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Izzy Roberts-Orr: In a world where fake news spreads like wildfire, truth has become increasingly fluid and elusive. From social media echo chambers to algorithms, how does the internet shape the information we receive?In this episode of the DWF podcast, Maddison Connaughton, Madeline Hayman-Reber and Sami Shah explore the role of the journalist on the digital frontier.Maddison : Hi everyone. Thanks so much for coming today. First I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, which we meet the Wurundjeri people and the Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. My name is Maddison Connaughton and I'm the editor of The Saturday Paper and I'm so pleased to be joined today on stage by two very smart, very funny, very talented people, Madeline Hayman-Reber is a Gomeroi woman and platform journalist at the National Indigenous Television. Her passion lies in social justice and First Nations Australians through storytelling. Most notably last year she worked with freelance journalists, Sylvia Rowley to expose the criminal records given to stolen generation elders simply for being taken.Maddison :It resulted in the records being expunged in the State of Victoria, for this work they received a Human Rights Award in the media category as well as the best news or current affairs story at the First Nations Media Awards. Sami Shah who has cut his biography back significantly because he did not want me to read this very long and impressive bio, has been profiled by The New York Times and appeared on BBC radio for his autobiography I, Migrant has been nominated at the New South Wales and Western Australian Premier's Literary Awards. His novel Boy of Fire and Earth was released in 2017. He is also a co-presenter of 774 ABC Breakfast Radio.Madeline Hayman:Thank you Sami.Sami Shah:Thank you.Maddison :So today we've been asked to talk about the Future of Truth which I think is a very popular topic at the moment, that everyone seems incredibly concerned about in the era of fake news. But I think, I'm curious what both of you have as a working definition of fake news. What do you think that it is? How do you define it in your work, I guess as a journalist and as a presenter and a comedian, maybe Sami?Sami Shah:I mean the birth of the phrase fake news, that title kind of came around, it's very Trumpian thing. The story behind that is basically Donald Trump almost coined it in an own way, if he didn't coin it, he certainly popularized it. And thus the meaning of it is indelibly tied into his own persona. And the idea being that fake news is news that does not flatter or represent certain political figures in a positive light. That's what gets qualified as fake news, particularly if you're in America, that's very much where it comes from. In Australia, we've co-opted and kind of made it our own thing, which is a great criticism to level against any news that doesn't conform to your own political ideology. So if for example, you believe in climate change then and someone runs a story on Sky News, say climate changes is not real, you can call that fake news. But if you don't believe in climate change and someone of the ABC runs the story that climate change is real, you can call that fake news and it all kind of breaks down along those party lines almost. Yeah.Maddison :It's become like a very partisan term.Sami Shah:It is. It's got very little to do with the actual credibility of the news of journalism or the history of journalism or the way journalism is going in the future and more to do with just I'm left, your right and this is something I can use to attack your sources of information so that they don't contradict my sources of information.Maddison :Maddie, do you think that it's similar-Madeline Hayman:Yeah. So, I think in terms of fake news what, Sami what you were saying sort of with having the left and right view. Sometimes it's not necessarily fake, but it's just a one sided opinion and then that can be ... like politicians use it all the time to say to each other, that's fake news, that's wrong, but it's actually just telling one side of the story. I think a lot of news outlets are guilty of that as well. Yeah.Maddison :Do you think that in your work, I think we was speaking earlier this week about the journalism you do and that you're often speaking to people who are potentially, there's someone in a position of power such as the police and there's someone that is in a position of relatively less power. And do you feel like the sort of trust that is afforded to powerful organizations makes it tricky for people to tell their stories?Madeline Hayman:Yeah, I do. I think that's sort of where a NITV can sort of, we sort of make a difference that way. The community trusts us. There is a lot of distrust in the community for journalists in general, mainstream journalists and mainstream media organizations. So when they do come to us with a story we, they know that we are going to tell their ... like we're going to give them the opportunity to tell their side of the story, as well as taking into account the facts from the police or from whoever else, and oftentimes you see media outlets only take, they don't go out into the community, they don't get people's opinions, they don't ... or the people don't want to talk to them because they know what light they're going to be shown in. So, yeah.Maddison :And being able to like to build that trust within a community. To be able to tell their stories is such a huge issue I think for journalism generally.Madeline Hayman:Yeah. I think it's because a lot of journalists don't really understand people in the community, they don't understand Aboriginal communities. They don't know how to approach people in Aboriginal communities or they're scared that they're going to say the wrong thing, so they just don't make the effort to as well and that also creates, it just turns into a big spiral of distrustful on both sides.Maddison :I think on that idea of trust, like there's this sort of sense that in the last five years or ten years or so, that social media has completely undermined public's trust in media or in institutions or experts. It's kind of very much blamed or attributed to social media. Do you think that that is true? Do you think that it's a very recent phenomenon or do you think that this is a longer issue that we've kind of just started talking about more specific ways in the past few years?Sami