Fake News: Overview

Introduction

"Fake news" has existed at least since the early nineteenth century. But as mainstream media becomes increasingly polarized in the twenty-first century, and as technology makes it easier than ever to set up a "news" site online, false stories are spreading faster and more widely than ever before. The popularity of social media also makes it easier than ever for fake news stories to take hold and "go viral" before anyone can verify whether they are true.

Awareness of fake news increased significantly during and after the 2016 US presidential election, with fake news articles proliferating across the internet. This phenomenon was linked to both foreign and domestic hoaxers operating particularly on social media, for monetary gain and political reasons. A similar surge was seen around the 2020 US presidential election and in the following years due to further advancements in content creation using more accessible artificial intelligence. But regardless of where it is coming from and why, the growth of fake news has a serious cultural impact. Authors, editors, and consumers all face significant challenges in trying to identify, manage, and stop the spread of fake news stories.

Understanding the Discussion

Biased news: A way of reporting on a factual news story that is designed to sway a reader toward a specific conclusion. This differs from fake news because the underlying facts are true but may be presented selectively or misleadingly to encourage the reader to think a particular way.

Click bait: A term used to describe articles, either real or fake, that have attention-grabbing headlines and intentionally inflammatory content, designed to entice readers to click on the article and share the content.

Confirmation bias: A tendency of people to seek out and trust sources that affirm a belief they already hold and to distrust sources that contradict their existing beliefs.

Deepfake: An image or video in which a person's features are manipulated through sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to create a convincing fictional representation.

Fake news: A work of fiction that is presented as a factual news story, often with the intent of deceiving the reader into believing it is factual and enticing them to share it. The term has also been used to undermine established media outlets by questioning the validity of real, factual news.

History

Fake news is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that has become increasingly problematic. In a 2017 article, economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow described how technology changes have influenced the type and quality of news available to the public. They explained that improvements to printing presses and inexpensive raw materials during the nineteenth century facilitated the production of more special interest publications. Allcott and Gentzkow further noted that the introduction of broadcasting in the twentieth century had a similar effect. These changes enabled the spread of more diverse viewpoints but also lowered the barrier to entry, which can potentially lower the quality of information being shared with the public. Late-twentieth-century examples include tabloid newspapers such as the National Enquirer or News of the World, which have long been accused of fabricating celebrities' affairs or substance use, pregnancy rumors, and even alien visitors, among other stories.

With the growth of the World Wide Web, the cost and other barriers to entry in the media realm lowered further. It has become easier than ever to publish and disseminate "news" stories of questionable—or even outright nonexistent—credibility and validity. These stories can easily be written and published from other countries, meaning that they are beyond US jurisdiction, and what may be illegal in the US may be legal elsewhere.

Several different criticisms exist for news sources. One is bias, for news sources that report on facts or events in a way that is designed to support an agenda. This is typically what is meant by a news source having a conservative bias or a liberal bias. But, importantly, a news source can be biased without being false—the underlying facts are still true but being presented in a way designed to lead the reader to a particular conclusion. By contrast, fake news is a piece of fiction that is presented as fact. Some fake news sites, such as the Onion or Clickhole , are intended as satire and make no claim to be factual, even though the humor is presented in the style of a news story. But other websites exist that produce "news" stories designed to look and feel like real news sources, even though the stories contain blatantly false information. They are written expressly to mislead readers into believing they are true and sharing them widely.

There are several theories about why fake news has become so popular. One is money: there is a lot of money to be made in advertising revenue from producing click-bait articles that attract many readers. The more views an article has, the more money it makes for its creators and publishers, who are often paid per view of the ads that appear alongside the article. For example, in a 2017 interview, Cameron Harris told the New York Times that he made as much as $1,000 an hour generating fake news stories about Hillary Clinton.

Another theory is that special interests—particularly those in politics and government—use fake news articles to influence the public's opinion in their favor. Because of confirmation bias, people tend to believe stories that confirm their existing world views and are easily led into sharing articles that they want to believe are true, without questioning the source of the information or its credibility. Both factors came into play during the long campaign season for the 2016 US presidential election, in which political interests sought to influence public opinion and found individuals both in the US and overseas who were willing to create fake news stories for the significant financial reward.

Unfortunately, many people are ill-equipped to assess whether these stories are true. In November 2016, Stanford University published a study conducted to explore how middle school, high school, and university students critique media sources and assess their credibility. They investigated several aspects of media awareness, including whether students could differentiate between a news article and an advertisement, evaluate photographs that claim to support a particular news story or piece of information, and identify potential biases in a reporting source. The study results showed that many students lack the media literacy necessary to evaluate whether a news source is credible and do not know how to determine this. For instance, more than 80 percent of middle schoolers surveyed could not correctly identify sponsored content as a form of advertising. Researchers found this particularly "dismaying" and "bleak" given that youth and young adults spend so much time on social media and obtain so much of their information online.

