My second example is a photo, apparently of the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota in 2017. The aim was to prevent a pipeline being built across Native American lands—I nearly said ‘naked’, then, but that would have been another story altogether—threatening their environment and water supplies. Some activists clearly decided that it would be good to inflate the size of the protests and accuse the media of covering them up. What they did was stand in an actual photograph of the Standing Rock protest with a photo of the Woodstock festival in 1969 in New York state—thousands of miles and 48 years out of place. Again, the rationale for the action is clear: how do we confuse people so that they don’t understand what the true nature of a particular moment in time is? Not just bend the truth, not just exaggerate, but lie. The bigger and more brass-necked the lie is, apparently, the further it seems to be able to travel. It’s a truly sorry state of affairs, not to mention a very worrying one.

There is a need for an escalated and more urgent public debate regarding this whole issue, and we must focus on some potential solutions. Firstly, we have to make room and help facilitate a renewal in local press and news. Hyperlocals, supported at first by Government, if necessary, can potentially provide an effective and trusted alternative, and help people back into a habit of recognising a trusted news source. We already know that local news is trusted far more than any other type of news, and social media news is trusted far less. Fifty-nine per cent of people surveyed for the 2018 Edelman trust barometer said they were unsure what they see in the media is true and about what isn’t, while nearly seven in 10 said they worry about fake news being used as a weapon. Only one in four British people trust news that they see on social media, whilst trust in local news is three times greater than Facebook.

As part of the budget deal with Plaid Cymru and the Labour Party, we came to an agreement to supply £200,000 in seed money to hyperlocals; an important first step. It’s part of having an honest discussion here in Wales, so lacking in a pluralistic media, about whether we see news and current affairs as crucial to our civic life. Do we see news and the media as just another commercial entity, or something vital to the health of our democracy and society? Do we dare to begin having a wider discussion on whether we begin to offer wider funding for journalism and independent media, particularly on a local level? This is something that’s done in other countries as a matter of discourse. It isn’t completely out of the realms of acceptability, and it may well need to be necessary.

We in Plaid Cymru have also called for a long time for the devolution of broadcasting powers and other regulatory mechanisms surrounding the media. If those powers were here, we could consider solutions right for the country where there is a lack of a competitive pluralistic news media environment. So, perhaps a charter to supply Welsh versions of newspapers, perhaps a closer step to a more competitive media environment. Hopefully, one day, we could get all broadcasters to stop placing items such as NHS stories from England at the top of their UK news agenda. It’s the kind of thing that I also class as misleading news, but in this country it seems to be accepted.

I believe this would start to fill the vacuum in Wales before fake news, on a Welsh level, was able to move in. However, in broader terms, there is a major global problem. The solutions to tackling it are not easy, even though we can be heartened by the knowledge that so many people do not necessarily believe what they see online. The challenge is also to alleviate confusion online so that more people can more clearly identify what is fake and what is real, what is objective and fair journalistic analysis and what is a hack piece written with an agenda behind it. It’s also crucial that we separate real journalists and decent political commentators from influencers who peddle a fantasy of lies.

The challenge was summed up in November last year, when the Daily Mail referenced a 10-day-old tweet, with no evidence, of a lorry crashing into pedestrians and gunshots around Oxford Circus in London. The resulting article, again with no evidence, was then referenced by the so-called Tommy Robinson, who tweeted,

How long before we find out that today’s attack in Oxford Circus was by a Muslim?

So, there is a need to ascertain who is genuine and a real influencer and/or a journalist and who is not. We also have to start really calling out the standards of tabloids’ news sources and those with a specific political allegiance. When there is a falsehood, it should be up to us as politicians, regardless of our position on the political spectrum, to call it out for the good of democracy. 

But there must be more robust procedures in place, using and promoting our existing watchdogs to do their jobs, and to be able to do it more effectively. We should be promoting those with good journalism degrees and industry accreditation. We should be using and promoting the Independent Press Standards Organisation as a wider standard bearer, and promoting it as a place to complain about misleading sources. This needs to be part of a wider education programme surrounding trusted and verifiable sites and news sources, encouraging the use of fact-checkers, broadening understanding, for example.

I would hope, too, that we can encourage the use and more consumption of news in general this way. I understand that we live in a time dominated by social media, but we're also in a time dominated in many respects by a vastly changing world. It would be good to use this opportunity to encourage even greater participation.

So, I've brought this debate here today because we need to keep the focus on what is a growing menace. We know that foreign actors are using these strategies to undermine elections and swing public debate. Even though most people don't necessarily believe what they read on Facebook or other social media networks, the stories being peddled, the memes, the comments from bots, are all part of a general environment of confusion and gaslighting, all designed to make us question the value of news and question what we believe, to force us to consider whether institutions we've trusted forever, our whole lives, are bringing us the skilled analysis and coverage. This is something that really, really worries me in that regard.

There is a final point to make. This also has to include politicians. This terrible phenomenon has become widespread, in part because politicians have helped to foster it. Some politicians have expertly and, at times, crudely, set large sections of the public against trusted journalists, and onto untrusted sources that share their agenda, whether it's Trump in the USA, Orbán in Hungary or President Duterte in the Philippines. Politicians and political systems have to recognise themselves when they are crossing the line into the bounds of misleading and lies, and check themselves for the good of our democracy.

To finish, I'd like to play a short clip now from my brother, Ciaran Jenkins, who is an investigative journalist for Channel 4. He's done various amounts of reporting on this in the Philippines and also in parts of Europe, where there are young boys who are actually making a living in poverty-stricken states to ensure that they can perpetuate the idea of fake news. So, I'd like to finish with that and to give us food for thought as to how we can stop fake news growing here in Wales.