The Invasive Species, Fake News

Perhaps you didn't hear before the election that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump. Or maybe you were not one of the million Facebook "shares" who learned that Hillary Clinton had secretly sold weapons to
ISIS. You know, the same Hillary Clinton who together with her campaign chief runs a child sex ring out of a D.C. pizza parlor.

These headlines — and a torrent of other stories spread across the Internet and through social media — were fake, of course, but they went unchallenged by Americans who accepted them as true and passed them on to friends. An analysis by Buzzfeed News found that the top 20 fake news stories had wider dissemination on Facebook — shares, likes and comments — than the top 20 real news reports. All but three favored Trump.

We have entered upon the "post-truth" era — it's the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year — when the truth is whatever one prefers to believe.

The news was once channeled through newspapers and the few broadcast television networks where staffs as a matter of pride checked their stories in an effort to get the facts straight. That became archaic when the Internet and social media sprung up to give ordinary citizens a voice and a license to say and write whatever they please, including fabricating phony stories at will. The public is left to figure out for themselves whether what they read or hear makes any sense. But why bother? If you like what you read, take it as fact. A large percentage of the public is prone to believe the preposterous because it's what they want to think is true. Silly stories (“This Is Huuge! International Arrest Warrant Issued By Putin For George Soros!” ) are taken as real and passed around by the conspiracy-minded. A reporter for Time magazine illustrated the phenomenon. About a fellow he encountered in Greenville, N.C., he wrote...

Allan Thiel likes to stay informed. That’s how he knows that President Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim who cheated his way into the presidency in order to promote a globalist "utopia"… He waits on the floor of the convention center for Donald Trump to take the stage, holding up his phone so others can see the latest headline he had just read: “Obama Announces Plans for a Third Term Presidential Run.”

The Buzzfeed investigation (a praiseworthy example of Internet-based news lapping traditional media) found a nest of over 100 websites in the unlikeliest of places, a town of 45,000 in Macedonia, once part of Yugoslavia, where hustlers as young as teenagers had set up to make money by putting out fake stories on the Internet. One teen tracked down by The New York Times at first tried stories praising Hillary Clinton but they attracted little interest. He switched to fake stories aligned with Trump and saw his revenue soar. Americans fell for his post that "the Mexican government announced they will close their borders to Americans in the event that Donald Trump is elected President of the United States”. It was the third most-trafficked fake on Facebook from May to July, said Buzzfeed's data.

So we have the sorry spectacle of Trump supporters taken in by a cluster of teenagers in Macedonia, and another in Tbilisi, Georgia, feeding fake stories for them to amplify in their Facebook posts and Twitter re-tweets.

Donald Trump himself shows a readiness to believe in conspiracies. He famously created one of his own, claiming for five years that President Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to become president. There was of course no proof, but he developed a huge following among those who had no need for proof, wanting instead to believe the lie.

Two weeks after the election, with Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote soaring past two million, Trump tweeted "I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions who voted illegally". This was in keeping with his destructive remarks during the campaign that elections in the United States are "rigged". Dana Milbank at The Washington Post traced Trump's inspiration to the entirely imaginary concoctions of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who two weeks before had published on his website, “Report: Three Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by Illegal Aliens; Trump may have won popular vote”.

That Trump chose to believe this fantasy tells us something disturbing about the man about to become our president. Milbank listed several of Jones' craven ravings that Right Wing Watch, a website of People for the American Way, had collected from Jones' website, which is named Infowars:

Jones has alleged that the U.S. government was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks…the Oklahoma City bombings and mass shootings such as Sandy Hook. Jones has said that “chemtrails” from airplanes spread a “weaponized flu,” that juice boxes are part of a chemical-warfare operation to make children gay, that Justin Bieber is brainwashing children to create an American police state, that Obama murdered publisher Andrew Breitbart, that an “alien force not of this world” is targeting Trump, that intergalactic shape-shifting reptilian humanoids secretly control the world".

And, of course, that the Clintons had their White House deputy counsel, Vince Foster, murdered 23 years ago. Trump has gone for that one, too, calling the circumstances of his suicide "very fishy". “I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder,” he has said.

