story was ready and met the group’s
2072 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
standards. A review of the elapsed time between publication of a fake news story and publication
of StopFake’s response shows that it rose significantly from an average 1.6 days
over the first three months of the site’s operation to a peak of 5.4 days in the three
months from December 2014 to February 2015. This reflects both a drop in the number
and energy level of volunteers and the more stringent editorial process that evolved
over the group’s first year. By the June to August 2015 period this had dropped back to
an average 3.2 days (Table 2).
Most stories involved several volunteers working together to locate and evaluate a
fake story. On August 10, 2015, Ukrainian social media outlets published a testimony
with a photo of a Ukrainian mother narrating how Russian skinheads brutally beat her
son in Almaty, Kazakhstan. A StopFake volunteer noticed social media comments
suggesting that the photo was taken in Moscow instead of Kazakhstan. This turned out
not to be the case, but another volunteer was able to identify the picture as previously published
in Brazil in October 2012 with the heading “Skinhead Hitler fans are arrested after
fight in S[ao] P[aulo].”2
The refutation appeared on the StopFake.org website on August
14, 2015.3
Some fakes took longer to progress through the editorial process, giving the original
story longer to spread unchallenged. For example, on July 31, 2015, a story spread in
Russian news outlets and social media that Romanians in the Western Ukraine region of
Bukovyna were demanding independence. This implied, inaccurately, that separatist tensions
were rising across Ukraine. A Ukrainian newspaper reprinted the story within that
region. The story appeared on the site as a debunked fake on August 8.4
During our period of observation, StopFake did not have the resources to investigate
large numbers of stories in depth. During a typical week in mid-2015, the StopFake team
might examine around 250 potentially dubious stories but post only five articles uncovering
fakes. However, these articles would usually rebut dozens of dubious stories as Russian television,
state-controlled newspapers, blogs, and social media repeated a single claim with
minor variations (Table 3).
The group organized its work processes via closed Facebook group, email, and file
exchange spaces. Participants used Skype and email to discuss daily operations. StopFake
had no office, conference room, or regular meetings. While the most active members were
based in Kiev and knew each other, communication took place primarily online. As one of
the StopFake editors said to us: the “full StopFake team has never been in the same room at
the same time.”
TABLE 2
Fake reports published by three-month period, with average processing time from appearance
of fake story
Period Dates Reports published Average processing time (days)
1 March to May 2014 122 1.6
2 June to August 2014 148 2.5
3 September to November 2014 65 5.1
4 December 2014 to February 2015 69 5.4
5 March to May 2015 68 5.4
6 June to August 2015 67 3.2
Total 539
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2073
StopFake’s choice of Facebook as a social media platform rather than VKontakte,
which as the most popular Russian-language social media platform had about 10 times
more users in the countries of the former Soviet Union, reflected its distrust of the security
offered by Russian services. VKontakte’s founder, Pavel Durov, had encouraged use of the
site as a platform for organizing social protests in Russia (Toler 2015). By 2014, however,
state-aligned interests acquired control of the company and they forced Durov out
(Scott 2014). This was part of a broader push by Russia to establish control over Web
and social media networks, including a law requiring foreign services to serve Russian
users only from servers located within Russia and hence within the reach of its security
service.
TABLE 3
Internal StopFake work sheet for July 20, 2015
Source
Stories
reviewed Potential fakes
Number of
potential fakes
LifeNews 12 http://lifenews.ru/news/157657 1
Russia Today
(Russian)
42 http://russian.rt.com/article/104536; http://
russian.rt.com/article/104425; http://
russian.rt.com/article/104346; http://
russian.rt.com/article/104283
2
Russia Today 8 0
Вести 23 http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=
2643614&tid=105474; http://www.vesti.
ru/doc.html?id=2643198&tid=105474;
http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=
2643437&tid=105474
3
Первый канал 15 0
Звезда 22 http://tvzvezda.ru/news/vstrane_i_mire/
content/201507200441-gbic.htm; http://
tvzvezda.ru/news/vstrane_i_mire/content/
201507201812-ian4.htm
2
РИА новости 36 0
Спутник 15 http://sputniknews.com/military/20150720/
1024816922.html
1
НТВ 12 http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/1446176 1
Украина.ру 12 http://ukraina.ru/news/20150721/
1013716958.html; http://ukraina.ru/news/
20150721/1013709894.html; http://
ukraina.ru/news/20150720/1013709542.
