Global Reach of Fake News
Initial forays into the world of fake news fall into the category of entertainment, satire, and parody. They are meant to amuse or to instruct the unwary. Canards and other news that fall into the category of misinfor- mation and misdirection, like the Martin Luther King website, often have more sinister and serious motives. In generations past, newspaper readers were warned that just because something was printed in the news- paper did not mean that it was true. In the twenty-first century, the same could be said about the internet. People of today create fake news for many of the same reasons that people of the past did. A number of new twists help to drive the creation and spread of fake news that did not exist until recently.
Twenty-first-century economic incentives have increased the motivation to supply the public with fake news. The internet is now funded by advertisers
rather than by the government. Advertisers are in business to get information about their products to as many people as possible. Advertisers will pay a website owner to allow their advertising to be shown, just as they might pay a newspaper publisher to print adver- tisements in the paper. How do advertisers decide in which websites to place their ads? Using computing power to collect the data, it is possible to count the number of visits and visitors to individual sites. Popu- lar websites attract large numbers of people who visit those sites, making them attractive to advertisers. The more people who are exposed to the products adver- tisers want to sell, the more sales are possible. The fee paid to the website owners by the advertisers rewards website owners for publishing popular information and provides an incentive to create more content that will attract more people to the site.
People are attracted to gossip, rumor, scandal, innuendo, and the unlikely. Access Hollywood on TV and the National Enquirer at the newsstand have used human nature to make their products popular. That popularity attracts advertisers. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Matthew A. Baum and David Lazer report “Another thing we know is that shocking claims stick in your memory. A long-standing body of research shows that people are more likely to attend to and later recall a sensational or negative headline, even if a fact checker flags it as suspect.”12
In the past several years, people have created web- sites that capitalize on those nonintellectual aspects of human nature. Advertisers are interested in how many people will potentially be exposed to their prod- ucts, rather than the truth or falsity of the content of the page on which the advertising appears. Unfor- tunately, sites with sensational headlines or sugges- tive content tend to be very popular, generating large numbers of visits to those sites and creating an adver- tising opportunity. Some advertisers will capitalize on this human propensity for sensation by paying writ- ers of popular content without regard for the actual content at the site. The website can report anything it likes, as long as it attracts a large number of people. This is how fake news is monetized, providing incen- tives for writers to concentrate on the sensational rather than the truthful.
The problem with most sensational information is that it is not always based on fact, or those facts are twisted in some way to make the story seem like something it is not. It is sometimes based on no infor- mation at all. For example:
Creators of fake news found that they could cap- ture so much interest that they could make money off fake news through automated advertising that rewards high traffic to their sites. A man running a string of fake news sites from the Los Angeles suburbs told NPR he made between $10,000 and $30,000 a month. A computer science student in
the former Soviet republic of Georgia told the New York Times that creating a new website and filling it with both real stories and fake news that flat- tered Trump was a “gold mine.”13
Technological advances have increased the spread of information and democratized its consumption globally. There are obvious benefits associated with instantaneous access to information. The dissemina- tion of information allows ideas to be shared and for- merly inaccessible regions to be connected. It makes choices available and provides a platform for many points of view.
However, in a largely unregulated medium, sup- ported and driven by advertising, the incentive for good is often outweighed by the incentive to make money, and this has a major impact on how the medium develops over time. Proliferation of fake news is one outcome. While the existence of fake news is not new, the speed at which it travels and the global reach of the technology that can spread it are unprec- edented. Fake news exists in the same context as real news on the internet. The problem seems to be distin- guishing between what is fake and what is real.