 Well, thank you very much for inviting me here. It's a great honour and privilege to share some thoughts on fake news with you today. Although I have to admit to feeling a bit of a fake myself in this context, with your professional expertise it's more than likely that I'll be talking about problems that you've already devised solutions to. So I'm really presenting this paper as a historian of propaganda who's only just really discovered the potential to transform my own research area in the digital age. So in 2016 Oxford dictionaries declared post truth to be its word of the year. The compilers suggested that the definition ranged far beyond the circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Rather the phenomenon had become a general characteristic of our age. The politics of passion rather than of informed opinion had become de rigueur. Even official sources including the new American administration under Donald Trump denounced uncomfortable truths as fake news with the effect that policy seemingly no longer required justification or explanation. According to Matthew Norman writing in the independent in November 2016, the truth has become so devalued that what was once the gold standard of political debate is now worthless currency. We are now apparently free to choose our own truth released from the tyranny of objective reality and expertise. The Guardian reported in September 2016 that the so-called liberal metropolitan elite were left scratching their heads. Political campaigning had spiralled into a debate about how to better appeal to post truth citizens as though they are baffling and lacking reason. So this situation has been brought about by a perfect storm. The speed, scope and scale of modern communications complicated by the uncertain status of social media as neither platform nor publisher and the hidden algorithms used to control the information that we see. The building frustration of those who feel disempowered. The desire of some to destabilise the entire social and political system through psychological warfare campaigns and by creating a situation where all views are of equal value regardless of the evidential base. Psychological warriors can operate under the radar in the largely unregulated wild west of the internet. This is an agitational propagandist's dream where nothing is certain, where all may be plausible and where communication networks are fast and they are global. Of course there are historical parallels. One might liken the current situation to popular mistrust of official information in the interwar period generated by a deep honey's, some felt, over the seemingly misleading stories about atrocities committed by German troops in Belgium in 1915. Of course we now know that some of these were true or the communications revolutions brought about by the printing press or the wireless, the open channels for false information to move beyond confined groups in a much faster manner. What's striking about each of these examples is the speed at which responses to urgent problems were formulated and how debates about the right approach to these problems in some cases strengthened rather than imperiled democracy. Our natural instinct, certainly since 1915 when the scientific and popular study of propaganda commenced in earnest has been to seek to understand propaganda's inner workings and in doing so to control and confine its influence. We can reassure ourselves then that we will in time become immune to malicious propaganda. Take for example the Institute of Propaganda Analysis formed in 1937 in the United States. The Institute devised a seven point schema to categorize propaganda activity in order to assist a bewildered public to navigate the new and treacherous communications landscape. They produced a small card that you could put in your wallet and pull it out when you thought you were being propagandised. You could categorize it and say right that is emotional propaganda I resist. That's quite like recent attempts by organizations like factcheck.org to provide quote strategies to shield yourself from fake news. Of a special concern has been the loss of official control over the basic instruments of mass communication particularly in the light of changing dynamics of communication prompted by the sheer volume of information circulating in cyberspace. Are we all now propagandists operating with impunity within a largely lawless environment? The 24 hour stream of infotainment and social media comment has not negated the prevalence of dominant ideas and ideologies rather these ideas and ideologies converge in an environment where it's increasingly difficult to decipher fact from fiction. That process may well aid the deepening of ideological mindsets where we only seek out or are presented with information from those who already share our views where we are trapped in a global echo chamber that simply legitimizes rather than challenges our existing patterns of thinking and where we silence those who we do not endorse. Arguably that has already damaged the very notion of liberal democratic free speech normally characterized by plural views and regard for alternative opinion. We rightly remain anxious about pernicious information warfare campaigns especially those that seemingly endanger liberal democracy or freedom of thought or as in the case of Russia simply seek to sow confusion and persuade us that we should mistrust all information. We fear that in an environment where all facts are contested let's think climate change or even where mainstream politicians are in the business of dismissing uncomfortable truths as fake news. The masses will increasingly succumb to a logical emotional impulses where the place of expert opinion in society is contested and where the sheer volume of information ensures the objective facts are buried or lost. Here we reach some of the central questions I wish to address today in an environment where objective facts are buried, lost or denounced. What becomes of a discipline such as history seemingly