Update: The www.nphet.e domain now plays the intro to the Muppets Show.
Here at Gript we take out job of calling out, and countering, “fake news” seriously, and as part of that we have recently decided that we are going to begin occasionally highlighting stories in the Irish media which we feel are questionable or worth examination.
Our friends in the Irish Examiner were kind enough to recently gift us with a small story that fits nicely into the definition of “fake news”, and so we’re going to take it apart to show you the ways in which the story misleads the average reader. It’s important to note that we’re not saying anything in the story is factually incorrect, or even that the Examiner deliberately choose to mislead people, but rather that reading the story would cause the average reader to come away with a distorted view of the event in question.
The story, published yesterday and written by Aoife Moore, relates to a redirecting of web traffic to Fianna Fail’s (FF’s) website. Anyone who entered www.nphet.ie into their web browser was, for a period, redirected to the main page of FF’s website. Shortly after the Examiner published its report the link began to bring people to the website of the Irish Times, and it now, at the time of writing, brings you to a page that plays the intro to the Twilight Zone.
On a technical level what is happening here is that whoever owns the NPHET site, and the details of that person are not publicly available, is linking the NPHET sites to others, sending anyone attempting to access the NPHET site to another site of their choosing. It is an incredibly common thing to see online and would require basically no technical aptitude, or financial investment, to do.
The basic gist of the story is that the Examiner reached out to FF about it, and FF said they weren’t involved in it but that they were investigating how it had happened. Rather a small story, nothing of real importance to it. But the story itself is not what’s of interest to us; we’re interested in how the Examiner presented the story.
Let’s start with the most immediate failure of the story. The story says that “Fianna Fáil say that a previous redirect took users to the website of People Before Profit. The party denies any involvement and says it is working to have the redirect stopped” This is presumably correct, and FF did say that to the Examiner, but what the story does not mention is that the Internet Archive, a tool which archives websites, confirms that what FF is saying is true – the redirect had previously linked to the website of PBP.
The Examiner would have been able, with a trivial expenditure of effort, to confirm that this was the case – they either did not do so, or they did so and then made a choice not to include that information. The result is that a verifiably true explanation is now merely an unsubstantiated claim made by an interested party and so the story, due to either ineptitude or deliberate choice, does not inform readers that FF are perfectly correct in their claim. Following on from that it would appear, based on the history of the redirect, that FF are in no way involved with the redirect.
The headline of the Examiner story reads “Fianna Fáil investigating why website domain Nphet.ie redirects to ‘Join Fianna Fáil’ page.” Later on in the story Moore says that “Internet users who type www.NPHET.ie into their browsers are immediately redirected to the Fianna Fáil party website which advertises: ‘Join Fianna Fáil.'”
A member of the public, reading that, would likely rightfully assume that the NPHET domain was being redirected to a page specifically dedicated to getting people to join FF. But the redirect was not to the membership section of FF’s website, it was to the main page of FF’s website.
The Examiner appears to have done one of two things here when they decided to refer to the main page of FF’s website as the “‘Join Fianna Fáil’ page.” They may have seen that the header of the main page had a button on it to access the membership section and decided to quote that button as constituting the content of the page, ignoring the other half-dozen buttons.
Alternatively they may have seen that when you use a search engine to find the Fianna Fail website one of the lines of texts displayed says ‘Join Fianna Fáil’ and then decided that meant the main page of the website was titled ‘Join Fianna Fáil’. The issue with this is that the redirect brought you directly to FF’s website and so those directed to it would not actually have seen any text saying ‘Join Fianna Fáil’, bar the button on the top right, as it only appears in search engines.
The end result of this presentation, regardless of the Examiner’s intent, was that many readers of the story rightfully came away with the impression that FF was trying to mislead people, or pulling a stroke of some kind, and had been caught out.