Election Day. Facebook. This is not a good combination when it comes to supporting that little slice of the multiverse we know as “reality.”
Politicians have always played fast and loose with the truth, cable news networks have always gotten stories wrong, and the internet has always been a place for conspiracy theories and misleading stories and photos.
But the 2016 campaign has seen an unprecedented increase in the sheer number of false news stories being shared on Facebook or posted to genuine-looking but entirely fake news sites run by tech-savvy young people looking to make some money off this long and bitter election.
When a story runs on Daily Kos, you might notice that it tends to have this little thing called sources. Sources that almost certainly do not feature stories on the latest machinations of the lizard men. Links that actually go somewhere. But the Facebook page of your Uncle Rico or zany Cousin Flo? Those stories … are not so real. Neither are their sources.
Take the Denver Guardian, which earlier this month ran a story with the attention-grabbing headline “FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE.” The article ricocheted across Facebook and gained tens of thousands of shares despite the fact that there is no such thing as the “Denver Guardian” and that the “story” in question is a complete fabrication.
All of this would be easier if fake news didn’t have an alternate spelling. Fox News is out there today pushing stories of voter fraud.
Austyn Crites, a Republican protester who was assaulted at a Trump rally in Nevada, was stunned to see a TV report associating him with fraudulent voting connected to a grandmother Fox News claimed died in 2002.
She was alive and well, although somewhat baffled that she was having to prove her identity to correct a TV broadcast that reported that she died 14 years ago.
In the last cycle it was pushing a theme of voter intimidation.
In November 2012, Fox News aired a video clip showing a member of the Black Panthers standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia. It was a single person at a single polling station in a heavily black, heavily Democratic area, but Fox anchors strongly suggested that it was part of a broader pattern of voter intimidation by militants determined to stop then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney. The segment was rebroadcast frequently throughout the day.
You can bet that the not-dead status of Crites’ grandmother won’t stop that story from appearing on Fox for hours, or days, to come. Because Fox and facts simply don’t mix.
Non-factiness has proven so profitable for Fox that it has generated a whole legion of sites that go all-in on the fake—sites which provide fodder that launched a billion Facebook shares.
… a website called ConservativeState posted an article with the headline “Hillary Clinton In 2013: ‘I Would Like to See People Like Donald Trump Run for Office; They’re Honest and Can’t Be Bought.’”
The story was a complete fabrication, but it immediately went viral, racking up more than 480,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook in less than a week.
That completely fake story drew many times as many views and shares as did legitimate stories about the election. With the alt-right already claiming that the media can’t be trusted, it’s easy for them to treat an invented story on a freshly minted site as having more credibility than a well-researched piece in the Washington Post. It’s not just frustrating, it’s genuinely dangerous.
In the last couple of weeks, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets have exposed millions of Americans to false stories asserting that: the Clinton campaign’s pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote a secret memo detailing plans to “salvage” Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by launching a radiological attack to halt voting (merrily shared on Twitter by Roger Stone, an informal adviser to the Trump campaign); the Clinton campaign senior strategist John Podesta practiced an occult ritual involving various bodily fluids; Mrs. Clinton is paying public pollsters to skew results (shared on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr.); there is a trail of supposedly suspicious deaths of myriad Clinton foes (which The Times’s Frank Bruni heard repeated in a hotel lobby in Ohio).
We may be—and often are—dissatisfied with the print media. With rare exceptions (God bless you, Mr. Fahrenthold) reporting in this election cycle has mainly consisted of reaction, of printing statements and speeches as quickly as they flew, and of failing to do the more serious work required to get beyond superficial analysis. The press has also proven to be, as always, easily led toward the most colorful, ridiculous story of the moment while allowing serious issues to die in the wings.
The American press is badly, badly flawed and in need of serious improvement. Unfortunately, what it’s getting is the other thing.
That contraction in the reporting corps, combined with the success of disinformation this year, is making for some sleepless nights for those in Washington who will have to govern in this bifurcated, real-news-fake-news environment.
“It’s the biggest crisis facing our democracy, the failing business model of real journalism,” Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri and a longtime critic of fake news, told me on Saturday.
Newspapers aren’t growing. Even in this circus season, heavy staff cuts are an almost universal experience.
It does not augur well for the future. Martin Baron, the Washington Post executive editor, said when we spoke last week, “If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?”
We’re at that point already. But what happens when there aren’t any basic facts to find, just oceans of fabrication? What’s to stop another Trump from riding into office on a tidal wave of purpose-built propaganda?