The 5-Minute Fix from The Washington Post

Keeping up with politics is easy now

By Amber Phillips

Donald Trump is dead. Hillary Clinton will be indicted. President Obama is thinking of fleeing the country of Trump wins. All these things are false, and yet they are some of the thousands of headlines that went viral during a presidential campaign already sorely lacking a grounding in facts.

The most quintessential example of the both scourge and popularity of fake news came the day after the election, when The Fix's Philip Bump found the top Google search result for “final election results” linked to a site declaring Trump won the popular vote by 700,000 votes. (Trump is currently losing it by 1.7 million votes and counting.)

Screen Shot 2016-11-14 at 10.01.27 AM

Just because the campaign is over doesn't mean fake news is. As long as people click on it, there's money to make off it, which means your Facebook feed will likely continue to fill up with it. (More on social media's role on all this below.)

So let's take a real hard look at the growing phenomenon of fake news.

How fake news is manufactured

LibertyWritersNews founders Paris Wade, left, and Ben Goldman, right, tap away at their apartment in Long Beach, CA. (Stuart Palley for The Washington Post)

The Post's Terrence McCoy hung out with the two-person team of the pro-Trump LibertyWritersNews.com, one of dozens of partisan sites that has gotten tens of millions of views (and an untold number of advertising dollars) by basically screaming innuendos, rumor and their own opinions to an audience hungry for it. Here's an excerpt from McCoy's excellent, must-read-in-full piece about how they do their work and get their "hits," as we say in the business:

Fewer than 2,000 readers are on his website when Paris Wade, 26, awakens from a nap, reaches for his laptop and thinks he needs to, as he puts it, “feed” his audience. “Man, no one is covering this TPP thing,” he says after seeing an article suggesting that President Obama wants to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership before he leaves office. Wade, a modern-day digital opportunist, sees an opportunity. He begins typing a story.

“CAN’T TRUST OBAMA,” he writes as the headline, then pauses. His audience hates Obama and loves President-elect Donald Trump, and he wants to capture that disgust and cast it as a drama between good and evil. He resumes typing: “Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back… .”

Ten minutes and nearly 200 words later, he is done with a story that is all opinion, innuendo and rumor. He types at the bottom, “Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country,” publishes the story to his website, LibertyWritersNews.com, and then pulls up the Facebook page he uses to promote the site, which in six months has collected 805,000 followers and brought in tens of millions of page views. “WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!” Then he looks at a nearby monitor that shows the site’s analytics, and watches as the readers pour in.

No, YOU'RE the fake news

It feels like what's real and what's fake can be difficult to discern these days, since the very same platforms that disseminate real news also disseminate fake news. We even have a video guide on how to spot fake news before sharing it on Facebook:

Click to watch video

Some ideologically driven publications are seizing on that confusion to muddy the waters in a way that benefits their cause, writes The Fix's Callum Borchers.

Exhibit A is the conservative Daily Caller, which wrote Friday: "Donald Trump has never called for a 'Muslim registry,' and any story claiming otherwise should be relegated to the pile of 'fake news' the media is so concerned about right now."

The first point (Trump's specific call for a Muslim registry) is debatable. The second is not. Borchers says pointing a finger and declaring "fake!" at anyone with a different view risks undermining real news: "Even if you subscribe to the notion that biased journalists are always looking for a chance to jump on Trump and always assume the worst about him, treating the incoming president unfairly is still not the same thing as making stuff up."

What's the social media's role in all this?

(REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)

Social media and web companies have long said they can't control the news content that comes across their sites; to do so would violate their free-speech principles.Which is why it was surprising after the election to hear Facebook is joining Google to cut off online ads to these sites.

Critics say that's not enough. Built into Facebook and Google is a self-perpetuating circle that catapults sensational (and sometimes sensationally fake) stories into popularity. A team of Washington Post's business reporters recently explained how any popular story catches like wildfire:

When Facebook detects that more people than usual are clicking on any given story, the company’s software algorithms instantaneously spread and promote that story to many other users in the network — enabling articles to “go viral” in a short period of time and making it harder to catch false news before it spreads widely.

But where do we draw the line on drawing the line? I'll end this meditation on fake news with two hopefully thought-provoking questions:

1) Civil liberties expert Jonathan Zittrain told the Post: "If we wouldn’t trust the government to curate all of what we read, why would we ever think that Facebook or any one company should do it?"

2) The Post's executive editor, Marty Baron, said: "If you have a society where people can't agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?"

Have your own thoughts, on fake news or anything else? I love to hear them! I'm on Twitter and email.
And, hey, at least there's Cat News, amirite?

There's always cat news. (giphy.com)

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