A CAMPAIGN OF INNUENDO, RUMOUR AND FAKE NEWS
Fabricated posts shared more than true ones
The news story looked at first glance like it had come straight from one of America’s most established and trusted news sources — ABC-TV — and it was an eyeopener.
A man claimed Hillary Clinton’s team paid him US$3,500 to pretend to be a protester at a Donald Trump rally, simultaneously calling into question the sincerity of anti-Trump demonstrators and Clinton’s ethics.
Eric Trump, the candidate’s son, soon tweeted a link to it — “Finally the truth comes out,” he commented — as did his father’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, who called the practice “deplorable.”
The problem? The story was undiluted fiction, the product not of ABC News, but of AbcNews. com. co, whose suffix is usually associated with Colombia — and whose creator uses his own name as a character in his mock articles.
The item was part of a burgeoning phenomenon in U.S. politics: partly or mostly made-up “news” items casting one presidential candidate or the other in a negative light, and — thanks to the immense power of Facebook and other social media — seen by millions of Americans.
If cable-news channels like Fox News and MSNBC revived an era of overtly partisan political coverage, producers of so-called fake news have taken the trend to a new and distorted level, largely dispensing with facts in their zeal to generate money-making clicks and/or promote one political side.
“It’s really disconcerting the scale that misinformation can achieve relatively quickly and with relatively little effort,” Craig Silverman, Canadian chief of the Buzzfeed website, said. “It’s driving divisions between people … It has made it very difficult for the public square to have some reasonable debate.”
Silverman spearheaded a study recently of “hyper-partisan” Facebook pages, finding that during a two-week period, 38 per cent of news material on three right-wing pages and 19 per cent on leftleaning ones were partly or mostly false.
Just as troubling, Buzzfeed concluded the fabricated posts were shared by readers far more than the legitimate ones, or stories on mainstream news sites.
While such material resided largely on the fringes of political debate in the past, it is now seeping into the mainstream.
This week, Sean Hannity, the influential Fox News commentator and Trump backer, aired a story suggesting Michelle Obama had erased all her pro- Clinton tweets in the wake of the renewed FBI email probe. It was a fake, easily disproven simply by examining Obama’s Twitter feed. Han- nity later apologized.
On the left, popular partisan news operations have posted pieces suggesting Russian hackers manipulated online polls to make it appear Trump won the first debate.
Rumour and innuendo have always been a shadowy part of elections, in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Gossips even suggested that Thomas Jefferson, a crusader for religious freedom, planned to confiscate Americans’ bibles, said Paul Brewer, research director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication.
But fake stories dress up such insinuation as news and the Internet provides a delivery system of unprecedented efficiency and reach.
More specifically, Facebook is the “game-changer,” a site used by 1.7 billion humans where “friends” trade information with each other — including news stories, Silverman said.
“These messages don’t just reinforce what some people believe, but they’re also socially validated by actual (Facebook) friends … and that gives them added credibility.”
And the deepening red ink of mainstream news organizations has shrunk the number of journalists, leaving fewer people to counter or correct false news, Brooke Binkowski, Snopes. com’s managing editor, said.
“Proliferation of fake news is a direct result of the fact that newsrooms have been cut dramatically,” she said.
Yet that proliferation seems to have varying sources and motivations.
Some sites and pages are designed wholly to hoax, mislead or satirize.
Paul Horner, the man behind the AbcNews.com.co site and others designed to look like those of established news operations, declined an interview request but linked to articles suggesting he was a “satirist.”
Many of his articles would seem to lack a key ingredient of satire — humour — and are often picked up and disseminated as real news.
When such articles go viral, they can be lucrative.
The operator of one site — Make America Great — that propagates dubious pro-Trump news told The New York Times he earns about US$20,000 a month from it.
That site is part of another group of online news entities often described as “hyperpartisan” and the subject of the Buzzfeed study.
Their reach is staggering. The three left-wing Facebook pages examined had between 1.2 million and 4.1 million fans; the rightist ones, 623,000 to 3.3 million.
For both, less truth meant more audience. Right Wing News, for instance, had an average of 91 shares for its generally true posts and 568 for partly or totally false ones, according to Buzzfeed’s analysis.
Silverman said he discovered that a small town in Macedonia has 100 dubious news sites pumping out mostly pro-Trump material. Four of its top five stories recently — with a combined million Facebook shares and likes — were false, Silverman said.