Shah:I think, yeah. There's definitely been an increase in distrust of major news outlets. So BBC, CNN, ABC, New York Times, Washington Post, The Australian, all of these Sky News, everyone, they've all got a trust deficit now. And that's largely to do with social media and the way kind of stories, propaganda there and everything, but I think that's a good thing. I know that right now the news outlets are very worried about that and I know right now as society, we're grappling with the idea that the Facebook post your grandmother shared from NANA has a .au that says vaccines can be cured by lettuce is worrying because your Nana now believes that. But at the same time, there's other things that are happening as a result of the fragmentation of news channels. So for example, it used to be that The New York Times said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because the Bush government said that, and we all had to believe that, because there was a venerable New York Times.Sami Shah:It used to be that the BBC said Brexit will fail and we believe them because of the BBC and now, or the ABC said that the Liberal Party will not win the next election. Like there's all these major outlets which are kind of having to rethink their credibility and their approach to journalism. But in the meantime while that's happening, you're seeing the birth of a whole lot new things. So yes, on one side you've got this crazy right-wing, Breitbart anti-vaxxer kind of nut-job websites. But on the other side you've also got things like Vice, you've got things like BuzzFeed, which had the editorial problems, but to pretend like that's not all news doesn't have that is a lie.Sami Shah:But also you're seeing Indigenous communities coming out with their own news sources, coming out with their own websites that present their stories their way. You're seeing minority groups in different parts of the world, LGBTQ-Y, et cetera, who are all saying, you know what, we're tired of our stories being told badly by the major news organizations that pretend like they're unbiased but have their own inherent biases and instead let's do it ourselves, and they're kind of doing it well. So yes, there is the label of fake news has been applied to around the major news outlets with the rise of social media has damaged the credibility of the major news outlets. But I think that's okay, they kind of need cop some of that abuse. They've let down people several times in the past and have gotten away with it because they were the only source of news.Madeline Hayman:Yeah. They need to be held to account for the things that they spread because they have an influence over the whole country or the whole world. So, I think that those little sites are really important even if some of it is fake news or if it's not completely true or it's one side of the story, it's still important to give another perspective and for people to think I guess, and know that like not just The Australian is correct or not just the Sydney Morning Herald is correct. Like there's a whole spectrum of ideas.Sami Shah:And if you want to become a journalist and you're not from one of the major universities or of a certain skin colour or certain socioeconomic background or certain political bent, the only way you can kind of get that pathway then is by joining one of these websites, setting something up yourself. And then if you do it well enough, regularly enough, one of these might pick you up and give you a big paycheck or by that point they would have collapsed because their budgets have been cut and your website might end up bringing in more advertising revenue anyway. But there's new pathways opening up to journalism which and to be a voice for certain communities, et cetera, which are, didn't exist I think even five to seven years ago. So it's a scary time right now if you're a news editor or if you're even a reporter in many places, but that's good I think, because in 10 years time we'll see a new industry kind of solidifying or forming itself more coherently and we could get something exciting out of that.Maddison :And I think in the structure of the media at the moment, those sites are doing a really good job at getting stories onto the news agenda because journalists at major news organizations have ... I mean constantly talk about how few resources and time they have to do stories. There's a lot of leg work being done by these sites that have been picked up by more national news organizations and which I think is a very good thing. But obviously there are examples where the work is getting erased that is done by these journalists that sort of smaller sites. Once a story is picked up and sort of put onto the national site.Madeline Hayman:Yeah, there's actually an example of this happening recently with the Aboriginal flag. So I forget his name, sorry, but there's someone that works at the Koori Mail and he was actually the one that had the exclusive on this story about the Aboriginal flag being the copy, the, some of the rights.Sami Shah:The intellectual rights.Madeline Hayman:Yeah. Like the intellectual rights for the flag to be used on clothing was given to this company called WAM Clothing, and he had actually written a story, it had been published in the Koori Mail and then all of these other news outlets picked it up, but none of them, there was hardly anyone credited him. So we actually republished his story on our site and that's just one of the ways I guess that ... I mean the Koori Mail has been around forever and everyone knows it and loves it and trusts it, but in the sense of Indigenous journalism, sometimes our stories just get taken in and no one credits you or anything, but in saying that-Sami Shah:And there's a very good chance that the white journalist who republished that story on the ABC or Sydney Morning Herald, one of these places will end up getting a Diversity Award for writing that story even though it's not, he's not even the originator of the story.Madeline Hayman:There was a big outcry about it on Twitter, and that's when we were like, well, we'll just republish that story on our site because they're a black journo too, which is great. But another, or like on the other side of things, I'll often find a story, like I find a lot of my stories on Facebook within my networks and if someone's like, written this big, I don't know, a big Facebook post outlining all this stuff that's happened, then I'll call them and I'll be like, where