Trump has been on Jones' radio show and apparently views him as something of a seer. His pronouncements echo what Jones has alleged — that climate change is a hoax, "that Antonin Scalia was murdered, that Clinton used drugs before a debate, that 'globalists' [a codeword for prominent Jews] are trying to take over America, that vaccines cause autism and that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination". Jones says he advises Trump, who called Jones after the election to thank him for his support, and boasts that Trump repeats his fictions 'word for word'”, Milbank reports.

Few fake news websites would exist were it not for Google, which automatically places ads on sites that sign up to receive them. Site
A search for "fake news" in Google Images yields
a surprising number branding Facebook, such as
this one, as well as photos of its CEO Mark
Zuckerberg
owners are paid by Google when viewers click-through to the advertisers' sites. Payoff from attention on Facebook is only one step removed. Users posting links to fake stories drive traffic to those sites where those Google-placed ads await.

It is Facebook by far that is the major conduit for fake news. The company now counts a quarter of planet Earth's population as members; its influence cannot be minimized. In June we ran this story reporting a Pew Research study that found that 63% of Americans consider Facebook and Twitter to be news services, and about 44% of Americans get at least some of their news there.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg disputes that: "I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way. I think it's a pretty crazy idea". He and others in Silicon Valley industries say they are agnostic, neutral platforms that shouldn’t be expected to police what members post. Facebook's role isn't to be "arbiters of the truth", says Zuckerberg. The company's position is that it can’t be held accountable for the material shared on its site because it is not a news organization. “We are a tech company, not a media company”.

In response, traditional media isn't buying Zuckerberg's plea of innocence. Unsurprisingly, they are not charitable about a company that has threatened their very existence. Neither is President Obama, who denounced the proliferation of fake news on Facebook and other services. Critics could point to late 2015 when "Mr. Zuckerberg decided to let posts from Donald Trump remain on the site even though they violated Facebook's policy against hate speech, leading some employees to threaten to quit", The Wall Street Journal reported.

For having done nothing to stem the flow of fake news stories favorable to Trump to permeated its network, Facebook is accused of affecting the election’s outcome.

Zuckerberg has since gotten the message, but the worry is that Facebook and its peers, who circulate news but do not want to be viewed as media, have every financial incentive to accommodate fake news stories that attract eyeballs and the advertisers anxious to be seen by them. Zuckerberg says his company will cease placing its advertisers' promotions on fake news websites. Google, too, said it would act against purveyors of fake news by no longer allowing them to sign up for Google's automatic ad placement on their sites. The moves would deprive the rogue sites from making the money that is the reason most pursue their squalid campaigns of disinformation.

That's a start but it is not enough. It does nothing to prevent fake news sites from posting material and seeking funding elsewhere — from shadow political operatives, say, who find value in agitprop to arouse the public, no matter that it spreads lies. Having drawn off so much of the advertising revenue that supports the actual news gathering and reporting media, Facebook in particular needs to take responsibility for promulgating the corruption of journalism. When Zuckerberg says Facebook is not a media company, he is dead wrong. Not only does Facebook troll through some 1,000 sites to select news articles, not only does it tailor those selections to readers' preferences deciding what to offer them, but it serves as a conduit for the exchange of news items that members post on others' pages — others who relay them in turn to further friends. Social networks are where conspiracy theories thrive best. Facebook's fundamental responsibility is to expunge inauthentic sites from its daily rounds of news pick-ups.

There is also the question of what could be done to brand fake stories as they are spotted rocketing about the Internet, before they win widespread acceptance. Could not Facebook and other sites step in to affix a symbol, an icon, a seal of disapproval in the margin branding a story as fake (or suspect, or satire), somewhat mimicking the practice at Wikipedia of notations in articles saying that greater verification is needed? This is not to suggest that Facebook become the supreme arbiter of the news — Zuckerberg's concern. It is to pressure them to take responsibility for at least tagging clearly false items as such, so that all instances on Facebook pages bear this mark of shame, like Hester Prynne's scarlet letter.