Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump. A leaked email showed Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS. And a legal revelation suggested that candidate Clinton was disqualified from holding federal office. Besides making headlines in 2016, what do these stories have in common?
They were all fake.
Fake news took the world by storm, driven by an election season that spawned a seemingly endless supply of politically tinged stories. To say that the internet played a role in distributing the false stories is an incomplete explanation of why fake news became so popular. Fake news found its greatest traction on social media, where people have a greater ability to determine what kind of information comes into their feeds. The connections of social media also allowed fake news to go viral as shares and likes spurred the spread of these stories to a wider base of readers. While election news from journalism organizations outpaced fake election stories on Facebook, as the election drew closer, fake content made up ground and eventually surpassed news content, according to an analysis from BuzzFeed News.
Social media sites and internet-based companies are now trying to fight back. Google is trying to undercut the profitability of fake news by barring fake news sites from using the company’s ad-selling software AdSense, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google already prohibits AdSense from being used on sites that support hate speech, or display pornography or violent content. But going forward, the company’s policies will also bar AdSense from being used on sites that display and spread false content.
Facebook is also getting on board with fighting fake news. After Google’s announcement, Facebook also said that it would prohibit fake news sites from using its ad network. Despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence that news on his company’s platform did not influence the election, a group of Facebook employees have formed a task force to tackle fake news, BuzzFeed News reported. Details are still being worked out but employees on this task force told BuzzFeed they plan to make a list of recommendations to Facebook management.
While making fake stories less profitable will help curb the spread of false information, it won’t stop fake news. For that, some are hoping software offers a solution. Facebook has released tools that allow users to flag questionable news stories as fake, which could make it slow their spread. But these tools are flawed, according to Mashable. They assume that people who have differing political points of view talk to each other on social media and are capable of spotting and reporting fake news. Also, readers are by their nature biased toward content that reflects views and values they already have. By design, Facebook’s algorithms feed users with the news and stories that a user is most likely to agree with and share, Mashable explains. And if a user doesn’t agree with something, he or she is likely to unfollow or block a user from that feed.
Fake news won’t go away. Undercutting the financial incentive to post fake news is a start. Software tools that identify and slow the spread of false stories is another piece of the puzzle. New tools can make the software approach even better. But for now, the most reliable way to fight fake news is decidedly low tech: a human needs to evaluate and make a decision that something is fake, and then spike it. Internet companies don’t want to take on the role of being an editor of news. But companies also need to weigh the impact that fake news appearing on their sites has on their credibility.
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