did you get all these details and blah, blah, blah. And then you can write it into your story, like I'll write into my story, this person figured out this happened when they saw X, Y, Z and then I'll quote them, so-Maddison :So, that their work isn't missing a piece.Madeline Hayman:Yeah. You're kind of, they don't have the resources to put into it. Like they don't have, they don't work for a news organization, but your taking it and putting it out there.Maddison :Yeah. And I think that culture of Write-Arounds as they're called, that have become very prominent with like large news organizations. Like, I don't know if I'm allowed to say, like the Daily Mail does them a lot and .au does a lot and lots of other places and they're just sort of like a rip and raid or whatever they call them, where you just take someone else's work and you link to them and usually they are linked to as low down as possible as you can in the story, so that you're not sending people off into other places to read. And this idea of keeping people on your page as long as you can, and I think, but what you're talking about is even more complicated where you're getting into the area of they're kind of citizen journalists in a way. They're doing all this work and then they're trying to put it out there to an audience.Madeline Hayman:Well, anyone can be a journalist on the internet these days, really. But I'd like to, I've had my work before the job around trees. An organization took basically everything that we'd written and put it into a story and then link to us, but there's some occasions like that if it was a big exclusive sort of thing, of course you'd be annoyed, but if it's something like that, then as long as the word sort of getting out there and more people, especially coming from the Indigenous community, as long as the word is getting out there, then I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Yeah.Maddison :Sami, I want to talk a little bit about satire and satirical news and I sent you a link to a Malcolm Gladwell podcast and I apologize.Sami Shah:No, I've been here before. Yeah. That's right, Revisionist History.Maddison :But yes, he has that absurd on Revisionist History where he kind of blames satirical news kind of, Last Week Tonight, and I guess his Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj as well, and there's so many of them now, but this, he was saying some of this is where a lot of young people are getting their news from and it blurs the line between fact and fiction, because that's what satire does quite brilliantly when it's done well. I'm just curious, like coming from a comedy background, what you think about that and what you think of the role of satire and securing the news?Sami Shah:There is a great thing John Stewart, the who used to do the Daily Show in America when people used to say, Oh, you're really speaking truth to power and this is in the run up to the Iraq war. He said, "Yeah, I made lots of fun with George Bush and we pointed out all the lies and hypocrisies, but the war happened anyway." And that's been one of the things that people talk about when they talk about the Weimar Republic, which is just before the rise of Nazis in Germany in that period in the 1930s, which is that there was great satire then as well. People were mocking and ridiculing the Nazi Party, but it didn't make a difference in the end. Satire tends to get overpraised or overvalued in its role in society.Sami Shah:It's an important thing to have, it's one of the first thing that things that gets cut down when you have, when free speech is taken away. In Pakistan right now, they've just passed a law that you cannot anymore mock politicians on television, and that usually tells you the politicians are up to something when they don't like mockery. Like I myself got in trouble in the past for mocking two politicians in Australia, one of whom went on to become prime minister, one of whom almost became prime minister, which could be any politicians in Australia. But neither of them apparently liked it very much, which sucks to be them, but too bad that's free speech. But we have this thing where we think, Oh well, you spoke truth to power.Sami Shah:Tonightly is speaking truth to power, Sean McCalleaf is speaking truth to power, that will hold politicians to account. It really doesn't though, like it's just ... What it is, it has a value in society, we're just not seeing the real value. The real value of good satire is, it's the canary in the coal mine. It's usually the satirical comedians who have an insight into where things are going wrong and what we should be paying attention to right now, because they will avalanche out of control later, but we don't do that. We just go. The comedian made fun of the politician, nailed it and we move on. We think that the politician is now skewered, they are not. They still have the power, the comedian is still the child pointing out that the emperor's naked. It's still just a child. And that's the kind of dichotomy that the powers still lies where it does, we just need to understand why comedian does what they do and give them the right level of importance, not overvaluing them.Maddison :I think when you say free speech as well, Australia is in kind of an interesting position with that because we don't really have a legislative like right to free speech. I mean we have a section in the paper called gadfly, which is like a satirical column and it's meant to be funny and it is the column that we have to most commonly send to the lawyers to make sure that we are not going to get sued for defamation.Sami Shah:And that happens everywhere, right? So even in America right now, for example, The New York Times took off a cartoonist because there was the cartoonist offended some communities. Part of what happens is, I did a documentary series on free speech in Australia, it's a, it's for The National and we're going to plug it here, it's called Shutup and it is a five part documentary series, podcast series. And for The National, you can find it if you go on Earshot or Conversations with Richard Feilder, he released it as well, and in that I spoke to Professor Adrienne Stone who is a constitutional law professor at the University of Melbourne who specializes in free speech.Sami Shah:And I asked her, I said, it's not in the constitution, we don't have it as a bill of rights in Australia, she said, "That's irrelevant. It doesn't actually matter because the law and the