False information plagued this election. In fact, false information swayed this election. There is no doubt that social media was full of some pretty nasty disinformation this year. This is a real problem for Democrats. We are the party of nuance and ideas. We are the ones fighting for free and open debate. In someone else’s words, “Disinformation is a scourge on our democracy.”
Don’t believe me? Let this sink in for a second.
And before you hit me with a false equivalency of both sides do it, read this. The false information was decidedly partisan. And not in our favor.
It is the ability to read, write and think critically. It is all those things that used to be taught in school before we decided that standardized tests were more important. And if anything has been made clear by the recent election season, it is that the proliferation of false and misleading media needs to be addressed.
Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media. Media literate youth and adults are better able to understand the complex messages we receive from television, radio, Internet, newspapers, magazines, books, billboards, video games, music, and all other forms of media.
Anybody catch Media Literacy Week, conveniently scheduled from October 31 to November 4 this year? Yeah. I didn’t either. I can’t imagine why it wasn’t discussed on the teevee. Oh, wait, yes I can.
To its credit, CNN published Here's how to outsmart fake news in your Facebook feed ten days after the election. Too little? maybe. Too late? definitely. This, after all is the network whose president admitted that running Trump rallies in their entirety was a “mistake”.
So let’s take a tour across the interwebs and discuss what the hell happened right under our noses and is being credited as a factor in our electoral loss. My suggestion is to read critically and to follow the links. Part of media literacy is reading as much as you can to form your own opinions. I would also suggest fighting the urge to feel either too guilty or too superior while reading this. Until you can prove that you have never unwittingly passed along a story that wasn’t completely true, you need to read this.
Facebook
Facebook is ground zero for fake news proliferation. While the Donald may prefer communicating 140 characters at a time, Facebook contains much richer information and allows for a more multimedia sharing experience. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversees a network that shares information at a dizzying pace every hour of every day.
Zuckerberg admitted that fake news on FB was a problem. Earlier, he strongly denied that it was a problem, saying “that the idea that Facebook influenced the elections in this way is “pretty crazy,” and that fake news “surely had no impact” on the outcome”. So, maybe it is an evolution. I’m willing to give Zuck a chance to decide it is a serious issue but I’m not holding my breath.
The Daily Dot put together a nice list of fake news sites. You will notice that there are some left leaning sites there too, or at least some purporting to be. Pay attention to what you share folks.
How A Story Goes Viral
The New York Times published a fascinating piece called How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study by Sapna Maheshwari. It follows a story, repeated by the Donald himself, that someone was busing protesters into Austin Texas the day after the election. The article follows one person’s tweet, and their inability or unwillingness to fact check, as it finds its way across the internet.
Eric Tucker saw some buses, did a quick google search for conferences and found none. So he put 2 and 2 together and inferred 5. The problem is that the tweet got past his 40 followers and into the larger Twittersphere. Once that happens, there is no turning back.
Mr. Tucker's post was shared at least 16,000 times on Twitter and more than 350,000 times on Facebook. The problem is that Mr. Tucker got it wrong.
We are still waiting for the Donald to admit that he is guilty of pushing false information. Anyone who thinks it is coming is foolish at best. Very unfair, indeed.
The Intentionally Fake
Mistakes happen, to be sure. The world is full of fallible people who are often leading busy lives. A much bigger problem is people who are making a profit from publishing and pushing fake news. Maybe you’ve heard the stories of foreign teens trolling the internet. Maybe you’ve heard of the guy who got paid to post fake stories but really doesn’t like Trump and can’t believe he helped swing the election.
Buzzfeed bring us the story of the Macedonians who created more than 100 pro Trump fake news sites. (I am just now getting comfortable trusting Buzzfeed as a source but the writing seems good people seem to trust it.) The reason people created these sites? Hint: click rates.
Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.
There is no ideology at work here. These kids, largely, acknowledge that they don’t give a damn about Trump. They are working piecemeal one click at a time. As any freelancer will tell you, it is all about eyeballs baby.
Okay lefties, I’ll throw you one bone here but don’t let it go to your head. Trump coverage is much more popular than anything else in the faked news world. Don’t let it go to your heads.