html
3
ТАСС 42 0
Ньюзфронт 15 0
Новоросинформ 22 http://www.novorosinform.org/news/id/
33046; http://www.novorosinform.org/
news/id/33026: http://www.
novorosinform.org/news/id/32981
3
Правда.ру 5 0
Рус весна 20 http://rusnext.ru/news/1437390519; http://
rusnext.ru/news/1437472977: http://
rusnext.ru/news/1437470051; http://
rusnext.ru/news/1437393468
2
Ren.tv 21 0
Total 322 18
2074 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
Translation of StopFake articles, primarily from Russian into English, took place only
after the editorial process was finished. This involved translating any quoted source
material as well as the StopFake analysis. Volunteer translators saw a high turnover rate
as the work is demanding and ongoing. As only finished articles were translated this
work was easy to decouple from the other editorial processes, and volunteers living in
Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Russia carried out translations.
Methods of Establishing a “Fake”
StopFake reports follow the same format as American fact checkers, by presenting a
claim and then summarizing the investigative process and evidence gathered while evaluating
it. Each published rebuttal thus presents at least one kind of evidence. We used these
published reports to categorize the debunking evidence used by StopFake into nine categories.
Figure 2 lists these, and categorizes their appearance in the 539 refutations published
by the group during its first 18 months, from March 2014 to August 2015.
This suggests that the two methods closest to those favored by American fact-checking
groups were relatively infrequent. As Graves (2016c) showed in an ethnographic study,
American fact checkers rely heavily on interviews with experts. Science studies scholars are
well aware that fact cannot be distinguished from fiction without placing trust in certain
authorities or social practices (Latour and Woolgar 1979). The category “expert evaluation
of controversial claim,” in which the group cited expert opinions, covered 11 percent of
postings.
Graves (2016b) referred to trust in official numbers, as distinct from claims by politicians,
an example of the preference of American fact checkers for “institutional facts.”
Such statistics appeared rarely (around 2 percent of the time) in the first nine months of
FIGURE 2
Proportion of 539 StopFake posts (English-language edition, May 2014 to August 2015)
employing each method of documenting a news story as fake
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2075
StopFake reports and vanished completely thereafter. StopFake rarely relied on official government
statistical publications as evidence that certain claims could not be true. This
reflected differences in the kinds of claim being evaluated, as fake news typically referred
to individuals or specific incidents whereas political claims usually concern more abstract
entities such as the economy. However, statements from government sources, for
example asking mayors to confirm or deny stories about events in their cities, were somewhat
more common, appearing as evidence in 14 percent of postings.
We found very few instances in which StopFake relied directly on media reports,
whether from Western or Ukrainian sources, as evidence that a contradictory claim must
be false. StopFake volunteers, as younger independent-minded journalists, tended to be
skeptical of news reported on established Ukrainian channels, owned by various oligarchs
with their own political agendas. We observed that they appeared more likely to conditionally
trust reports of the upstart non-profit Hromadske internet television news
channel, staffed by people of a similar age, background, and mindset.
The four most frequently used methods all involved systematic evaluation of the candidate
piece of fake news and its constituent images, facts, and quotations for signs that
they had been manipulated or misappropriated. During Soviet times the KGB would
invest considerable time in producing professionally faked stories to plant in Western
media, complete with plausible supporting documentation. A prime example of this was
the 1980s effort to spread the story that the US military had created AIDS (Mikkelson
2013). Modern Russian misinformation campaigns have a distinctive amateurishness,
reflecting the new reliance on peer-to-peer propaganda. The focus is on quantity rather
than quality, as befits a contemporary media landscape dominated by listicles, teasing
headlines, and other clickbait.
As a result, StopFake found some fake stories surprisingly easy to refute. Many pieces
of fake news about Ukraine hinged on pictures sourced from social media, allegedly
showing various atrocities carried out by Ukrainian forces. StopFake typically debunked
these using elementary techniques of digital forensics. Google allows searches by image,
to find other versions of a particular image file. Various tools can be used to explore the
metadata embedded in pictures, including the date and time on which they were taken
and, from some cameras, the GPS coordinates. This metadata frequently revealed that
the picture could not possibly show what the fake news story claimed, having been
taken elsewhere or before the relevant time. StopFake hosted a tutorial page on these techniques,
to encourage its readers to be more cautious media consumers.5
Thirty-five percent of the StopFake postings relied on locating the original source and
context of misidentified images. For example, numerous StopFake stories identified pictures
and video from the civil war in Syria, the Bosnian conflict, or Mexican drug violence
reused by Russian sources as evidence of outrageous Ukrainian aggression in Donetsk.