courts and everyone behave as if we have it there anyway." So right now it's so normalized in assumption that we all Australians do get access to certain kind of free speech, that the courts and the law will always take that into account even if we don't have it written down as constitutional right. So I think in that way, we have it to a degree. I choose the free speech at the same that most Western liberal democracies have, which is that is it as equal as we'd like it to be? Is as free as we like it to be? Are the problem areas, political correctness and identity politics or is it actually defamation laws and any of the courts deciding who can and can't publish a story about cardinals and things like that? That's the debate that we're having right now, which I think is a good debate to be having.Maddison :Maddie, do you think that Australia's defamation laws undermine the ability of journalists to publish the truth?Madeline Hayman:No, not really. Because if it's the truth then it's not really defamation, is it? Yeah, I don't think so.Maddison :Interesting. So there's this idea that fake news is more likely to be shared online by older people so, and research supports that. Do you think that this issue will become less and less important as young people kind of grow up who have been taught and encouraged to be more critical about these-Madeline Hayman:Yeah, because I think a lot of young people will not, and I'm not saying all old people, older people don't.Sami Shah:You're saying #notalloldpeople, correct, yeah?Madeline Hayman:No, but I think a lot of younger people because they've grown up with the internet, they know how it works, they can sort of just detect if it's a fake news website or not. Even if it's sort of a replica site of the ABC or something, they'll be able to pick up on the differences and it's just, they just know, I guess. And older people don't have that sense because they haven't grown up with technology, they haven't been on it their whole lives, so it's a relatively new concept for them, and maybe it's just that younger people's brains are wired differently. I don't know. But I definitely think that as time goes on when the, we've got access to the internet, the new generations go on and on, then I think it'll be easier for them to detect.Maddison :I feel like I'm almost overly skeptical now. Like yesterday, there was a story that came up, like one of those things that you're targeted at the bottom of the news story with another one and it was a, and it linked out to .au article that said that young people are growing like-Madeline Hayman:Horns.Maddison :Horns on the back of their head.Sami Shah:That's right.Madeline Hayman:I think I have them.Maddison :The idea is like their bones spurs that young people are growing because they're spending so much time like this, like looking at their phones and it was like, the photo on the article was a x-ray of someone's head with like a little horn, right.Sami Shah:Like a little teal. They can, yeah. It will be a horn.Maddison :I was like this is fake. I was like this cannot be true, I read the journal article. I was just I, this cannot be true.Sami Shah:And it's crazy because that one is Washington Post and by two Australian researchers based out of University of Brisbane, like it's a proper study. It's really scary, but yeah, same reaction. As soon as I saw that, I'm like, yeah, sure, whatever and-Madeline Hayman:We were all touching each other back of each other's heads because we suspect we have a horn.Maddison :Are you a Gen Z or a millennial?Sami Shah:But that's good. That level of scepticism is healthy. And that's what I think some of the younger audience, I mean and that's not to say that young people are this wonderful new creature that will never fall for fake news. I mean there's the Bright Barton and the right-wing kind of white supremacist websites are all manned by people in their 20s and things like that as well. So there is an ideological issue there that separate one. But overall, they know a website that can be trusted from a website that can't be trusted because like you said, they know how to read a URL, they'll know that it's not, the web address should conform the thing whereas other people won't look at the web address, they won't look at those things-Madeline Hayman:They'll do it so it's like, I don't know. Instead of BBC for example, they might put BPC or something. So the average person that's just, and they'll put it like they'll put the logo and stuff in the same format and whatever. So that an older person who's looking at it, just does a quick glance and they don't like, and younger people can detect these little things I guess, maybe we are more observant or something. No, just like on the internet I mean.Maddison :I think it gets into a tricky place.Sami Shah:That's okay. Other people have franking credits, it balances out.Maddison :I think it gets into a tricky place at the video though. Like I think when you look at YouTube and the algorithms there that are serving you videos at the end, there's a lot of research that like you quickly go into conspiracy theory rabbit holes-Sami Shah:Oh, you watched one Joe Rogan video and all of a sudden your entire feed is just conspiracy theories. Feminists getting owned by Jordan Peterson and all of that kind of crazy stuff.Maddison :That does affect young people more, because I think that there is that that rabbit hole kind of thing with YouTube.Sami Shah:In the Muslim community. They've been struggling with this for a very long time, which was I did a documentary on the, on Islam in Australia and one of the things, this is like three, four years ago now, one of the problems they were struggling with then, was what's called Imam YouTube, which is YouTube preachers who radicalize young people. Because, the Imam at the mosque isn't doing that, it's these guys that who are online, who are going to lead them to ISIS and things. And now we're realizing, especially after Christ church that, that's been happening to young white men as well, this radicalization online. So yes, there is a whole issue there plus now there's deepfakes and a whole other level of technology being unleashed on the world, which kind of changes your levels of understanding of who's saying what on video. Video is no longer trustworthy either. It used to be, if you could see it, you could believe it, but even that's going now.Maddison :Yeah. I think that, yeah, that undermining is interesting