Plenty of people have been blamed for the rise of fake news, with Donald Trump and his 'alternative facts'-spinning political team taking most of the heat at the moment.
But, to put a spin on French counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre’s famous quote: “Every nation gets the government it deserves”, perhaps so too do we get the news we deserve.
If you’ve got a spare minute – hell, even a few spare seconds – I’ll bet the first thing you do is reach for your phone.
In fact, the Daily Mail reckons we check our phones 110 times per day (but you should probably take that with a grain of salt, considering Wikipedia recently banned the infamous rag as a source, due to its “reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication”).
An idle moment of quiet reflection is all but a thing of the past, which is a real shame, because we are no longer giving pause to think about the information we’ve just digested. We just want more.
And this constant consumption of information is turning us into content addicts. We don’t care about the quality, we just want our next hit.
Rather than sitting down at the end of the day to get the news of the day from a reliable source, we want to know exactly what’s happening right now, as if the world is some kind of constant soap opera with minute-by-minute episodes.
I call it ‘Fact-ertainment’.
The problem is that we’re gorging ourselves on information and content, rather than reliable, well-researched news.
Now, that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with taking a bit of time away from the 24-hour news cycle and enjoying a bit of escapism via a piece of good fiction (hey, even a bit of crappy fiction can be great fun).
But the world isn’t getting whipped into a frenzy over the terrifying threat posed by the deadly white walkers north of the Wall. Yet people went absolutely nuts about the paedophile ring that then-Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton was running out of a New York pizzeria.
Because people don’t share fiction on social media or news sites, they share falsehoods.
And so the facts of the whole ‘Hilary’s a monster in a pizza parlour’ story – which became known as Pizzagate – were lost in the echo-chamber that is Facebook, as more and more people read and shared this sensational story, despite the fact it was completely fabricated.
Perhaps it’s in human nature to get off on bad news. But so many people don’t even care if the bad news is true or not, they just want to be the one breaking it to their section of the world, seeing themselves as the intrepid new-age journalist who has uncovered a sensational scoop.
Take Aussie basketball star Andrew Bogut. Upon hearing the ‘news’ of Pizzagate, he tweeted: “If only 1% of this #pizzagate scandal is true, all people involved deserve life in prison (or worse).”
https://twitter.com/andrewbogut/status/801878120131338240That tweet is still live for all the world to see, months after it’s been emphatically proven that there is absolutely zero truth to the matter.
How many of Andrew’s 300,000-plus followers have seen the tweet, and taken this ‘celebrity endorsement’ as evidence that the story was true?
Then again, if you’re getting your news from the Twitter feed of a basketball player, rather than a reputable member of the fourth estate, perhaps your ignorance is deserved?
Regardless, the problem is that ‘fake news’, even after it’s been exposed as being false, can take over the global narrative.
This is hardly a new phenomenon – think of Christopher Columbus' 1492 journey. He found himself in the Americas, but since he was searching for a passage to India, he declared these new islands were part of the Indian Ocean.
The result? More than 500 years later, the people of the First Nations of the Americas are still commonly referred to as Indians. We’ve known for centuries that Columbus was half a world away from the India, yet one of the world’s greatest explorers created a myth and it’s been maintained.
Nowadays though, you don’t even need to be a global authority to create a narrative that’s digested by the masses. It’s remarkably easy to establish yourself as a ‘credible’ source, because, as Barack Obama said, “there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well”.
And the ‘smell test’ on the internet is remarkably easy to pass. According to the American Press Institute, “digital news consumers cite three specific factors of digital presentation as critical to whether they rely on a news source… the behavior and placement of digital ads, load times, and how well a site works on a mobile device.”
Forget Pulitzer prizes, all it takes to establish your journalistic chops is a fast, mobile-friendly site with ads!
Which is how Cameron Harris both made himself an estimated $1000 an hour and spread the fake news that Hilary Clinton was rigging the 2016 Presidential election, with the website ChristianTimesNewspaper.com – an address he picked up for $5 and spent 15 minutes setting up.
The site looked legit, had a reasonably real-sounding (if right-leaning) name, and served up ads from Google. So when Harris’ totally made-up story hit the internet – accompanied by a photo Harris found on Google image – it was, as President Obama puts it, “packaged very well”.
It wouldn’t take much digging for a discerning adult to pull the story apart – this wasn’t a grand fraud perpetrated against the American public, it was the handiwork of a 23-year-old former frat boy who said he just wanted to make a quick buck, not influence an election.
But, with the global addiction to Fact-ertainment, the piece did the rounds on social media, being shared with six million people! Then we moved on to the next episode, with little attention paid when Snopes debunked the story.
Ironically, while we treat news as a global soap opera, mud still sticks.
Ultimately, fake news isn’t a new phenomenon – people have believed lies and innuendo about other people since the Stone Age.
The reason it’s come to the fore at the moment is a combination of both the ease with which people can establish false credibility thanks to technology, but also because we’re such voracious consumers of content.
It’s simple supply and demand, and if there wasn’t such rampant demand for content – any content – then we wouldn’t be receiving the crap being served up by the likes of Cameron Harris and Andrew Bogut.
Simply put, we’ve created the storm of fake news because we keep consuming it. And while both Facebook and Google are making efforts to curb the output on their platforms, I suspect fake news will only wane in a serious fashion when people are happy to have a minute to themselves when their phone stays in their pocket.
By Atomic 212° CEO Jason Dooris