I used to see in the supermarkets the Weekly World News.
It was full of fake news stories.
They were famous for this ongoing saga about the bat boy.
It’s not even new for Hillary Clinton.
There was another story in which Hillary Clinton was supposed to have found an alien baby and adopted him.
So this kind of thing, as an editorial strategy,
has always been around, but there wasn’t a lot of money in it, and there wasn’t much
incentive to produce it.
Because the big money was in advertising.
If you’re trying to make people think ‘this expensive watch, these kind of clothes will
make you seem like a savvy, cool person,’ advertising in a fake news publication, it
doesn’t meet any of those objectives.
What is new are the incentives of the internet.
A lot of advertisement these days is served by remote computer algorithms.
They know who you are because they’ve been tracking your web browsing, but they don’t
care what site you’re on.
And within Facebook, it can be hard to tell where a story is coming from.
The way that’s presented, you don’t have a strong sense of what is the brand and what
is their reputation.
So fake news can zoom around facebook faster than anything before, it can make money, and
people might not know if it's coming from a credible source.
And fake news was definitely rampant during the 2016 presidential election.
One Buzzfeed News report found that the top
fake news articles on Facebook were either pro-Trump
or anti-Hillary.
Which makes fake news a convenient target for liberals who are
upset about the election results.
While established media outlets are brands based on accuracy, rogue websites,
some masquerading as legitimate, are reporting misinformation
But when you look at it, as best we can tell,
the kinds of things that really hurt Hillary Clinton
in the campaign were true stories.
Gallup asked voters what they’d read, seen,
or heard about Hillary Clinton,
and they found stories about Clinton’s email dominated
throughout the campaign.
Network television news devoted
more minutes of total airtime to covering Hillary
Clinton’s email server than to all policy issues combined,
and it wasn’t even close.
Clinton violated security guidelines
when she used a private email server.
The Hillary Clinton camp back under the cloud of the email controversy.
Thousands of emails under the microscope.
Clinton's email scandal is back in the spotlight.
you have two candidates out there
you have a team of reporters,
you divide up your team.
Reporters are smart, they want to be adversarial.
So the upshot is that you naturally end up with the result
that both candidates are pretty similar,
because you have similar numbers of people,
writing similar numbers of investigative
stories about both of them.
So if it turns out there’s two big knocks
on Hillary Clinton, her emails and her
foundation, you get a lot of stories about
each of those subjects
And if it turns out there’s a million knocks
against Donald Trump,
each story winds up getting less coverage because
you only have a certain amount of Donald Trump space
This is called false equivalence, and you
can see some evidence of this in the Gallup data.
Emails consistently are at the top for Clinton,
with Trump stories shifting around.
Facebook is finally beginning to fight back by partnering with proven fact-checking organizations.
But don’t expect this to fix everything.
Many voters are making a lesser of two evils
assessment right now.
You have two flawed candidates this year,
which one can you tolerate the most.
Scandals surround both campaigns.
Both candidates are facing serious trust issues.
Real news, very mainstream outlets
did not present the stakes well.
I think that means a lot of people
went into this election not really understanding
what was at stake.