because I watched Balibo the other night which is, I'd seen it before but I just, it was the only thing on TV, but the kind of, the feeling of the journalists who were there that they wanted to film the thing because they wanted to win and they wanted to be the one to-Sami Shah:So you watched Balibo?Maddison :Have you not seen it?Sami Shah:I have no idea on what you're talking about.Maddison :It's like, it's this Australian [crosstalk]. It's this Australian film about these five journalists that were killed in Balibo like during the Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste and there was Channel Nine and Channel Seven, I think the ABC was there as well, but they left when they got told to leave. And they went to try and film the invasion because they wanted to film the soldiers getting off the boat and running up the hill because they knew if they had the footage then people had to believe them. And there were a whole lot of other things, there was a lot of competitiveness between the networks and they wanted to be the journalists that got the story and there was the ego, but they actually ended up dying because they stayed so long and the fighting sort of came to the town that they were in. And I think that that desire that they had is one that is quite central to journalism. You want to show the thing, because you think that if people will see it, they have to believe you and they have to do something. They can't ignore it if they see it.Sami Shah:And here's an interesting thing is that's actually been faked for so long as well. So if you look at the history of like newspapers, like one of the, probably the first newspaper baron were to remember, was William Randell first who was, they made a character like him in Citizen Kane, that's what that's about. And William Randell first whole thing was when he said, "If I want there to be a war, I will create a war." And he created wars, like the part of the lead up to the Spanish-American War was just articles that he published that were nonsense, that weren't real.Sami Shah:He just published articles saying, this is what's happening, this is what's happening and the credible public believed him. And we've kind of seen that throughout history is that newspaper barons and newspaper owners and television owners have kind of shaped reality to conform to what they want, which means just because the journalist says it's true, doesn't mean it's true. And that lack of credibility is being there throughout, we're just are only now calling into question, unfortunately, we're throwing the good ones under the same bus that we're throwing the bad ones under, but that's ... I don't know how to fix that problem. Yeah.Madeline Hayman:I sort of have an example of this. I don't know if you guys remember the story of the Tennant Creek two-year-old, who was raped in Tennant Creek, when that story came out it was obviously horrible, but no one ever spoke to the family about it. So they were telling one side of the story, which was elements of it was true, but the other side of things, they really demonized the child's mother and no one, yeah, she hadn't told her side of the story, but she actually came to me and wanted me to tell it.Madeline Hayman:And it was really difficult because all of the, it was still going through court and everything, so there was legal restrictions on how we could tell it. It was like one of those situations where you want to use, you have to use video to tell a story and we couldn't show her face and we had to distort her voice and all of these stuff, so I think there is this ... She said her piece and you can go look it up online if you want but there's, in that sense it was very difficult to be able to tell her story with all those, like things in place.Maddison :Those filters between.Madeline Hayman:Yeah. In the end though, it actually turned out really nice because there's like, well not nice but fine because we could use music and other things as well to tell that story. So I think when even in situations when you can't really use video, there is ways around it to put more of an impact onto a story.Maddison :Yeah. And I think even to convince someone to let you film them, even with those filters, like that's such an achievement to get someone in front of a camera. I think when it's a personal story as well.Madeline Hayman:Yeah.Maddison :I just want to flag that we will be taking questions, so if anything pops into your mind that you want to ask, there will be someone with a microphone I think, but I wanted to kind of finish on the idea of regulation and there's this kind of push at the moment to try and regulate social media in order to stop the spread of fake news or deepfakes, which are kind of these videos that use AI to create fake faces of people. So it looks like a politician is saying something that they're not really saying and also very kind of extremist sites within Facebook and Twitter and others. I just wonder if you think that, one, that's even possible to regulate and two, whether it will go, there's a risk of it going too far? I think that if there will be important conversations that are shut down because of regulation that is more of a blunt tool and-Madeline Hayman:I think it won't. Even if social media could get rid of all fake news, there will still be blogs. Like you can't stop it. It's going to be like anywhere anyway. Everyone's entitled to an opinion as well so, I guess even if it's like on Twitter, writing staff that doesn't necessarily have to be a fake news article, like it can just be people saying things online. I don't think we'll ever be able to get rid of it.Sami Shah:Yeah. I think that that ship sailed a long time ago. I also don't trust government regulation of certain things, which is particular things that kind of sort of have to do with free speech a lot, because law is, and we have to understand this, the law is a hammer, it's not a scalpel. It can't go in and surgically cut out the websites that you dislike and keep the websites that you like because that's only dependent upon who is in government. The next government could be 10 years from now Pauline Hanson could win or Mark Latham could be the prime minister, these things happen. I was in Pakistan when I was very young and there was the worst guy that should ever become prime minister was asked if he's a Zadari. And in the 1990s, someone said, if someone had said the Zardari would one day become prime minister, we'd be