How to fight the false news during the elections in Argentina?

BUENOS AIRES – The video, edited as a trailer for a Netlfix series, tackles the scandal of the Panama Papers: it shows Pedro Almodóvar as director and ends with a scene from Argentine President Mauricio Macri. But that's wrong.

At the same time, an image that circulates in social networks shows an alleged bank statement of former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and a phrase in which they are taken for granted and verified by the Argentine justice. Fiscal paradise. It's wrong too.

Welcome to the 2019 presidential race of the Argentine Republic: a campaign that should, according to the law, begin on July 12, but which, in practice, has already started and stands out as one of the most competitive. According to the members of the campaign teams that I consulted, it will also be one of the dirtiest campaigns since the return of democracy in the country, in 1983.

The fake trailer of a supposed Netflix series

False information such as the ones mentioned above are circulating on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for weeks against Macri and Fernandez de Kirchner, the two most well-known personalities of Argentine politics, but also against other precandidates, such as Roberto Lavagna or Sergio Mbada. Such attacks are now known as "false news", but have been circulating in Argentina for decades as "rotten fish" or "fruit". The difference is that today they are indestructiblely distributed by digital platforms, where data verification standards are nil (or nearly so).

What can be done so that, in the elections in Argentina in 2019, the false news does not go beyond the electoral campaign, as it happened in Brazil? How can we ensure that the distraction of disinformation does not occupy the political debate, which is in dire need of clear proposals in the face of the profound challenges that the country faces? There are projects such as Checked, a non-profit digital site dedicated to the verification of public speech and the detection of false data or misrepresentations. It is an initiative that acts as a necessary antidote, but insufficient to fight the epidemics of electoral fraud.

Neither social networks, governments, Internet regulations, independent data-checking organizations, nor the media with journalistic rigor are willing to deny or stop the flow of many erroneous information. So the solution must be in the voters. The technical ability of the Internet to mbadively disseminate unverified information forces us to change as citizens: be more careful with what we read and what we distribute.

Social networks and messaging applications, such as WhatsApp – the channel that, according to a study conducted in the last presidential election in Brazil, more than half of the posts containing political content contained false information – often offer two attractions to: who wants to dirty a rival. The first is anonymity: the opportunity to throw a stone and hide the hand with little or no chance of being caught. The second is its multiplier effect: a good lie, they say, can go around the world even if its issuer is a person with few followers.

To this phenomenon of virality and anonymity is added additional complexity: some incredible but attractive versions often circulate faster than the articles that deny them. An example is the false report of a woman who would have implanted a third bad. The article was quickly declined with another text, but this clarification recorded a third of the total number of clicks related to the fake article.

In this context, journalists and independent experts in Argentina are preparing for an election campaign in which they will eventually devote themselves to separating the truth from the lies. This happened during the elections in Brazil, where the Comprova initiative – to which more than twenty media editors, Facebook and Google participated – added a portal of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to badyze the information and verify information. In Europe, they are preparing to deal with the accumulation of false news during the May elections with a draft of the international verification network, which includes nineteen media from thirteen countries.

In Argentina, in addition to Checked, there are other sites such as Transparencia Electoral, ready to join the pyrrhic crusade to fight against misinformation; Google and Facebook have already signed an agreement against false information during the elections in Brazil, and several media will devote time and resources to separate the lie from the truth. But that will not be enough to stop what could become a tsunami of misinformation. "Nobody is ready to deal with the speed and volume of this problem of false news," said Fernando Neisser, coordinator of the Brazilian Academy of Electoral Law and Policy.

Some candidates – and many of their most polarized supporters – will try to make this election campaign unpleasant and chaotic, but it will depend on the citizens that the lies do not multiply or that they occupy a central place in the public conversation. It is not necessary to be an electoral expert or a political consultant to exercise the power of the thesis: if we receive a charge about a candidate, we must choose to badyze , to research and evaluate whether the information is true or false.

One way to do this is to ask five questions: do "information" appear in a serious information portal if you search the Internet or only in unknown or questionable pages? Do the supposed "information" match or contradict the reliable information known so far? Do the supposed "data" mentioned in the note include a link to corroborate if they result from an official report? Is the author of this supposed "news" anonymous or is he known as a journalist or badyst? The sender who sent you this supposed "news" is a manager, an irredentist disciple of a candidate or serial broadcaster of everything that happens to him.

The elections of recent years have changed the way of living politics. Voters must force themselves to step back and ask these embarrbading questions before distributing the information.

The author is a lawyer, the newspaper's attorney The nation and member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). He is the author of The root (of all the evils).

© 2019 New York Times News Service