 So, even before we had the state attack declared on fake news, we have also seen a lot of people doing this on a civilian level, actively moving against or taking action against fake news. And two of these people are people who are holding the talks here today, Karolina. She's a social media editor and developed the website HoaxMap, which is also what it's going to be about today. And Räuberhose, the second speaker is, well, both are very interested in the more dangerous forms of fake news and the forms that has taken in recent debate. So please welcome Frau Lutz and Räuberhose. So we're glad to be here, but we got the Congress flu before Congress this time, and so that's why I sound a bit the way I do. Well, so I'm getting right to the point. Fake news, of course, isn't a new thing, only the name. Fake news is really new, but basically we've seen, since we've had the Internet, we've had false records that we had, for instance, in 1994, the news item that Microsoft had bought the Catholic Church, acquiring copyright over the Bible, et cetera, and of course, at the time, even then, people recognized pretty quickly that it was satire. And so Microsoft had to counter the effect. So at least in this US-specific context, we've seen so-called fake news for quite a long, long time. So as an example, Sponsor Kitten, which gave the target's name. So there were fake news, where there were kittens inside glasses, which were growing up in glasses, and this was, of course, also fake news. Years after that, there were still protests by animal rights activists. But now in 2016, it's not that funny anymore. So in 2016, we had the most curious headlines, like an armed man that was arrested near the sea in a pizzeria, because there was news that in the pizzeria there was prostitution going on, so this man read this news on Twitter and went to the pizzeria. Also in Germany, there was a case of rape report, which was fake, and then there was diplomatic reasoning with Russia. So if we look particularly at the right wing, since summer last year, we can really see that in Germany the incidents are increasing, but we can also see the tendency that there is a lot of fact-checking, a lot of corrections from news media, analyzing fake news, and so we actually managed to plot this phenomenon. So on the one side we have the rumors, or the fake news, some 460 just on this map. And those are only the ones that have been countered in print or in public, but people observing the scene say, well maybe that's just the tip of the iceberg, because just maybe for one city like Dresden, I can name so many incidents of false rumors, so in particular North African and Middle Eastern refugees, in particular, have been featured as a group notably, and so we do see that, well we did want to try to confront people with the level of misinformation, but we also wanted to just analyze the data and see how things have developed over time, if there are any context that we might find or connections otherwise. So in the meantime we've been working on this 11 months now, collected these different kinds of rumors, these hundreds of different news stories, and what are the main focus topics that are noticeable, so you can see the time plot here on the screen, this isn't only the place and the incident, but this is also, these are dated news obviously, and so you can see the rapid increase in September 2015, and incidentally, well this coincides with the situation in Hungary, that the border regulations in Hungary were changed to the routes and the influx of refugees, and you can also see a peak in, later in December, January after the incidents on New Year's Eve in Cologne, there was a lot of excitement and so there's another peak here, so these are obviously not exactly descriptive of the initial rumors that were then found to be false, but these are the actual real news that we mapped against it. So we also looked at the region as a different German countries, on the left you can see the numbers and total numbers for the country, so it's Bavaria and North Rhine with failure, which are obviously the ones with the most people living there, and also a lot of refugees were entering through Bavaria, so that's also a cause, and a lot of refugees were placed in North Rhine with failure, so this again makes a lot of sense. On the right you can see it proportional to one million inhabitants, so this is the rumors per person, so there is, the former East German states are on the top and then there is the next one, Bavaria. So we also looked at regional, at the topics which were most talked about in different regions. One of the topics were money and social services, which were discussed if refugees access them, so there is something where we could found an increase of occurrences in the area around Munich and in the south of Germany. So we are unsure why this is, if it's because Bavaria is very rich or if it's a local press which had an influence on this. On the right the graphic shows another topic, which is theft, and you can't see regional distribution there, so there is no one region where this was most often occurring. Then we looked at different sources of these hoaxes, and for around 200 rumors we couldn't establish where they came from, because they were unknown sources. Next most often was social media like Facebook or WhatsApp. Around 50 rumors were with people reporting to the police, which were wrong. And for another 50 there was something actually happening, but the reporting was exaggerated about it. And also there were lesser extents of things that were completely invented. We can see here, this is a local politician in Dresden, Tatiana Festerling. I'm not exactly sure about the exact relations between Pegida, the new right group in Dresden and Festerling, but on her