Fake news: did it swing the US election?
In the run-up to the US election, said Deborah Ross in The Times, one story popped up again and again up in my Facebook feed. It was this 1998 quote from Donald Trump: “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe everything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.” The only trouble is, he never said it. It sounded so plausible that it never occurred to me – or to the hundreds of thousands of other Facebook users who “shared” it – that it might be false. Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, were busy disseminating their own “fake news” stories: that the Pope had endorsed Trump, for example; or that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson’s disease and was using a body double to hide it; or that she had sold weapons to Isis.
This isn’t just the usual rumour mill, said the FT. Fake news reports are “dressed up to look like genuine news articles, sometimes from news sources invented solely for that purpose”. Because they look real, people are quick to share them on social media – often without reading beyond the headline, let alone checking the facts. One false story, from the non-existent “Denver Guardian”, claimed an FBI agent suspected of leaking Clinton’s emails had been found dead in suspicious circumstances. It was shared up to 100 times a minute on Facebook. Indeed, analysis by Buzzfeed has found that, during the final three months of the campaign, the top 20 fake news stories generated more “engagement” on Facebook – measured in “shares”, reactions and comments – than the top 20 stories from real news outlets. All but three of these fake stories were pro-trump. Given that 44% of American adults say they get their news from Facebook, fake news may have swung the election.
The trouble is, there’s money in it, said Helen Lewis in the New Statesman. Google and Facebook – which between them control 64% of the digital advertising market – favour content that “optimises for engagement”: in other words, that people are likely to share. Enraging or scandalous political “reports” fit the model perfectly. And there’s cash to be made from producing it, too. Much of the pro-trump fake news was created by teenagers in Macedonia, as a way of harvesting online ad revenue. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has promised to do more to weed out fake news, but there’s a limit to how far the site can, and should, intervene. Plenty of conventional journalism bends the truth to make a point. Do we really want Facebook making decisions about what we’re allowed to read?