“We have a psychopathic former reality-TV host as the leader of the most powerful nation in the West. The trolls have verily won.”
They said the internet would bring us all closer together, but has it actually pushed us further apart? Shaun Prescott investigates.
American News, otherwise known as ‘The Patriot Review’, is a Facebook page with nearly 5.5 million followers. With its heavily conservative bent, it shares stories with headlines such as ‘Michelle Obama Picks A Fight With Melania Trump, Learns Instantly That Was A Huge Mistake’ and ‘Innocent Father To 4 Dies Because Of Reckless Anti-Trump Protesters Blocking The Road’. These stories are sensational in the good ol’ British tabloid tradition, but they’re also, largely, patently untrue.
Pages like these are starting to present a problem for Facebook. Since the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the US election last month, critics have warned that the company should take responsibility for the false news that proliferates on the platform. While the company denies that it could possibly have influenced the outcome of the election, it doesn’t take much scratching around to find huge nests of deliberately falsified viral news (or if we’re going to be honest, propaganda), with astonishingly huge audiences.
Zuckerberg hasn’t taken the responsibility on just yet, though ‘fake news’ has joined ‘illegal content’ as material that Facebook’s advertising will no longer appear on. In terms of banishing this kind of material altogether, he pointed to stats showing that the number of offending pages are low (because of course they are — compared to the millions of total Facebook pages).
Meanwhile, the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what its users see, while still mostly shrouded in secrecy, is based on engagement. In other words, if a story is very popular among the people you’re friends with, you’re more likely to see it. In this way, users are increasingly subjected to an echo chamber of competing sites, all vying for your attention in the most heavyhanded ways possible — and more often than not, they’ll pander to your pre-existing views. That’s an especially toxic combination when that algorithm is inadvertently determining the sentiments of American voters — especially those liable to swing.
According to a Buzzfeed report, some Facebook employees are upset about the proliferation of ‘fake news’ and are trying to deal with it in an internal “renegade” taskforce. Meanwhile, Google has announced it will ban “fake” news sites from receiving ad revenue from its advertising services. Another Buzzfeed analysis claims that “fake news” had more virality during the campaign period than any traditional (i.e. legitimate) news source. If these sites really are as influential as they appear to be, then the damage has already been done: we have a psychopathic former reality-TV host as the leader of the most powerful nation in the West. The trolls have verily won.
And Trump is one of them: independent fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have confirmed he told hundreds of lies and half-truths during the election campaign, which, when combined with his seeming obliviousness to any of the finer-details of running a country, is likely to be a volatile mix. Trump knows that gestures and pandering and, importantly, appealing to those disenchanted with “the establishment” (which the New York billionaire claims to not belong to) are more important than anything as trifling as detail. It’s fitting that Oxford Dictionaries has declared that ‘post-truth’ is the 2016 international word of the year.