Facebook page she posted this item where people had observed that there were tents being torn down in front of a hospital. Or being constructed in front of the hospital, and there was then immediately a built, constructed a story around this that this was an outbreak of tuberculosis, but in fact these were party tents for some celebration. And so this is a typical development, you take some incident, which actually happens. And so here's another example, this is a bit much to read through. There was a bomb threat in Siegmarin. Allegedly there were three terrorists arrested. This was posted on a right-wing website, and if you looked for where the text fragments came from, the main source was a bomb threat on baden.fm and other reporting on focus.de where it was reported that there was a raw bomb found. And this was remixed to a new incident and something completely new story. And other thing we find is that representatives also catch on to this fake news. So this seems to be known to all the audience. So right-wing parties in Germany like Siegmarin and AfD also catch on to this news and then inquire from the government different things related to it. One of our favorite is this one, where a representative from a place, very representative inquired about a rape, alleged rape in Maxim Gorky Park in May 2016. And the government replied, So basically the federal government said, in this federal state, we don't actually know of any Maxim Gorky Park at all. So we can't answer your questions. So on the picture you can see AfD representative, local party, functionary. And so he was obviously accused of not at least googling. So these are all just examples, obviously, but the underlying question is, of course, who wants to spread these rumors? And we were looking to find the original source, but it's not always possible to actually localize a source. And sometimes it's just not worthwhile. But in some cases it's interesting to follow this kind of lead. So for instance, if you have supposed victims of a crime, for instance, so this is something that you can easily find out that the source is a private Facebook profile, which can, of course, be someone else. But this is where the rumors started spreading. Some of these cases only became known through Facebook comments or people actually calling in, replying researchers with newspapers or people who maybe know local politics, correcting and reacting to these stories. And of course we have quite a number of news items that were just basically made up, even if they were eyewitnesses, but just gave the story a wrong spin. Not necessarily making up a rumor, but placing it in a context or allowing it to run loose. And especially if this happens in a context like the AfD, the new ultra-right party in Germany. But similar things are happening, of course, in Austria and in Switzerland, where you also have a very strong German language, right Facebook networks like, for instance, from the NPD, the German right-wing party. So what's next? If we want to look at the US election results, we saw a lot of debate about how fake news or forced communications impacted the election results. But we have only recently started looking at solutions or the situation to look at fake news or even be able to flag this as difficult content on Facebook channel at least. This is of course a lot of work for Facebook managing these tickets. At least in the German debate we've heard about hate speech, the collaboration isn't working too well yet, but at least the technical possibility is being developed in Germany. It might be difficult, but to actually technically flag contents as fake news. But the situation in Germany is difficult because it's not necessarily coming from so-called fake news, websites specifically, but through other channels or through other means of distribution. And so it's harder to pinpoint. This is also very close to the Lügenpresse, the lying press slogan. This has become a big rift in German society or debate. How to treat these hate speech versus classic standard press, the so-called lying press? So especially the US media wants to cooperate with Facebook on this. The Washington Post has released a Chrome extension, which is fact-checking Trump's tweets. They have a lot to do. But also here in Germany there are different initiatives. So the legislation for legislation there is talked about banning fake news and making it a criminal record if someone shares fake news or distributes fake news. So you could imagine where this could possibly lead to or maybe not. And there's also talk about having a truce ministry or a distributed defense center against fake news. Quite interesting, as this minister has also been reported on our website for hoax news. So he said that around 30% which pretend to be Syrian refugees are actually not from Syria. And another quote he said which is fake is that there are doctors labelling people who are about to be deported, that they write a medical report, that they are in bad health conditions or can't be deported. And he was also using numbers that was about 70% of males under the age of 40. So what's next? Well I think we have been there so we don't want to go there again. So thank you for your attention that has been about it already. Many thanks to Lutz and Caroline. If you have any questions please go to the microphones. So a question from the floor. Do you actually enjoy these kind of legislation procedures? The Ministry of the Interior seems to take pride in the whole process. So if you can force someone legally to prominently articulate your campaign, I think that's quite a helpful campaign against for instance politicians who make up numbers as a fact checking instance, if I understood it correctly. So if you were to employ that kind of technique against