Fake news is PolitiFact ‘lie of the year’ for 2016
Ignoring the facts has long been a staple of political speech. Every day, politicians overstate some statistic, distort their opponents’ positions, or simply tell out-and-out whoppers. Surrogates and pundits spread the spin.
Then there’s fake news, the phenomenon that is now sweeping, well, the news. Fake news is madeup stuff, masterfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports that are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word.
In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse — promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters — gave rise to a
spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity.
Fake news: Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop.
Fake news: Democrats want to impose Islamic law in Florida.
Fake news: Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan chanted, “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back.”
None of those stories — and there are so many more like them — is remotely true.
Fake news found a willing enabler in Trump, who at times uttered outrageous falsehoods and legitimized made-up reports. Clinton emboldened her detractors and turned off undecideds with a lawyerly parsing of facts that left many feeling that she was lying. Her enemies ran wild.
Each year, PolitiFact awards a “Lie of the Year” to take stock of a misrepresentation that arguably beats all others in its impact or ridiculousness. In 2016: where to start? With such a deep backlash against being truthful in political speech, no one person (though there are world-class front-runners) and no one political claim perfectly stands out as the dust settles from an extraordinary campaign.
Because of its powerful symbolism in an election year filled with rampant and outrageous lying — PolitiFact is naming Fake News the 2016 “winner.”
What made 2016 different
Bad information has always lived online. Before fake news, there were electronic message boards where people shared conspiracy theories and emails instructing you to FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Before the computer, there were anonymous pamphlets and chain letters sent through the mail.
But in 2016, most viral lies spread on Facebook. They were reinforced by Google searches, in which stories from dubious sites jumped to the top of your screen based on traffic.
Bad actors would create fictitious web pages that people couldn’t resist sharing: claims that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump, or that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS, or that she helped fund ISIS. (None of those things is true.)
The popular website BuzzFeed analyzed the interest in these fake stories and found that they got more shares, reactions and comments during the final three months of the campaign than real stories from The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, for example.
Craig Silverman, a Torontobased journalist with a long track record of reporting on misinformation and media errors, headed up BuzzFeed’s analysis of fake news on Facebook during the 2016 election.
“Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anonymous messaging … these things have always been around and circulating,” said Silverman, now BuzzFeed’s media editor. “But Facebook is a game changer because of its size.”
With 1.79 billion people around the world using Facebook each month, Facebook dwarfs other online platforms. Hoping to encourage people to be better informed, Facebook after the 2012 election introduced new tools explicitly aimed at helping users read news and share stories. Ironically, Facebook’s technology and good intentions fueled the rise of fake news in 2016.
Creators of fake news found that they could capture so much interest that they could make money off fake news through automated advertising that rewards high traffic to their sites. A man running a string of fake news sites from the Los Angeles suburbs told NPR he made between $10,000 and $30,000 a month. A computer science student in the former Soviet republic of Georgia told The New York Times that creating a new website and filling it with both real stories and fake news that flattered Trump was a “gold mine.”
Tracking and checking
Fake news swims in the same electronic currents as everyday exaggerations, hard-charging opinion and political hyperbole. That makes it seem normal, even when it’s just crazy, made-up stories that develop under the radar before blowing up into viral memes.
Take, for example, the rumor that Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop. BuzzFeed reported that the rumor seemed to start from a Twitter account associated with white supremacy.
From there, users on the online forums 4chan and Reddit argued (perhaps facetiously) that evidence for the theory was to be found in Podesta’s stolen emails, which WikiLeaks had posted on the internet weeks before. Podesta’s repeated use of the word “pizza” in his email was a code word for pedophilia, they theorized, and Comet Ping Pong housed secret rooms to imprison children. Fake news sites, such as YourNewsWire.com, tapnews.com and USA Newsflash, turned the story into Facebook posts that earned roughly 100,000 interactions per post.
Other fake news had less convoluted origins. Paul Horner runs a string of websites, some looking deceptively like mainstream news organizations. He created a post that said protesters at Trump rallies were paid $3,500 to disrupt the rally as a dirty tricks plot. He told the Washington Post he knew it wasn’t true but wrote it as a parody that could make him money if people actually believed it. “I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off,” he said.
What happened next is classic: Trump himself repeated the claim about paid protesters at a rally.
In fact, all campaign long — and since the election — people of stature and education have repeated fake stories. Trump’s nominee for national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, repeated the false claim that Florida Democratic senators voted to impose Islamic Sharia law in the Sunshine State (Pants on Fire). Flynn’s son, who had a role on the transition team, repeated the Clinton “pizzagate” rumor.
So you can only blame the internet to a point.