underpinned by evidence? Are there creative ways we might use fake news in a more positive and illuminating way? Here I'm advocating for a transformation especially a transformation in how we view fake news and how we might think about it in a different way. I don't see aspects of fake news as an artificial memory as someone mentioned this morning. It's actually quite authentic and that's what I want to talk about now. Finally, if fake news is critical historical evidence how should it be preserved and curated? Of course historians are familiar with the problem of distinguishing fact from fiction, interrogating the provenance of our sources through historical method and working in mythical or uncertain frames. We're used to asking when, how and why records are created, questioning the veracity of that record and we sometimes find that those texts are fake and we can sometimes discover that deception many years after it's entered into the historical record. Now venturing onto a very uncertain ground as a modernist I'm going to say something about medieval history. Take for example David Carpenter's discovery that a marriage charter purportedly granted by Henry I was more than likely a fabrication even though it found a place in foundational texts on the history of medieval England as a critical source in understanding Henry's behaviour and the inner workings of feudal society. Carpenter concluded that forgery is extremely common in Anglo-Norman royal charters and he details an elaborate process by which authenticity may be established, all of which have their limits, examination of the seal, script or language or reconciling content from what is known elsewhere. In that case then the potential forgery has only been detected some 900 years after it was first produced and even there there are complexities as Alfred Hyatt's work has demonstrated in these documents how do we sift away the nuggets of truth from the out and out forgeries. Do we deprive ourselves of important evidence in a period where surviving evidence is in itself rare. We may be left in a historical no man's land whereas Hyatt notes many documents are neither pure and simple forgeries nor completely authentic. Equally we should not simply assume that those fictions are deliberate acts of deception what is to be the place of subjectivity or deep belief here. None of those questions are new. Historians are used to thinking and working within these frames and we've developed okay limited but we have developed methods for navigating ambiguity. But modern communications presents new challenges. Historians studying the 21st century will be asked to work at significant scale with an archival base that is unstable and unpredictable is ephemeral and where false information might enter the mainstream in unpredictable ways. And that is particularly a problem for historians seeking to understand the phenomenon of fake news. But as I suspect that as in the past scholars will collectively devise strategies for approaching these problems. And you will know far better than I that digital historians, computer scientists and archivists are already working to collect, curate and process this data. Algorithms will be developed to detect the inherent characteristics of fake news. Although it's likely that the forgers will develop increasingly sophisticated means of remaining undetectives. We can look authentic now. This could have gone very, this slide could have gone very badly wrong had you all decided to do your Christmas shopping in Birmingham this afternoon. But imagine the potential just a decade from now. Artificial intelligence will increasingly replicate the human through training AI to imitate human behavioural patterns and apply them using big data. Let's take the theme project as an example. So that may be of use to journalists now, but this might also be one way in which historians of the future can probe veracity through programmes like that as they develop and advance potentially becoming part of our methodological toolkit for determining authenticity in the nature of the evidence. I mean that's the future, but what about now? This technology is actually really exciting to me now as a historian who works with the problem of fake news in the past. Now fake news, I don't like the term. I'm using it today as a bit of a catchall, but my research has really dealt with two forms of fake news now and in the past. Firstly, misinformation, deliberate misinformation campaigns on the one hand and then the natural human process of rumour transmission on the other. It's that latter one that I'm going to talk about mainly as my example today. And here the possibilities of historical enquiry are really opening up. Imagine that we could work, and you're going to tell me now that we already do, but imagine that we can work with this technology to use it to talk to historical data. We have access to historical rumours dating back centuries in my period in the Second World War. Governments were obsessed with collecting these things, a huge archival base. We could investigate short to medium term and long term movement of rumours. How do ideas travel in history? How fast? What have been the effects of technology on speed and scale? We can track the persistence fading and morthing of rumours over time. We can group rumours, formally identify patterns through technology, but also through AI patterns that we cannot see or recognise. In short, the technology might present a solution to a series of complex historical problems that at the moment we can't really tackle. Processing data of that scale in that way would take teams of scholars many years to interrogate, think of the language barriers, everything, all subject to human limitation. All of this then is potentially transformational byproduct for historical method that emerges from our society trying to tackle the problem of rumour and misinformation, but there is something problematic in the proposition in theme short film. There is an assumption here that rumour, transmission, that one