What is fake news? How to spot it and what you can do to stop it
‘Fake news’ has rapidly become a catch-all term to discredit all kinds of stories. We need to be smarter at recognising and combating outright fabrication
Fake news reports soar on social media, where links are given the same weighting regardless of source, and particularly on Facebook, where there is a potential audience of 1.89bn. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
Until recently, there was news and “not news” – as denoted by comments of “that’s not news” below the line on more light-hearted stories or features. Now there is “fake news”, said to be behind the election of Donald Trump as US president and a recent incident involving a gunman at a Washington pizzeria.
The term has become widely used – too widely. But it’s understandable there’s confusion when some fake news is only a bit fake, or fake for an arguably legitimate reason (such as satire).
Can we still make a useful definition of fake news? And should we even be worried about it at all?
Definitely real fake news
First the most famous example of an indisputably (or so you would think) fake news story that has had real-world consequences.
Subscribers to “Pizzagate” point to apparent “code” within the hacked emails of John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chair, and the fact the restaurant has the same initials as “child pornography”. (Googling Pizzagate is not advised. The background to this extraordinary story has been explored in detail on the Reply All podcast.)
From 4chan and Reddit, the online message board where the story took root, the story gained sufficient momentum for a poll of 1,224 registered voters in late September to find that 14% of Trump supporters believed it to be true.
A significant 32% of respondents were “not sure” – just like the 25-year-old gunman who, though not convinced of the theory, felt there were sufficient grounds to pay a visit to the restaurant to “self-investigate”.
Yes, it stretches the boundaries of belief – but a lot of fake news does. And yes, people nonetheless think it’s true.
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