like, yeah, right and then 20 years later he was.Sami Shah:So that's politics is sometimes things happen which you can't but should predict. And what Pauline Hanson deems valuable to the public in terms of internet access will be very different from what Richard and Natalie might deem or I'll say, I think I've been easy and she will have her supporters and it's that kind of a thing. The way I like to think of the internet is it's because now it is a human right. It's in the United Nations Bill of Charter, Bill of Rights. Free access to the internet is there as well and one of the things we have to consider is, all right, let's say you don't like your neighbours’ point of view, your neighbours doing stuff that he's, that you disagree with. He is a deplorable human being who has various points of view.Sami Shah:Can you tell the electricity company to shut the electricity to his house to punish him for that? No. The same way you can't tell Facebook to take his website off, because it is also his right to have access to the website and it may seem enticing to say, Hey, let's cut his website access of that where he can put his feet on the internet. But 20 years from now when he comes to power, your website will be cut off and the laws you put in place to help your side now will be used against you later. So it's better to let all sides have access to the internet and have a sense of personal responsibility as to what we consume than to let government do it for us, because that never leads to a good outcome.Madeline Hayman:I think another thing that could be useful in the future is if maybe they taught even in school, how to detect fake news, how to fact check claims, how to research I guess.Sami Shah:Yeah.Maddison :I think they do. My colleagues has a child and she was saying that- [crosstalk] But she was saying that the kid was learning about being a critical news radar in primary school.Sami Shah:We used to have that. We used to have the thing of like, if you wanted to do a research paper, cite your sources. And I'm not talking about like university, I'm talking about in high school and middle school, cite your sources or Encyclopedia Britannica for example. One of those things which you knew the information there was vetted correctly. We've kind of lost that now. If you're presenting a point of view, you can do so without your sourcing and there's so many sources anyway. What can you say Wikipedia isn't reliable anyway. There is those issues, it's a changing landscape and who knows where it'll end up.Maddison :Okay, well on that note, Encyclopedia Britannica, please rate it.Sami Shah:I'll come to it.Maddison :Come back to that. But if anyone has any questions, please, we've got some microphones, ask away.Speaker 4:Hi, talking a lot about free speech. I was just wondering how you kind of sort of navigate the parameters between when free speech goes beyond just fake news but kind of enters a territory of hate speech and what, I don't know, I guess what that looks like and what the differences really in how you can go about the consumption and in the best way possible? I don't know if that makes sense.Sami Shah:Yeah. You want me to go first? Yeah.Madeline Hayman:Don't look at me.Speaker 4:I think from the point of view of that we ... I guess on the not kind of creating laws that you don't want to-Sami Shah:Well, okay. So every country has the limits on free speech. Some of them have more restrictive ones than others, but it is one of the only freedoms that is defined by its limits. Hate speech is something that yes, we grappled with, but one of the things that we've all decided, for example, collectively that's America and that's Australia, that's everyone is incitement of violence is not something you can allow when it comes to free speech. So I can stand up and say, I hate X and that's fine as long as I say, and now let's go out and kill X. Right? Or hurt X or maim X. So the boundary goes from hate speech, it probably starts from hate speech to incitement to violence. Hate speech itself, what is, isn't hate speech is almost in some cases in the eye of the beholder. It might seem clear cut in examples of racism for example, but there's other examples where I am, I'm an ex Muslim, right?Sami Shah:So I'm an atheist, which means I'm basically like many people atheist it's not a big deal, but if you are a religious conservative Muslim, then you will believe certain things in the Quran that are very violent against me. And now are you by practicing your religion, just by practicing your religion, practicing hate speech against me? Because I might feel vilified by that, or oppressed, not necessarily because you also have freedom of religion. But am I okay to ... Am I valid in my fears and paranoia? Absolutely. So that's there as well. The problem will come when hate speech goes from that into the violence speech and those areas. And it comes out the same thing, what offends one person is another person's free right to say that. Is that really awkward to quote by Supreme court judge for America once you choose the right to swing your fist and your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, and it's the same thing with free speech I think and hate speech.Madeline Hayman:I think also just making sure whatever you're reading or consuming is unbiased like that telling two sides of the story. So there's the person making this claim and then sort of a reaction from someone else who's on the opposite scale so you can read both and decide which way you want to go as well. That's important.Maddison :I think on the incitement to violence thing. It's quite interesting. I mean, I don't know if either of you have experienced this, but obviously being on Twitter there are a lot of horrible people saying horrible things, but a few years ago I was doxed so my-Sami Shah:Oh, really?Maddison :So my home address was put on the internet and my phone number and I was kind of shocked of how little you can do about it. Like there's very little that the police can do, and I was just very surprised and thought that there was more. Kind of in place to support you if you wanted to kind of, if you did feel that there was a threat of violence against you or there was the threat that, that might happen.Sami Shah:And that's the police literally not catching up to the modern world, because this has been around for ages now, doxing and all those things, they just the cyber crimes units and everything. Just don't have the