aspect of fake news, is a pathological condition that those tools' real value is derived from their ability to seek out and expose rumour, to stop it in its tracks. Same approach in the Second World War, but that is of course important, but for the historian we maybe think differently about this. What if we imagine that rumour is more than that, that it's an inherently human behaviour that could play a central role in understanding popular belief systems, behaviours and dominant mentalities? What if fake news circulation could tell us something about our deeper hidden inner thoughts? Could historians turn fake news, rumour and misinformation that is shared and passed on into creative tool for understanding society in new ways? I've been working for a few years now on rumours circulating in Britain and the United States during the Second World War. I've been interested in what rumours were in circulation, how frequent they were, how they travelled and how governments sought to limit and control them. This was the key issue and I've come to agree with the historian of colonial India, Anand Yang, that a rumour is not idle talk, that it is not determined by the dynamics of small group interactions whereby the personal lives and activities become the subject of embellishment, a pastime commonly characterised as gossip. Where gossip may be socially and culturally important, rumour may be political, purposeful, a window onto prevailing fundamental mentalities and belief systems, an attempt by the disenfranchised to articulate their views and a mechanism for those views to enter the public sphere. Almost all scholars agree that rumours are generated by deep-seated psychological needs and while those needs are difficult to interpret, there is the promise of accessing them. As the sociologist Tamutsu Shibutani writing in 1966 argued, rumour is part and parcel of the efforts of people to come to terms with life, especially in uncertain and critical environments. Shibutani suggested that rumours assume particular importance when news becomes scarce or is considered unreliable at times of sustained collective tension where rumour functions as a mechanism for reasserting some degree of control where individuals are perceiving themselves to be powerless. If we accept that times of crisis undoubtedly create the circumstances where these factors surface uncertainty coming to terms with extraordinary circumstance, the paucity of news, individuals perceiving themselves to be powerless in the face of overwhelming events, does that sound familiar? That environment is ripe for the formation of rumour and it's subject to a complex dynamic. At times rumour sutures sometimes unconnected events together in an attempt at collective problem solving. We're trying to construe meaningful interpretation by pooling our intellectual resources. At other times it fragments and challenges those conceptions causing confusion and disorientation. Rumours are attempting to sate the desire for information. It becomes a platform for improvised news where official confirmation does not or cannot exist. Those spreading rumours that I've seen are undoubtedly doing so out of a deep psychological need, anxiety, hope and what often doing to fact check. So prevalent rumours in the Second World War centred on rationing, more often food or fuel, the death of leaders, Hitler is dead, Churchill is dead, they're missing their ill, invasion. Germans have landed near Warmer Castle making their way inland, bombing, where and when bombing will take place, what major facilities have been destroyed, internal rebellion, the rise of the fifth column, the overthrow of government. All of those rumours cluster around survival, basic human needs, fears, hopes for the present and the future. There were of course rumours that were rather more fantastic, that the British government was planning to stagger Christmas to cope with the demands of rationing. That German occupying forces were planning to melt down the Eiffel Tower for munitions or worse that they'd poisoned France's supply of champagne. That the Nazis had emptied the nation's zoos and planned to drop lions and bears into the English countryside and in response the British had discovered how to set the channel alight with flaming oil. If that were not enough, there was the suggestion that the British government had ordered 26 sharks from the Australian government for immediate delivery into the English channel and woe betide any German who tries to cross that stretch of water under those circumstances. But those were few and far between. More often than not, rumour functioned as a means of deeper emotional expression, particularly emotions such as fear, anxiety, despondency and despair that ran counter to expected behaviours in wartime and could not be directly articulated in public for fear of social ostracism or being accused of defeatism. The creation and transmission of rumour was a search for stability, certainty and explanations, a means of seeking out the truth for answers, seeking to take control of a situation by checking out stories that could not be or would not be verified by the authorities. Now that is a particularly important exercise and although the authorities saw rumour transmission as a pathological condition, it is not. It is an inherently human behaviour that needs to be understood. And that might serve as a better guide than the often superficial and polarised and most importantly socially sanctioned readings provided by public opinion sources. Evaluations of public opinions sometimes operate at the extremes, measuring high and low morale, high and low anxiety levels for or against, we speak of notions of success and failure when applied to propaganda campaigns, for example. And such propaganda or such public opinion sources may be governed by what an individual feels he or she is able to say in a public arena and that latter aspect may be conditioned on patriotic gesture, public performance or fear of social ostracism. We may not reveal our true views