Photographs of dead children have been particularly prone to misappropriation. Social
media users circulated a picture from the filming of a Russian horror film as evidence of cannibalism
by the Ukrainian army. StopFake frequently finds that pictures claiming to show
unrest or chaos in various towns outside the conflict zone were taken in other cities.
One example: a picture circulated by Russian media as a Ukrainian martyr who suicide
bombed a government tank had been spread from a Vkontakte account but actually originated
on the Facebook page of a Russian woman who remained alive and well (Capron
2014).
2076 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
Locating the original source of an image sometimes revealed manipulation with
Photoshop or other image-editing software. This was documented in 10 percent of postings.
One StopFake story showed that the swastika visible on a Ukrainian personnel
carrier, in a picture widely distributed on Russian social media, was not present on the original
Reuters website version of the image.6
Another showed that an image of a small girl,
holding a handwritten sign reading “we want war,” had been doctored to remove the word
“don’t.” A Russian television news report centered on a proposed Ukrainian banknote incorporating
a portrait of Hitler was rebutted via image analysis, showing that the image used in
the report was a manipulated version of a 2008 design featuring a Ukrainian writer.
Other stories required more in-depth investigation, using more traditional journalistic
techniques. One of these was to locate the original interviews or documents from which the
suspected fake report used extracts. Propaganda stories based on misrepresentation generally
do not link back to the original sources being distorted, so the absence of such links
made StopFake flag a story for investigation. This involved contacting the sources quoted in
the article or identifying the original documents or videos on which they are based. The
broad category of “original source does not hold claimed information” applied to 39
percent of StopFake reports.
Many of these fake news stories specifically involved misleadingly edited or contextualized
quotes, which were highlighted in 26 percent of the StopFake reports. For example,
Russia Today broadcast what it claimed was an interview with the Chief Rabbi of a Kiev
synagogue, calling on his followers to emigrate because of rising anti-Semitic violence.
StopFake found that the interviewee was the Chief Rabbi of Simferopol, Crimea, describing
conditions under Russian occupation.7
This was also an example of the specific practice of
wrongly identifying individuals featured in news stories, which were documented to identify
news stories as fake in 15 percent of StopFake reports.
Certain kinds of acknowledged media sources would also alert suspicions. For
example, volunteers identified several English-language sites on which material supporting
Russian propaganda campaigns frequently appeared. Russian-language media then linked
to these reports, misrepresenting them as credible evidence of Western journalistic consensus.
One of these was the European Union Times, whose plausibly official name belied its
fondness for conspiracy theories of all kinds. Looking at the Domain Name System
records, reported ownership, links, and history of suspect source domains helped StopFake
to evaluate their credibility.
Some of StopFake’s counter-propaganda work relied on exploiting internal inconsistencies
in evidence. For example, Russian state media claimed that American Stinger antiaircraft
were found in a facility at Luhansk airport after it was overrun by Russian-backed
forces. StopFake’s report documented several misspellings in the text on the weapons,
which matched the virtual model of the Stinger used in a popular video game but not
the real-life version. In this case the report summarized and disseminated evidence gathered
by other communities, such as a Reddit group.8
We found that 9 percent of StopFake
stories relied in this way on debunkings already performed by other groups.
Proving that an event did not take place is inherently challenging, so stories sourced
to eyewitness testimony were hard to evaluate with the resources available to StopFake.
One exception came in July 2014 when Russian media, including Russia Today, disseminated
one of the most notorious pieces of fake news of the entire campaign. Ukrainian
forces had recently recaptured Sloviansk, the military headquarters of the “Donetsk
People’s Republic” established by Igor Girkin, a Russian colonel. In a lengthy interview,
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2077
Galina Pyshniak tearfully described the crucifixion of a small boy in the town’s central
square by the Ukrainian army, after which his mother was dragged through the streets
behind a tank until she died. StopFake’s initial report focused on the lack of verification
for this story (there were no photographs, despite the huge crowd allegedly gathered at
gunpoint to watch), or its incommensurability with independent media reports showing
a warm welcome for Ukrainian troops, and on its similarity to archetypal narratives including
a recent plotline on the television show Game of Thrones.9
Western journalists likewise
covered this report as a fake, making it notorious as a distillation of the ludicrous excesses
of Russian state news reporting.
