Some 600 delegates of the Eurasian Media Forum came to the Kazakshtan city of Almaty to contemplate on how the fast-changing world entered an era in which people trust nothing and no one, thanks to the rise of social media.

“The world is overloaded with information noise. This is a time when facts lose their primary importance, turning into an endless stream of arguments and opinions, generating a distorted vision of reality,” said Dariga Nazarbayeva, founder and chairperson of the Eurasian Media Forum organizing committee.

The forum’s 15th anniversary was held on May 22-24 in Kazakhstan’s former capital city and attended by politicians, international organizations, research centers and mass media representatives from 60 countries.

Since 2002, the forum is held each year to strengthen the Central Asian country’s contribution to international and East-West dialogue.

Andres Ilves, a South Africa-based writer and journalist, said that the media had become “the least-trusted institution of all”.

He referred to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer survey that revealed 63 percent of respondents did not know how to tell good journalism apart from rumors or falsehoods.

Meanwhile, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows that 77 percent of Americans believed major news outlets report falsehoods and only 43 percent of respondents across dozens of countries trusted the news media.

Furthermore, Ilves said, the Edelman Trust Barometer reported that Americans’ trust in their own institutions had dropped by 9 percent, while in the rest of the world, the level of trust had decreased by 23 percent. Faith in the government dropped 14 percent among Americans and 30 percent in other countries.

There was good news for Indonesia, however, as it ranked third among countries with the highest level of trust in the government, after China and India.

“The problem is, [...] we need to solve the problem of trust generally,” Ilves said at a panel session on the general public’s declining trust in key institutions, including the government, businesses, the media and non-governmental organizations.

British author and politician Lord Michael Dobbs pointed out that the rise of social media meant that people only listened to their own
prejudices, saying: “They live in echo chambers, hearing only their own views.”

In Ukraine, for example, people were particularly likely to believe fake news if it coincides with their own beliefs, said Ukrainian legal counsel and human rights activist Andrey Buzarov.

To deal with the phenomenon of fake news spreading faster than genuine news, authorities blocked access to several websites, he said. “There is no fact checking at the government level.”

The panelists agreed that fake news was impacting the lives of more and more people.

Criticizing traditional media for emphasizing negative news, Yusuf Omar, an Indian journalist based in South Africa, said the principles of responsible journalism were even more important in an age of fake news.

Omar argued in favor of constructive journalism, telling positive stories based on achieving solutions. He described how his organization, Hashtag our Stories, trained people in disadvantaged communities in telling stories about their lives and their concerns using video and text editing techniques on their mobile phones.

“Be cautious,” he warned. “We must still spend time on research and fact checking. We must be the first guard against fake news.”

Khatia Dekanoidze, a Georgian official and politician, said that in her experience, corruption was entirely behind the crisis.

“I believe in the rule of law,” she said. “Trust is a social contract between the government and the people. We need social contracts to achieve the highest standards of the rule of law.”

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