The ease with which fake news spreads can have immediate and severe consequences. For example, in December 2016, a man entered a Washington, DC, pizzeria with a semiautomatic rifle and a revolver, threatened an employee, and then fired the gun several times. After finally surrendering to police, the man explained his actions were motivated by online reports that the pizzeria was the cover operation for an international satanic organization supported by Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and was harboring child sex slaves. Investigations turned up no evidence to support the accusation, but even high-profile figures such as Michael Flynn Jr., son of the then–national security adviser to President Donald Trump, tweeted that the theory could be valid. "Pizzagate," as it became known, fed into a broader conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which grew considerably over the next several years.

Several reputable media outlets have undertaken investigations and uncovered a variety of fake news sources. Some are based in countries such as Russia and Macedonia; others come from within the United States. All seem to be lured in by the significant financial rewards, as well as the desire to demonstrate the ease with which one can manipulate both the general public and mainstream media to influence significant events.

In 2016 and 2017, "fake news" also became a popular accusation among Republican politicians and their supporters when a news outlet would report something unflattering, regardless of its truth. Some news sources fought back and stood behind their stories. For example, the Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction, Colorado, threatened to sue Republican state senator Ray Scott for defamation, after he used his Twitter account to accuse the paper of spreading "fake news" when it ran an opinion piece in February 2017 questioning why the senator postponed a hearing date and vote on a public records bill. Even more prominently, President Trump frequently claimed most mainstream media outlets were publishing fake news in an effort to discredit him, despite little supporting evidence. Established sources such as CNN created ad campaigns to counteract these accusations, striving to show factual evidence behind their reporting. Regardless of the outcome, accusations such as these can lead consumers to question the validity of formerly trusted news sources; unfortunately, however, accusations of fake news do not always lead consumers to distrust questionable sources.

Meanwhile, the technology used to generate fake news continued advancing rapidly as well. Artists and computer researchers have experimented with machine-learning algorithms to generate still images, audio, and video clips of people that do not exist or to mimic the movements or speech of real figures. As these "deepfake" technologies have improved, it has become increasingly difficult to verify whether a source is real or fake, as it has become easier than ever to generate "evidence" to support any claim dreamed up by fake news creators.

Three researchers affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral—sought to understand how false news spreads by analyzing rumor cascades on Twitter between 2006 and 2017. Their study of about 126,000 rumors spread by about 3 million people more than 4.5 million times, published in Science in March 2018, found that false news spreads faster and further than the truth. The top 1 percent of false news cascades spread to between 1000 and 100,000 people, while the truth rarely spread to more than 1,000 people. These effects were more pronounced for fake political news than fake news about financial information, natural disasters, science, terrorism, or urban legends. They also found that robots spread true and false news at the same rate, while humans are more likely to spread false news.

Fake News Today

Fake news was again a major concern around the 2020 US presidential election. Based on the experience of 2016, many experts warned that disinformation would be widespread, especially on social media. Social media companies announced special efforts to combat the spread of fake news, including warning tags on false content or even complete removal of certain posts. Notably, Trump and his supporters continued to both propagate falsehoods—such as claims that mail-in voting was fraudulent—and level accusations of fake news against legitimate media outlets. Many experts suggested Trump was attempting to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election in case he lost, and indeed, he refused to accept that outcome even as states certified the victory of Joe Biden. Fake news suggesting Trump had actually won or that the election would be overturned became a major problem, often merging with other outlandish conspiracy theories such as QAnon and driving some believers to threats or acts of violence.

The dangerous consequences underlying the issue of fake news became clear when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in January 2021, resulting in several deaths. Trump's own false statements were widely seen as contributing to the insurrection, and both Facebook and Twitter banned him from their platforms. One study suggested that online misinformation about the election subsequently dropped sharply, indicating the power of influential figures in spreading fake news.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, concerns over the increased impact of AI-generated fake news content, including everything from video to text, only grew as the software behind the technology became more available to a wider range of users. The initial release by the company OpenAI of its deep-learning, large language model chatbot, ChatGPT, in late 2022 led many to wonder if the software would make disinformation even more prevalent and harder to detect. While events such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022 led to fake news creations, the beginning of the presidential election cycle again drew some of the greatest attention to the issue. Reports indicated that members of the public, candidates' campaigns, and political parties were posting AI-generated or altered images and videos as well as even entirely fabricated articles meant to sway voters and spread propaganda; in some instances, entire websites were created that were meant to appear to host genuine news content, including, reportedly, by foreign states such as Russia. Because of this saturation of fake news aided by AI despite software companies' rules against such use, lawmakers at both the federal and state levels sought to impose regulations on the technology, with several states introducing and passing such legislation; these bills often included measures aimed specifically at the use of AI in political campaigning. At the same time, some people were working to develop detection software and educate the public on how best to recognize fake news content.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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