Fake News Will be With Us as Long as There is Social Media
If you’re worried about the spread of disinformation and “fake news,” blame social media. More specifically, blame Facebook.
According to political and social scientists, a sense of belonging – which is basically the reason social media exists – is what drives many people to spread misinformation. Social media makes it too easy to disseminate the bullshit people hear or make up themselves.
NewsWhip, a company that tracks and predicts the impact of news published on seven major social media platforms, tracked the top 10 publishers on Facebook in April and ranked them based on engagement – or how often people read and reposted news from the outlets. It found that five of the top 10 publishers are known for disseminating misinformation.
The number one culprit is a company called The Daily Wire, which saw nearly 75 million interactions on Facebook in April, more than twice any other publisher. The company posted nearly 1,400 articles on Facebook during the month.
“In terms of the stories that drove the engagement for the top publications, the Daily Wire was mostly driven by political narratives,” noted Benedict Nicholson of NewsWhip in the report. “Their top piece was on Charles Barkley saying that politicians divide people to keep their grasp on money and power, which received some 825k engagements.”
The Daily Wire bills itself as “one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment.”
A quick look at their web site shows that they don’t seem to do any original reporting, they just aggregate stuff from other outlets and employ selective editing.
But it’s not all “fake news,” according to NewsWhip. The second largest publisher in April was the British newspaper The Daily Mail, with nearly 43 million engagements. Their top stories in April were about the death of Prince Phillip.
Coming in third was everyone’s favorite “fake news” purveyor Fox News, who disseminated such gems as Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game out of Georgia because of their restrictive voting laws, U.S. embassies being allowed to fly the Gay Pride flag and the Supreme Court ruling against California’s restrictions on in-home religious gatherings. Fox saw more than 32 million engagements on Facebook in April, the company noted.
The largest purveyor of “fake news,” Facebook, doesn’t care. The more eyeballs they can get on their site, the more advertising revenue they can generate. They don’t care if what’s posted is true or not. As long as it generates green (as in dollars). It doesn’t have to be real, or true.
“When you post things, you’re highly aware of the feedback that you get, the social feedback in terms of likes and shares,” William J. Brady, a Yale University social psychologist, recently told The New York Times. “So when misinformation appeals to social impulses more than the truth does, it gets more attention online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it.”
Zeynep Tufekci, of the University of North Carolina, writing in the MIT Technology Review in 2018, put it more succinctly.
“Our cognitive universe isn’t an echo chamber, but our social one is. This is why the various projects for fact-checking claims in the news, while valuable, don’t convince people. Belonging is stronger than facts,” she noted.