Earlier in the year, some in Veles experimented with left-leaning or pro–Bernie Sanders content, but nothing performed as well on Facebook as Trump content.
“People in America prefer to read news about Trump,” said a Macedonian 16-year-old who operates BVANews.com.
BuzzFeed News’ research also found that the most successful stories from these sites were nearly all false or misleading.
How f*ckin dumb are we?
And that is a real problem. Because we live in a world where the sensationalistic sells and the delivery system is lightning fast.
To use an analogy, we have made media crack. It’s more powerful, more addictive and cheaper to produce.
In fact, the Facebook world “engaged” (read, liked or shared) more of the fake news than the real stuff between August and the election in November.
Let that sink in for a second. More lies than truth affected the world in the final stages of the 2016 election. Yes, the Trump election came during the most uninformed period in Facebook’s no good, very bad year.
And, before you get too superior here in the bubble. Buzzfeed also published an article from a person who claims to have been making viral fake news stories for months. He claims credit for a faked PPP memo claiming that polls predicted a lead for Trump in Florida as opposed to Clinton, who the polls actually showed leading. Sadly, the faked map looks a lot more like the electoral map than the poll did.
One of my proudest moments with the memo was a Daily Kos article written by the site’s founder Markos Moulitsas himself, asking whether the faked memo was a pathetic right-wing attempt at propaganda or a brilliant left-wing forgery. I couldn’t break character to tell him it was the latter—but I was proud to see the online poll asking that question was close to 50-50.
So, yeah, kos caught on that this was probably a troll and nearly half of us suspected it was fake. Sadly, we still live in TrumpLandia™. But I digress.
We’ve Addressed Supply, What About Demand?
New Republic published an excellent article, also on November 18. Fake News Isn’t the Problem argues that the biggest issue is the fact that so many are willing to believe what they see. Jeet Heer says that the biggest consumer group for the fake news was Republicans looking for any reason to justify a Trump vote.
But it’s not the supply of “fake news” that is the problem. As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote on Twitter after the BuzzFeed data came out, “I think we should talk about the demand side. Where was it coming from? Why did it surge late? Perhaps as election day neared a lot of people who had figured they would vote for Trump asked themselves: am I REALLY going to do this?”
At the end of the day, the problem isn’t media illiteracy or fake news makers. The problem lies with the people who consume and, in this age of social media, signal boost the bullshit. Those who pass along anything short of acknowledged satire are making the problem. Those who consume and regurgitate that fake information are the problem.
The question is, how do we address that?
Michael Casey and Oliver Luckett at the Daily Beast have an idea. Here’s How to Fix Facebook’s Fake News considers the costs of censorship as the solution and suggests that the problem is incentive structures and economic models built into the very software that keeps the lights on.
This is no accident; this is a business model. Algorithmic curating allows social media platforms to deliver clearly defined, niche markets—Facebook’s ad marketers call them “look-alike audiences”—to advertisers who pay a “boost” fee to gain prominent placement with those targeted feeds.
This is especially appealing to political propagandists, that special breed of “advertiser.” They can use this system to tap bands of enthusiastic supporters who will, at no charge, dutifully “like” and “share” posts that appeal to their worldviews, regardless how truthful they are.
Facebook’s echo chambers are an incredibly cost-effective means of propagating disinformation.
Yes it is a systemic issue. Sure the answer seems at once too simple and too difficult. Yet the answer is right there in front of our faces. One of the biggest problems with this spread of disinformation is the suggested posts and advertisements. Twitter is a completely user generated feed. There is no algorithm deciding what you see. Of course that doesn’t absolve Twitter, it has its part to answer for, but it seems to be drawing much less criticism than Facebook.
By shifting the path of least resistance for information, they could change the flow dynamics of the social organism, creating a more organic process of network growth—a fairer system, in other words.
Models like these don’t rely on a censor-in-chief to decide on the truthfulness of every message but instead objectively assess how those messages are distributed and then prices the user’s access accordingly.
This focus on distribution is important because it centers on the core aspect of what makes social media such a profound departure from traditional media—why it is, in our mind, the most dramatic change in mass communication since Gutenberg’s Bible.
Oh, by the way, those advertisements you see on this page at this very minute? Ignore them. Pure click bait. Just a little hat tip from me to you.
