Four Key Misunderstandings about ‘Fake News’

The first keynote at the iCS Symposium is by Alice E. Marwick, whose focus is on the motivations for sharing the various forms of content grouped under the problematic moniker of ‘fake news’. Her recent report with Rebecca Lewis on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online has shown that such sharing can be highly effective: because so many of us are now sharing news and news-like information online, and because especially younger users and journalists are paying increasing attention to what is happening on social media, it is now possible for mis- and disinformation content to migrate from far-right, fringe spaces through mainstream social media sites and on to hyperpartisan far-right press sites and even the mainstream news media. One of the vectors for infiltrating the mainstream news in this process tends to be Fox News, unsurprisingly.

The contested term ‘fake news’ complicates these observations. Such language matters, and there are four fundamental misunderstandings about ‘fake news’. First, ‘fake news’ is neither ‘fake’ nor ‘news’: instead, it represents a shift from consuming content from news sites to consuming content through far less controlled and edited social media. The term also means something entirely different depending on who uses it; Donald Trump’s understanding of ‘fake news’ is widely different from the understanding employed in Buzzfeed’s annual list of the top 10 ‘fake news’ stories on Facebook, or from the deliberate disinformation around political stories being shared by interested actors via social media. Much of the latter content would also not be detected by automated ‘fake news’ detection mechanisms.

Second, fact-checking and debunking ‘fake news’ content is not going to make the problem go away. People largely do not share ‘fake news’ simply because they were duped into thinking it is true: audiences are nowhere near as simple and unthinking as this magic bullet theory would suggest. This also means that Donald Trump did not win the U.S. presidency simply because of the role played by ‘fake news’. Rather, ‘fake news’ content on social media appears as one content element within a complex and multifaceted stream of content from a wide variety of sources.

‘Fake news’ and other partisan content is instead a matter of identity than politics: users come to believe what people like them believe. Fox News, for instance, has successfully merged conservative talking points with white tabloid culture, making the full package attractive to a U.S. working-class audience; The Guardian or the New York Times have done the same for a different, more liberal and upper-class audience. And such identities serve to promote the sharing of ideologically aligned content via social media, and prevent the sharing of ideologically divergent content. In the U.S., this identity construction has extended and solidified much further on the right than it has on the left. Fact-checking by mainstream or liberal news sources, then, cannot reach the opposite side: instead, it will only reinforce conservatives’ perspective of these sources as biased.

Third, ‘fake news’ is not limited to online content. Problematic content in the U.S. is more likely to be right-wing, but it originates from or is amplified by TV channels like Fox News as well as fringe news sites, and sometimes even retweeted by Trump and other high-level political operatives. Beyond the individual stories, this feeds into a number of deep narratives that describe various conservative values as under attack from liberals in general and/or from particular minorities in particular. The affective elements of such stories generates a sense of urgency and a sense both of in-group solidarity and out-group animosity, fuelled in part by resentment towards the undeserving. As a result, problematic, fringe partisan content is very much in line with content from mainstream partisan sites. And such content may be shared by partisans from either side of politics: by supporters because they agree with it, and by non-supporters in order to discuss what they do not agree with.

Finally, then, ‘fake news’ content is not shared only by people who do not reflect critically about what they are doing. Conservative ‘fake news’ sharers even adopt bible study group- or online fandom-style collective reading practices through which they decode speeches by Trump and others, and critique their coverage by the mainstream media. This is essentially using standard media literacy practices as they are being taught to improve Internet audiences critical reading practices – but it is done in order to pursue and cement a particular ideological perspective that is diametrically opposed to the aims that such practices usually embody.

Sharing ‘fake news’, then, is done to signal shared ideological values, to support shared belief systems, and to militate against opposing perspectives. To fully understand these practices, we need a new sociotechnical model of media effects that incorporates actors, patterns, and the affordances of platforms. The latter, in particular, significant amplify the circulation of ‘fake news’ further.