resources because it's not taken seriously, but it's a very serious issue.Maddison :Yeah. And the amount of times that happens. And I think there are a lot of journalists who their news organizations have had to pay for security, because there is no sort of support by the law to protect them if they are doing a story about someone quite powerful or someone ... And this happens all around the world as well. It surprised me how little there was in the way of protection sometime, which maybe they probably shouldn't have. Do you have another question?Speaker 5:Hi. I've got a common question on kind of constructed fake news, which is like stuff that are actually constructed and we believe they're real. And I'll give you an example, like a couple of years ago there was the Syrian gas thing where there was like the gassed Syria and then there was that also the ISIS videos of the decapitation of the Egyptians and then also the burning of the pilot. Right? And then, so these are actually put into very reliable sources that released them, like CNN and BBC and we watch them and then they've got such a gripping human angle and they're on real news sites, they're trustable, you can source them. So my question is how do you, how do we go approaching these without going like super, like conspiracy theory and like just critical and not believing anything? So what are your comments about this?Sami Shah:I think there's a solution. It's an old problem, it's not even to do with social media. If you look at, and this isn't again like everything, the problem is everything sounds like a conspiracy theory once you go down this road. But a large part of it is like discernible fact and recorded fact. So, operation Ajax, which is when the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh's government in Iran, that entire thing was kind of orchestrated by just like two CIA agents on the ground. And one of the things they did was they went to certain newspapers, bribed the newspaper editors to put fake stories in that would make Mossaddegh seem weak and also paid writers to go out and write. That's something that happened in the 1950s. This stuff has been going on for such a long time where it doesn't matter. Intelligence agencies use newspapers, and these kinds of things to seed certain stories in to get a certain desired effect, because they realized the value of fake news a long time ago.Sami Shah:Is there a solution to that? Not really. And that's what sucks is because depending on your ideology, you either believe that Syria Assad gas attack was real or it was fake and sarin gas was used or it wasn't used and you will find people on both sides who have verifiable facts that point to the truth in either way. At some point you just have to kind of throw your hands up and go, yes, there is a great deal of stuff out there, which is not verifiable as a truth or I just can't trust it. It's unfortunate, I don't know what to do about that because you've got people who believe the moon landing was faked for example, and they've got legitimate news sources that can verify that because they watched a documentary once about how Stanley Kubrick did a fake news that moon landing. Is up to a certain point, you can argue with people. We've always lived in consensus reality, it's not an objective reality. I think we just have, are now waking up to that unfortunately. It seems like a rude shock because a lot of us weren't paying attention.Maddison :I think also that journalists and news organizations get into a tricky situation when they start becoming predictive. Like they try and get out in front of the story or have the most definitive version of a story, and I think, especially when you're reporting a war zone, you have so little information that is verified, you have ... Basically you're a journalist with very few connections. You're on the ground, and you're trying to pull together information, and you'd probably file that story, and it would get put up and given a headline, and a treatment that you didn't put on it, that wants to make it seem like more than the version of the story.Maddison :And I think with that story in particular there would have been, this is what seems to have happened and if you are only reporting the facts that you know and not trying to become predictive but not trying to get out in front, you wouldn't have made a call on what was used, who did it, what happened? And those are the things that you're trying to pull together. But I think that like waiting a little bit isn't the worst thing in the world and only reporting what you do know and not trying to get into a predictive space, where you're trying to get one step ahead of the story or one step ahead of the facts that you actually have.Madeline Hayman:Yes. We do that as well at NITV. Like a story will come out in mainstream media, but until we can actually talk to the community, we often don't publish anything. And that could be a couple of days later or something like that. But at least we know we're being balanced and we have both sides of the story, especially from a community perspective as well.Maddison :I think we might have time for one more question. Sorry. Our timer has paused, but maybe just last question.Speaker 6:Thank you. What a privilege. So I'm a scientist and one of the devastating things that's happened for our community over the past 20 years is that our authority as bearers of truth as collapsed on both sides of politics with, I think we can certainly see, especially in the case of climate change, absolutely devastating results and also for example, the anti-vaxxer community, how did we get it so wrong and what can we do to correct this through the media?Maddison :You can go first.Sami Shah:No problem. Last Week Tonight, which is John Oliver's show on HBO, he made a really good point when it came to climate change in fact, which is if you're going to do that nonsense of both sides of the story, we have a climate change scientists on, we have to have a climate change denier on, he's like, then make sure you reflect the actual consensus numbers, because science does rely on consensus to a certain degree and it's a very valuable tool within scientific discourse. And so if you're going to have a climate change denier on, then make sure there's 100 climate change scientists on to counter that one idiots point of view. There was recently a, Alan Jones had one because the Q & A did a panel, which was the right way of doing it.Sami