However, StopFake later challenged widely circulated Ukrainian claims that Pyshniak
was an actress who had been identified playing different roles in Russian television reports
on other cities. Framing its activities as neutral fact checking, rather than nationalistic
counter propaganda, meant that StopFake was committed to correcting erroneous information
in Ukrainian news sources as well as Russian ones.10
As one StopFake volunteer
explained:
We refuted quite a few cases of erroneous reporting in the Ukrainian news outlets. We find
the proof that the claim is wrong and contact the source … Fakes stand out, because
usually they are propagated very quickly in multiple outlets and producers of the fake
ignore our calls to recall the claim.
Such instances were rare, but our informants pointed to them with pride as proof of
their willingness to put the service of truth over their immediate desire to bolster Ukraine’s
legitimacy in its struggle. This also increased their international credibility: Graves (2016a)
noted that StopFake.org’s founders were questioned with regard to their bias at the
Global Fact Checking Summit in London, in July 2015, and asked whether they ever
debunk falsifications of the Ukrainian side. We found that 9 percent of StopFake’s published
reports challenged Ukrainian reports, though most of these involved Russian-generated
fake news that spread via Ukrainian media.
Changes at StopFake
StopFake’s editorial standards and most frequently used kinds of evidence shifted
over time. As Figure 3 shows, the proportion of fake stories debunked by finding the original
source of misidentified images decreased over time, from 43 percent in the first threemonth
period analyzed to 30 percent in the final period analyzed. In contrast, the proportion
of StopFake reports relying on finding the original source of quotations to show
that they were misleadingly edited or contextualized rose from 16 to 60 percent over
the same period. This was more labor intensive, and our StopFake informants suggested
that it reflected increasing sophistication in the fake news they encountered.
Early StopFake stories frequently relied on assurances from Ukrainian government
agencies as evidence, but StopFake’s insistence on “facts” soon led it to discount these
sources. We found statements from Ukrainian government officials referenced as evidence
in 33 percent of StopFake reports during its first three-month period, dropping dramatically
to 10 percent in the next three-month period as the group imposed tighter editorial
standards.
During our period of observation, StopFake frequently had to adapt its tactics in
response to shifts in fake news production techniques. Some of the stories investigated
2078 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
were hard to prove because they reported on fictitious people (e.g., the claim that a nonexistent
freelance journalist had been killed in Ukraine)11
or because they relied on the testimony
of actors using the names of real experts.
StopFake’s success in spreading its stories via social media was challenged by a new
practice applied against it as a counter-counter propaganda measure. Facebook provides
a “Report Post” button on shared material, so that users can flag items that breach site
guidelines by causing offense or being spam. By reporting StopFake stories as offensive,
the group’s enemies succeeded in having Facebook suspend the accounts of some
people sharing them (Volchek 2015).
Toward the end of our period of study we observed some significant institutional
changes in the project, which have continued since then. Reliance on volunteer editors
began to change in June 2015 when the project received its first grant support, for
$38,000, from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established by the US congress
in 1983. In 2015, NED funded 67 grants in Ukraine, totaling around $3.4 million, to
promote investigative journalism, media monitoring, government accountability, anti-corruption
initiatives, and training and skill development for leaders and activists. This grant
was to “maintain and expand the fact checking website Stopfake.org, transforming it
into an information hub for journalists, bloggers and the general public … improve the
FIGURE 3
Change over time in the six most frequently used methods of classifying stories as fake.
Horizontal axis shows time in months, from May 2014 to August 2015
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2079
site’s security, increase its outreach on social media, and produce video content for traditional
and online TV audiences” (NED 2017).
Prior to this, StopFake had few resources and hence almost no institutional existence.
Its volunteers had relied on assistance from the Kyiv-Mohyla School of Journalism and its
Dean, including the video equipment and studio space used to create weekly news
digest-style videos summarizing the most prominent fakes of the week. During the
second half of 2015, two journalists were hired as staff members for StopFake, reducing
its reliance on volunteer editors. Beginning in early October 2015, the newly established
Ukraine Today, intended as a Ukrainian equivalent to English-language services such as
France 24 or Deutsches Welle, carried StopFake video digests (UkraineToday 2015). The transition
from volunteer-only to staff-managed operations is a vital one in the development of
a successful non-profit organization, and it remains to be seen whether these institutional
changes will lay the groundwork for long-term success.
Conclusions and Implications
The distinctive blend of media practices devised by StopFake turned media literacy
and responsible journalism into tools of resistance against fake news. To embrace those
principles is not to march in lockstep with Ukraine’s new government, which has been at
best inconsistent in transcending the post-Soviet pattern of self-interested rule by
corrupt elites, but it is most certainly to set oneself in opposition to contemporary
Russian state-affiliated media practices.