politicians or use it against them, well I think our main interest is another or at least we're not politicians or I think a lot of people just have the tendency maybe to spread contents that are not strictly true. There are some jokes we don't even dare to make anymore. Where's what's art and what's satire? It is a problem to not dare things and I think it's not the right way to try and regulate or even over-regulate processes like this. Because this is still about free speech in the end even if that's a very over-welcome expression. And I forget, I forgot something. This is Dr. Axel Stoll, a notorious German conspiracy theorist who died and has acquired some sort of strange cult following. So in Austria we did have that paragraph that expressly pertained to spreading fake news, but this no one was ever convicted due to this paragraph so in the end they just basically... Another question from the floor. Well the Maxim Gorky Park that didn't exist in Saxonia, where would we be able to find that on the map? Or how did you map these that you couldn't place otherwise? Well, very, very rarely there is no place at all, not even the federal state. And in the worst case here we did sometimes just put Bolin, but in the case of the Maxim Gorky Park we picked the landmark, the local parliament in Saxon, in the federal state in Dresden. And another question, different also legal alternatives I think both aren't really satisfactory, but I'd like to see what strategies from social media users work or if there's any kind of counter-speech, if there's reach or what are your experiences or practices except like large-scale trolling. And that's not necessarily productive as we all know, it's not convincing to people to discuss in this way, but what's your advice there? It is like the classical counter-reporting in the big media, they most often don't reach as many people as the original fake news. So there is one example where a store owner reacted very quickly to some fake news, he put a sign in front of his store and also put a post on social media and this post was shared more often than the rumor. Something which is shown that if there is a very quick reaction, it can have an impact, but if the rumor is allowed to run free, it's very hard to intervene. It also depends on which networks these news are shared. Not everyone of us is scrolling through Pegida, so the right-wing networks or right-wing discussion forums. So it also has to be done by the media that they regulate their comments and delete inappropriate comments. This is more about the technical side of your website. Do you have some kind of ticket system where you look at incoming reports and mark them? No, we don't. We were too lazy so far, we only do this part-time next to our full-time job. So this is on our to-do list to actually have a ticket system like this. The internet has a question. How many people are working on hoax maps? It's two. We're just not completely correct. A lot of the reports we have on the map are crowdsourced. People are sharing these via email and Twitter, so it's not completely correct to say we are only two, but there are a lot of people helping us. Another question we got from the internet is, wasn't that all clear that this would be happening with a big boom of blogs? Maybe. Hello, thanks again for the talk. It's very important what you do on the one hand for the parliamentary debates, but also for the public debate. So your graphics has shown different kind of things. One has shown the increase of fake news during the so-called refugee crisis during last autumn and the beginning of the year. And have you balanced this with the reports about refugees which have been out in general? So maybe this also changes the topic change over time, like last year it might have been about Greece. No, so far we haven't cross-checked this with the general news about refugees. There are several topics which are reported on higher in certain times. So it's very likely that in the beginning of the year, January, February, there were a lot of reports about refugees. So there's been a lot of reports in general, so it might very likely be that this also correlates with having a lot of fake news about refugees. But we haven't worked on this specifically because we're only doing this in our free time and haven't had the time. But I think it would be very cool if other people could try to do this and put this in correlation. For the second part of the question, there always have been fake news. There always have been fake news in official media and the Bolivar as well. So we also have incidents which showed up two years ago, but go back way back to the 90s, like chain letters. But there's also a bigger audience for this fake news, and so the fake news resonates a lot more with the audience. So it's not just a background noise, but the public reacts a lot. So how can we authorise this? Basically my question is, are you immune against this kind of misinformation yourselves? Well, for the case that we do make a mistake, which we haven't done so far, I think we just have the principles where we always share our news items on Twitter, and we of course just have the policy for verification to be very open about it if that would be the case. But it luckily hasn't so far, but of course in terms of fact checking and verification, we do just go all the way and call back and call authorities or maybe check stories with police and go back to the individual points of the fake story. On top of that, there are several stories that we didn't include in the hoax map because they weren't entirely false. So if in doubt, we just say we take a break or don't try and over hurry things and just take a look at how a story develops maybe over a couple of days. So give the ladies a big hand.