By Javier Garza Ramos

A few weeks ago, my two teenage daughters asked why the president had banned potato chips and soft drinks at their school.

The subject did not surprise me. This was around the days a new law had taken effect in Mexico, prohibiting the sale of junk food in school cafeterias and stores as a way to combat the obesity epidemic. 

What surprised me was how they framed the question.

“Why do you say the president banned it?” I asked.

“Everyone says so; that (President Claudia) Sheinbaum ordered schools not to sell junk food anymore,” replied one of my daughters.

I tried to explain that this law was passed by the Mexican Congress months before Sheinbaum was elected president, but it was only beginning to be implemented. She had nothing to do with it, I said. But the explanation was pointless, the consensus was solid at their school, and others: she banned their favorite snacks, it was her fault.

Now, let me explain what this has to do with press freedom.

Distorting truth 

In the following days, as the law began to take effect, I realized why that version of events had taken hold in teenagers. Almost every video I saw on social media about the ban on junk food at schools said that it was ordered by the president. But those videos were posted in unknown TikTok and Instagram accounts.

Examples of TikTok posts that went viral

Every mainstream news outlet had the story straight: Congress had passed a law. And they added context: It was a public health measure that had the support of every political party. This was the angle I had pushed in the stories I presented in my radio program and podcast.

If a twisted version of this story was taking hold, then journalism was irrelevant. The nuance that many of us had pointed out when discussing the new law had gone without notice. No attention was paid to the legislative process or the timeline of events. Whatever mention of the arguments that supported the law were ignored.

We could not beat the tide. We had been overwhelmed by anonymous social media posters pretending to be journalists.

The dissemination of fake news or manipulated information is one of the greatest challenges to press freedom that we face today. It forces journalists and news organizations to reexamine our role and confront a new threat.

A legitimate threat 

For years, journalists have thought about threats to press freedom as constraints on our work, as attempts to limit reporting the news by different means: physical violence, intimidation, smear campaigns, surveillance, or lawsuits. The landscape is familiar: journalists killed by criminals or politicians. Hacked by government agencies. Intimidated by anyone who does not want light shed on them.

Now it seems that a more effective threat to press freedom is to simply overwhelm our coverage with fake reporting passed off as legitimate journalism. 

This noise drowns the voices of independent journalism, especially as younger audiences gravitate toward social networks marked by immediacy, like Instagram, or Snapchat, but especially TikTok, where the need to condense a message in a 15-secon video kills all the chances for context or explanation in a news story.

Found on Instagram

News organizations all over the world have done terrific work with social media, developing new products to fit the news in a way that interests a younger audience. But the race against fake journalists is still asymmetrical.

Real journalism takes knowledge, work, and resources. It also takes intellectual honesty. This means taking time to produce a solid, trustworthy, and attractive story and put it in different formats: text, audio, video.

Someone posing as a journalist on social media only needs a few bits of information and a few minutes to edit a short video. No need for fact checking, no effort to make sense of the story and explain why it is important. And artificial intelligence will probably shorten this process so that it can take on an industrial scale.

This is an easy way to spread lies and disinformation, either by ignorance or malice, and by the time legitimate news media catches up, it can be too late. The public is misled.

Journalists need to do a better job of educating their audience about information on social media, impressing upon them that a blogger, a tiktoker, influencer or youtuber is not a reporter. That there are skills and rules needed for legitimate journalism.

Social media is a blessing for anyone who has tried to silence journalists through violence or intimidation, because it can help make the news media irrelevant. Fighting back is our newest challenge.

And the issue was ripe for political manipulation. An unpopular move with youngsters needed to have a culprit and whoever was interested in putting the president under a negative light would profit from this. 

About the Author

Javier Garza Ramos is a journalist and member of the World Editors Forum.

His podcast El Noti is one of the most popular news podcasts in Mexico.