“Fake News,” a phrase that originally struck us as the awkward coinage of people
speaking English as a second language, became suddenly familiar to American audiences
following the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election of November
2016. This followed what US intelligence agencies have officially concluded had been a
campaign waged by Russian intelligence on the orders of Putin to tip the election in his
favor (Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2017). One of the report’s three key judgements
was that
Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert
intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government
agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media
users or “trolls.” (Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2017)
The report focused particularly on the strategic role of inaccurate reporting in Russia Today.
However, the presidential campaign also demonstrated that fake news is not the
exclusive product of state-sponsored trolls. One report, in the New York Times, documented
the process by which a major online news story, with hundreds of thousands of social
media shares, ballooned from a tweet in which an obscure American with only 40
Twitter followers of his own incorrectly alleged that a fleet of busses visible in a picture
had been used to carry anti-Trump protesters to Austin, Texas. Bloggers made no effort
to conduct basic checks, such as calling the bus company, before running stories about
paid protestors. Efforts by the original poster to correct his mistake, including a new
tweet imposing the word “FALSE” over an image of his original message, failed to reach
anything like the same audience (Maheshwari 2016). Other reports suggested that the partisan
credulity of some American conservatives made pro-Trump propaganda a profitable
global industry: a popular fringe political site, departed.co, turned out to have been set up
2080 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
by Beqa Latsabidze, a post-Soviet entrepreneur in Tbilisi, Georgia. He had initially set up
websites and social media pages to pander to the supporters of various candidates. It
was, he claimed, a surge in advertising revenue as Trump supporters shared his material
via social media, rather than any ideological mission, that led him and several of his countrymen
to inject vast quantities of pro-Trump fake news into the media feeds of American
voters (Higgins, McIntire, and Dance 2016).
The activities of StopFake show the power, and the constraints, of journalistic activism
against a well-organized fake news campaign. The same internet tools and social
media networks that made it easy for Russian activists and trolls to spread peer-to-peer propaganda
and disrupt discussions on Western websites also empowered the volunteers of
StopFake to build a collaborative community online. The success of StopFake in disseminating
counter narratives relied on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to spread its
work and bring it to the attention of Western journalists who might themselves lack the
time, language skills, or specialist knowledge needed to definitively discount fake news
before filing their stories. In turn, this generated coverage in conventional media to
magnify its impact.
Our goal here has been to document the work practices of StopFake rather than
to assess their effectiveness. Further research would be needed to judge how successful
it has been in countering peer-to-peer propaganda and how applicable its model might
be in other contexts. It is not clear that this effort or any other yet mounted have been
truly effective in sweeping back fake news. Despite its success in attracting a Russian
readership, StopFake clearly could not match the reach of government-controlled and
government-allied media outlets. Disrupting the spread of fake news is inherently more
resource-intensive than creating it and clinical rebuttals are less outrageous, and hence
less likely to spread virally online, than shocking claims engineered without concern for
facts.
StopFake’s experiences provide an instructive case for American journalists facing
their own crisis of relevance in the face of fake news. While mainstream Ukrainian media
has a weak tradition of independence and limited reach, the United States has an exceptionally
rich media ecosystem of fact checkers and professional journalists. Fact checkers
played an active role in disputing the many unsubstantiated claims made by the Trump
campaign and, following his victory, the Trump Administration. Journalists trained to
avoid taking sides in a dispute were forced to question the reflexive association of neutrality
with objectivity. Trump’s blatant lack of concern for facts pushed some traditional media
outlets such as the New York Times to shift fact checking from a separate activity into the
body of the story, and in some cases into headlines such as “Meeting with Top Lawmakers,
Trump Repeats an Election Lie” (Barry 2017).
Yet these media responses did not seem effective during the campaign in changing
the public’s level of belief in various bogus claims on topics such as crime rates, illegal immigration,
and voter fraud. This has been widely attributed to the rise of partisan media
(Mitchell et al. 2014). Traditional fact checking rests on the assumption that the public
trusts journalists to evaluate claims impartially. Partisan polarization means that many
Americans put little faith in government statistics, journalists, or experts to determine
what is true and what is fake. A core narrative of conservative media such as Fox News
and Brietbart.com has been that readers should not trust “mainstream” journalism.
Instead of changing their opinions in response to facts, voters could expose themselves
only to facts that fit their opinions.
