This is Part 1 of The Comms Pro’s Guide to Fake News. See Part 2 here.
What we call “fake news” today is nothing more than propaganda and disinformation. The idea that this election was in any way unique for its use of made-up stories is ridiculous. The only thing that is different today is the reach and speed at which fake news stories can be disseminated.
As far back as Thucydides, societies at war attempted to gain the upper hand by feeding false information to their enemies. More recently, at the turn of the last century, William Randolf Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used it to stoke readership in their respective journals. Long before you could track likes and clicks, Hearst learned that the more sensational the story, the more papers he sold. He calculated that if he could latch onto an issue that would provide a continuous stream of stories then he would sell more papers, and he’d beat his rival Pulitzer. His chosen cause: the Cuban revolt against Spain in 1895. To fill his pages with lurid stories of Spanish atrocities, he sent a steady stream of high-profile writers to Cuba (including my grandfather, Ralph Delahaye Paine).
When one of Hearst’s correspondents, the famed illustrator Frederic Remington, complained that things in Cuba were quiet. “There is no trouble here. There will be no war.” Hearst’s infamous—and possibly apocryphal—response was, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
Less than three weeks later the U.S. entered the war with Spain, which led to fighting in Cuba and the Philippines, and the death of nearly 10,000 Americans and as many as 200,000 in total. Such are the consequences of fake news.
The measurable impact that fake news had on last year’s elections is a matter of debate. NPR’s On the Media posited the notion that, now that we are aware of it, fake news has already lost its power to influence, But whatever it was, presumably our awareness of its existence will, we hope, reduce the actual death and destruction it will cause.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth. No matter whether it’s a news release that covers up the truth, or an outlandish story on Facebook, some percentage of the population will believe it because it aligns with what they want to believe. Psychologists call it confirmation bias. Or group bias. As a news junkie who used to get much of her news from Facebook, I will admit my guilt, in the early days of the campaign, in forwarding any number of stories that I wanted to be true, but never verified. Many I now realize were just as fake as the notion that the Pope would endorse Donald Trump. Admit it, you probably did some of the same.
Regardless of whether you call it fake news, disinformation, or propaganda, we need to exercise appropriate action to ensure that it has minimal impact on our civil societies. To that end, On the Media published a very handy “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook – the Fake News Edition.” That’s it, over to the right >>>.
To which we thought we’d add some additional warnings for communications professionals and researchers.
First, let’s divide the broad category of fake news into three buckets:
- Completely made up BS for link and “like bait.” These are the stories made up by kids in Moldova or business people in southern California without a specific political agenda. They’ve figured out that if they can write sufficiently sensational headlines, people will click on them, and advertisers will pay for the click. To combat what is essentially click bait and fraud, first, don’t click on any URL that sounds suspicious. Reread OTM’s rules 1-4. If you have an ad agency or a digital ad program, work with them to pressure Facebook and Google to remove these sites from search.
- Plausible enough stories that might be believed intended for propaganda and persuasion. These are the ones generated by paid trolls that have a specific political agenda.
- Unverified stories that someone is circulating for the purposes of his or her own agenda. There were a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum making up stuff during the election. But not all agendas were logical or sensible. Take the guy who just did it for fun and see the “hits light up.” The lesson here is, expect craziness, not logic.
3 Tips for Dealing with Fake News When Doing Measurement
So how best to not let fake news affect your communications measurement? Here are three tips to help prevent this stuff from harming your organization or your research.
- Establish a list of credible influential sources, ignore everything else. Monitoring companies for years have claimed bragging rights based on how many sources they capture, but most don’t matter. Probably 40% of the sites that the major monitoring firms pull into your news feed exist only for the purposes of click bait. Monitor only those news outlets that you know your stakeholders read and trust.
- If you don’t know what outlets those are, start with a survey of your stakeholders to find out where they get information. That’s where you want to be.
- Pay attention to individual authors, not just the publications. If you know there’s a writer who exercises significant influence on your industry, follow him or her wherever their content appears be in Snapchat, Instagram or The Wall Street Journal. If you don’t know, start with Traackr or Little Bird to identify who the influencers are in your network.
Good luck out there. It’s a dirty ugly world. ∞
This is Part 1 of The Comms Pro’s Guide to Fake News. See Part 2 here.