because we have to confess it to another person. We may do this via rumour, passing on a rumour at one remove and attributed to another person. That then means that this might offer a means for historians to probe human behaviours, motivations in new ways. It becomes a creative tool for reconstructing past mental maps and understanding how societies interpreted the world around them. What people are prepared to believe is perhaps just as historically significant as what actually happened. If that's true of the Second World War, might this also be true of our own times? When public opinion polls or indeed betting odds did not predict Brexit or the election of Donald Trump in the United States, although those polls were close, could we have taken our cue from widely circulated fake news or alternative information on social media? By seeking new sources, more able to understand our society and capture opinions that are difficult to admit, are we coming closer to an understanding of human behaviour? Let's take one example, Seth Steven Devidovic, his book Everybody Lies, who argues for the use of Google Trends, what information people search for hidden away in their own homes. He's saying that the power of Google Trends lies in the fact that people tell that giant search engine things that they may not reveal to anyone else. Do you type things into Google, for example, about medical symptoms you may be experiencing, but do not want to tell anyone for fear of being denounced as a hypochondriac, and then you probably immediately regret doing that? Have you ever typed into Google something that is something very personal? I'm lonely, my husband doesn't love me, my close friend doesn't respect me, my boss is harassing me. Have you ever shared a rumour that seeks to meet a psychological need or to calm a fear? I've heard there are job cuts, have you heard that too? The point I'm making here is that if rumour might be a way of accessing perhaps private mindsets, if Google Trends is a confessional, if Google is a confessional, if fake news might reveal more about society by capturing what we're prepared to believe, circulate and share, and if we can devise a method by which this might be used in historical scholarship, it's worth collecting and preserving as part of the human record, a record that's potentially more revealing than the records we already collect on popular views as a matter of course, such as poll data or newspaper opinion, which are different beasts altogether. My contention is that rumour, fake news, conspiracy is historically significant and is worth preserving, but how? The National Archives among others are pioneering new ways of archiving certain strands of Twitter and YouTube, but recognise the complexities of curating the entire online media landscape, the sheer scale of it, the fact that social media is often based around dynamic rather than static content, changing technologies and the challenge of preservation are difficult, and even the fact that as we've seen in recent research conducted by the BBC into fake news in India, Nigeria and Kenya, much is circulating offline in encrypted private spheres through WhatsApp, for example, they're not in the public domain. Decisions will need to be made about what constitutes misinformation, rumour, clickbait and categories and contexts assigned. Are we seeking to preserve only the most prevalent misinformation campaigns or all of them? How do we catch such evidence before it disappears? At least Henry I's charter remains for further scrutiny, whereas it's entirely possible that the threads of particular stories have long since vanished by the time their significance comes to light. If repositories collect fake news in their specific area of interest, how will collections be joined up so that data may speak across such divides? We're already seeing some of the challenges associated with uniting databases that emerge from research projects that often fall into obscurity after the project is complete and remains isolated from other data that, if brought together, might offer new historical problems for investigation. I wonder who holds the intellectual property of fake news, whether there might be a legal dimension to archiving and storage. These are not questions that I'm at all well placed to answer, but you are. I know that archives are grappling with all of these challenges. Of course, those solutions are going to have to be worked out at considerable speed if we are going to preserve our current record due to the pace of technological change, just as we work out how to archive today's dynamic content, will the platform move again? In my own work then, I've found studying rumour has disturbed and unsettled assumptions about public opinion that have characterised all of my previous work. I've started again. By mobilising history in conjunction with social psychology, anthropology and sociology, I've found, I think, greater insight into deeper mentalities than any of my previous sources or my previous work allowed. These more limited sources only captured surface opinion that what that which one human is prepared to share with another. But what if those sources are misleading or polarised? My interest as a historian of propaganda and psychological warfare concerns those deeper currents of the popular mindset for it's here that propaganda and psychological warfare seeds grows and takes hold. And this isn't simply a question of finding a method for historical study. If we pay more attention to that which we are so eager to dismiss as sheer bunkum or as the unthinking claims of a public that does not understand complexity, we might have a barometer of emergent and sometimes uncomfortable viewpoints that might be better to confront head-on and early-on rather than left fester to become a cause of discontent of individuals feeling unheard and powerless. For when those feelings do surface and they will, they can do so in unpredictable ways with profound consequences that can be difficult to roll back or to unravel. Thank you.