STOPPING FAKE NEWS 2081
The rampant spread of fake news and fake news outlets took this phenomenon to
new heights in 2016, letting Americans who so desired submerge themselves fully in a
media landscape with little connection to traditional journalistic practices (Beck 2017). As
we have stressed throughout this paper, the American model of fact checking is not well
equipped to deal with fake news. Instead, it targets exaggeration by politicians, and
assumes the trustworthiness of the media that reports those claims and the power of
expert opinion and government statistics in rebutting them. Thus, the avalanche of fake
news reporting the Clinton campaign’s ties to Satanic child sex abuse was ignored by mainstream
media until a man walked into a popular Washington, DC pizzeria and opened fire to
free the children he believed were being held in its non-existent basement. “The intel on
this wasn’t 100 percent,” he explained from jail (Goldman 2016).
Immediately after the election, conservative groups began to appropriate the term
“fake news” and apply it to mainstream media (Oremus 2016). Donald Trump has repeatedly
dismissed the centrist news channel CNN as “fake news” and refused to take questions
from its reporters. Within days of its new prominence in American political discussion, the
phrase “fake news” was already at risk of becoming just another partisan insult. Liberals call
Breitbart.com fake news, while Trump calls the BBC fake news. Even the Russia Foreign Ministry
has embraced the term, setting up a website in which stories from sources such as
Bloomberg and the New York Times are depicted with a big red “FAKE” stamp on them, imitating
the visuals of StopFake but not its methodical presentation of evidence (Kottasova
2017).
If nothing else, our exploration of the work practices of StopFake demonstrates that
“fake news” can, when combined with a careful editorial process grounded in media literacy
techniques, be reclaimed as a useful and epistemologically robust category. All knowledge
is socially constructed, but not all social processes produce the same kinds of truth claims.
Fake news, as operationalized by StopFake, falls well outside the normal range of variation
caused by journalistic bias and subjectivity. Journalists and scholars need to treat both sides
in political or military conflicts fairly to do their jobs effectively, but neither can or should
aspire to neutrality in the battle of fake news against real journalistic practice.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank our informants within StopFake, the anonymous reviewers, Lucas
Graves for his comments on an earlier version of this article, Christine Evans for her insights into
Soviet media, and Dean Tomas Lipinski for support given to this research by the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
NOTES
1. Russian officials deny the existence of these trolls and investigators have been unable to
trace the ownership of the front companies that employ them (Chen 2015). To distinguish
between state and elite private interests is challenging in modern Russia,
which was succinctly summarized within titles of recent books as a “kleptocracy”
2082 MARIA HAIGH ET AL.
(Dawisha 2014) or “mafia state” (Harding 2011) in which only enterprises allied with the
ruling elite are allowed to stay in business, while government officials earn huge sums as
executives of nominally private businesses. Thus, the question of whether state accounts
ultimately fund the trolls is less important than the observed reality that their messaging
is closely coordinated with that of state-controlled broadcast and print media.
2. Agency Record, October 13, 2012 (http://www.tribunahoje.com/noticia/42601/brasil/
2012/10/13/skinheads-fas-de-hitler-sao-detidos-apos-briga-em-sp.html).
3. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-photo-used-to-depict-almaty-scuffle/.
4. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-bukovinian-romanians-demand-autonomy/.
5. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/how-to-identity-a-fake/.
6. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-ukrainian-fighting-vehicle-entering-donetsk-with-
a-swastika/.
7. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-jewish-people-are-leaving-kiev-because-of-the-
anti-semitism-of-the-new-government/.
8. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-american-missiles-found-in-luhansk/.
9. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/lies-crucifixion-on-channel-one/ and http://www.
stopfake.org/en/the-crucifixion-of-a-3-year-old-the-u-s-helped-kiev-shoot-down-flight-
17-and-other-tales-the-kremlin-media-tell/.
10. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-the-infamous-heroine-of-the-slaviansk-boy-s-
crucifixion-report-found-among-the-victims-of-the-explosion-in-donetsk/.
11. See http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-ukrainian-media-reports-on-starvation-in-russia/.
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Maria Haigh (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), School of Information
Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA and School of Information and
Media, Siegen University, Germany. E-mail: mhaigh@uwm.edu
Thomas Haigh, History Department, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA and School of
Information and Media, Siegen University, Germany. E-mail: thomas.haigh@gmail.
com
Nadine I. Kozak, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.
E-mail: kozakn@uwm.edu
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