Dousing the flames of fake news on local firms
Mr. Mikhail Pathikirikorale
Fake news connected to business activities that hit headlines in social media at a time of extremist terror can damage the image and impair a company’s bottom line, several heads of leading firms said.
Now, many companies are planning to sign up with third-party firms with IT expert monitors and the latest artificial intelligence to tackle social media in search of viral posts that could harm their image and reputation in the local and international market.
Sri Lanka is now saddled with the gigantic task of restraining the spread of disinformation via Internet especially of a product brand or a company under the present circumstance of ethnic divide, a business intelligence technology expert said.
“Necessary damage control action should be taken before fake news via social media ignites into wildfire causing irreversible harm,” he added.
Once fake news has been published online, content spreads across platforms rapidly, and by the time it is eventually removed, the damage may have already been done, he said.
Facebook management has taken several measures including making it easier for users to report stories as fake, attaching warning labels to stories flagged as fake, using third-party fact-checking services to verify the legitimacy of content, and improving automated systems that detect disinformation before it is flagged by users.
He revealed that automated content removal is the only feasible precautionary action social media companies could take to ensure that disinformation does not appear on their platforms in the first instance.
A recent victim of fake news in the aftermath of Easter terror via social media Lanka Spice (Pvt) Ltd, owners of the leading Sri Lankan “Mc Currie” brand of spice products. It had to take immediate remedial action to repair the damage caused to the image of the company, Mikhail Pathikirikorale, director of the company said.
A malicious item of fake news had been circulating recently on Facebook and Whatsapp about Mc Currie being involved in the alleged associates of Easter Sunday attacks, he disclosed.
He added that the fake news creators have in fact used two different brands, the unrelated international brand Mc Cormick, as well as Mc Currie.
Mr. Pathikirikorale is an IT expert who had his secondary education at Eton College, UK and entered Edinburgh University, Scotland and graduated with an Upper Second Degree in Computer Science. After living and working in China for 10 years, Mr. Pathikirikorale returned to Sri Lanka last year to help run Lanka Spice, the family business.
In Shanghai, he worked at Wiredcraft as a Programme Manager, managing large accounts and teams to successfully deliver software projects at scale for Starbucks China, the World Bank, Hilton, Sam’s Club, Walmart and many other large multinationals.
As an individual, it’s important to ascertain the veracity of a news source and to look closely at the post before sharing it. With Whatsapp it’s very hard to combat fake news as messages are sent directly or in groups, and as such they are not public or easily reportable, he pointed out.
With Facebook, you can report public messages and reach out to anyone who has shared that message. Asking your Facebook followers to also report the post seems to reduce the time before Facebook deletes it, he emphasised.
“We’ve had to use additional resources into answering the large number of questions we were receiving by call, email or Facebook,” he said adding that to streamline the process they had prepared a short script that their social media team can use to reply quickly and clearly to questions regarding the fake news post.