Shah:Instead of pitting Brian Cox against Malcolm Roberts, they put a whole panel of just scientists on to talk about climate change. And there was a very intellectual proper discussion by qualified people. You could look at that and go, these are experts. And one of them said, Alan Jones is wrong. He isn't a scientist, I am a scientist, which is a very valid criticism. Alan Jones took umbrage to that and had a scientist on his show who's a climate change denier, and that man has scientific credentials, but it takes 30 seconds online to find out that that man also believes dowsing is a good way of finding water. And he's written some papers on that and been discredited by that for that, and so there is that thing where at some point we have to learn the value of experts. Experts have never been discredited.Sami Shah:Politics have discredited experts. And I think that the differences we're listening to the politicians and not the experts, so maybe the answer then is to disregard politicians. I never understand Australia's respect for politicians. It boggles my mind. I'm from Pakistan, we know the idiots, we know the self-serving scum who will completely debase themselves for the lowest common denominator as long as it gets them to power. And that doesn't matter which side of politics you're from, right or left, they're all equally narcissistic sociopathic losers but we, for some reason in Australia, we seem to give them the benefit of the doubt. They're not worthy of that. They've never earned that. They should never get that.Madeline Hayman:I think it's more than benefit of the doubt. People just will take because the-[crosstalk]Madeline Hayman:They're put up on a pedestal as well. So people take, yeah, take their word for what it is when they don't have any qualifications whatsoever when it comes to climate change or any kind of science. Just because they are the minister for energy or the environment or whatever, doesn't mean that they're an expert in that field. It means that they've been given that to manage.Sami Shah:One month ago, he was the minister of sports, now he's a minister of environment, all of a sudden we're supposed to believe this idiot has the same qualifications in sports that he had in environment which are that he had none. And it's a weird cultural phenomenon. I do not get this, this respect for politicians that Australians consistently insist on having.Madeline Hayman:But I think also journalists need to do their job better and not necessarily not give climate change deniers a voice because everyone's entitled to their point of view, I believe that. But I think that they need to be researching better, they need to be using more scientists in their stories or whatever they're doing then.Sami Shah:Yeah.Madeline Hayman:I think on climate change it's particularly interesting as well because I think scientists are at a disadvantage because of the way that science works, the way that it is open to the possibility that it may be wrong and it tries to get less and less wrong, but you are always open to new information. And I think that climate skeptics are at a position of advantage because they are absolute, they will not budge, and the media kind of likes that. The media likes a strong statement, and us not being open to people who approach the world as trying to learn more and get more correct and get better understanding.Madeline Hayman:Like what a beautiful way to approach the world. That the fact that the media doesn't respond to that, I think is a huge failing of the media that we don't support scientists and also try and develop them as sources. I think I am very much guilty of this, you call a university and you ask for someone who's an expert in a topic and then you get a quote from them and you hang up and you never call them until you do another story on that topic. But you're not developing them as a source and you're not giving them a chance to get better at expressing what they want to say and-Sami Shah:Yeah. Most news editors and journalists would fall over themselves to have a working relationship with a politician. The amount of people I've seen who were senior journalists across all the different media who will have lunch with a politician or dinner with a politician versus a scientist, it's shocking the numbers. It's a very bizarre thing. Yeah.Maddison :Yeah. And I also think that the fact that climate change skepticism was funded at such a huge level especially in the U.S. over decades. Like I think we're seeing in the last few years this sort of battle between skeptics and scientists that has the tail runs to the 50s and 60s and 70s in the U.S. And the amount of money that was poured into creating academic research that would support skepticism is crazy to me. So I think that there's, it seems like it’s sort of this fight that's just emerged, but you're up against a very well moneyed machine, so I wish you luck. I think that might be all the time we have. Do we have any final thoughts? Truth, lies, deepfake the internet?Sami Shah:We always say journalists to vet their sources. I think as consumers we have to do that as well. I think it's a major part of our responsibility, freedom of speech, freedom of press, these things are great for the journalists and for the people speaking out, but it's also for us individually to kind of practice, which we are very happy to abrogate responsibility because it's too much work otherwise.Madeline Hayman:Yes. Fact check everything is what I would say. That's my piece of advice.Maddison :That's very good advice. Thank you so much, Maddie and Sami.Sami Shah:Thank you.Maddison :Thank you for being here. Thank you. Izzy Roberts-Orr: Thanks so much for listening. We hope to see you right here, online, for the rest of the Digital Writers’ Festival. This podcast was put together by our brilliant program producer, Linh Nguyen, and the audio was produced by the fantastic Ahmed Yusef. Our theme music is the magical Huntly's 'Please', from their EP, Songs in Your Name. You can find them on Facebook as Huntly Music. This episode was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people, of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge that First Nations peoples are the first storytellers of this land, and that their sovereignty has never been ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and to the Elders of the lands this podcast reaches. ................
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