Pedia Kiwi - What Is... Fake News?

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FAKE NEWS IS A TYPE of hoax or deliberate spread of misinformation, be it via the traditional news media or via social media, with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically. It often employs eye-catching headlines or entirely fabricated news-stories in order to increase readership and, in the case of internet-based stories, online sharing. In the latter case, profit is made in a similar fashion to clickbait and relies on ad-revenue generated regardless of the veracity of the published stories. Easy access to ad-revenue, increased political polarization and the ubiquity of social media, primarily the Facebook newsfeed have been implicated in the spread of fake news. Anonymously hosted websites lacking known publishers have also been implicated, because they make it difficult to prosecute sources of fake news for libel or slander.

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FAKE NEWS HAS BEEN DEFINED as news which is completely made up and designed to deceive readers to maximize traffic and profit.

The intention and purpose behind the piece is important. What appears to be fake news may in fact be news satire, which uses exaggeration and introduces non-factual elements, and is intended to amuse or make a point, rather than to deceive. Fake news may actually be convincing fiction, such as the radio dramatization of H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds, broadcast in 1938; or it may be one of the variety of possible hoaxes. Propaganda can also be fake news.

In the context of the United States and its election processes in the twenty-first century, fake news generated considerable controversy and argument, with some commentators defining concern over it as moral panic or mass hysteria and others deeply worried about damage done to public trust.

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THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF LIBRARY Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form to assist people to recognise fake news. Its main points are:

Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)

Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)

Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)

Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)

Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)

Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)

Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)

Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).

The independent, not-for-profit media journal The Conversation created a very short animated explanation of its fact checking process, explaining that it involves extra checks and balances, including blind peer review by a second academic expert, additional scrutiny and editorial oversight.

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Ancient and medieval

Significant fake news stories can be traced back to Octavians 1st century campaign of misinformation against Mark Antony and the forged 8th century Donation of Constantine, which supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope.

Nineteenth century

One of the earliest instances of fake news was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. The New York Sun published articles about a real-life astronomer and a made-up colleague who, according to the hoax, had observed bizarre life on the moon. The fictionalized articles successfully attracted new subscribers, and the penny paper suffered very little backlash after it admitted the series had been a hoax the next month.

In the late 1800s, Joseph Pulitzer and other yellow journalism publishers goaded the United States into the SpanishAmerican War, which was precipitated when the U.S.S. Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba.

Twentieth century

Fake news is similar to the concept of yellow journalism and political propaganda, frequently employing the same strategies used by early 20th century penny presses. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has published that, through its reporter Walter Duranty, The New York Times printed fake news depicting Russia as a socialist paradise. During 19321933, The New York Times published numerous articles by its Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, denying that the Soviet Union at that time starved to death between 2.4 and 7.5 million of its own citizens in the Holodomor. The New York Times now claims this was some of its worst reporting. This years-long fake news episode has been noted by multiple pundits in Australia, the U.S., and the UK.

During the First World War, one of the most notorious forms of anti-German atrocity propaganda was that of an alleged German Corpse Factory in which the German battlefield dead were rendered down for fats used to make nitroglycerine, candles, lubricants, human soap, and boot dubbing. Unfounded rumors regarding such a factory circulated in the Allied press since 1915, and by 1917 the English-language publication North China Daily News published these allegations as true at a time when Britain was trying to convince China to join the Allied war effort; this was based on new, allegedly true stories from The Times and The Daily Mail which turned out to be forgeries. These false allegations became known as such after the war, and in the Second World War Joseph Goebbels used the story in order to deny the ongoing massacre of Jews as British propaganda. According to Joachim Neander and Randal Marlin, the story also encouraged later disbelief when reports about the Holocaust surfaced after the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

After Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany in 1933, they established the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under the control of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis used both print and broadcast journalism to promote their agendas, either by obtaining ownership of those media or exerting political influence. Throughout World War II, both the Axis and the Allies employed fake news in the form of propaganda to persuade publics at home and in enemy countries. The British Political Warfare Executive used radio broadcasts and distributed leaflets to discourage German troops.

Twenty-first century

In the 21st century, the use and impact of fake news became widespread, as well as the usage of the term. Besides being used to refer to made-up stories designed to deceive readers to maximize traffic and profit, the term was also used to refer to satirical news, whose purpose is not to mislead but rather to inform viewers and share humorous commentary about real news and the mainstream media. American examples of satire (as opposed to fake news) include the television show Saturday Night Lives Weekend Update, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and The Onion newspaper.

Fake news has become increasingly commercially motivated in the twenty-first century. In an interview with NPR, Jestin Coler, former CEO of the fake media conglomerate Disinfomedia, revealed who writes fake news articles, who funds these articles, and why fake news creators create and distribute false information. Coler, who has since left his role as a fake news creator, shared that his company employed anywhere from 20 to 25 writers at a time and made $10,000 to $30,000 monthly from advertisements. Coler began his career in journalism as a magazine salesman before working as a freelance writer, but launched into the fake news industry to prove to himself and others just how rapidly fake news can spread. Disinfomedia is not the only outlet responsible for the distribution of fake news; Facebook users play a major role in feeding into fake news stories by making sensationalized stories trend, according to BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman, and the individuals behind Google AdSense who basically fund fake news websites and their content. The majority of online fake news stories are being sourced out a small city in Macedonia by teenagers being paid to pump out at a fast pace sensationalist stories, where approximately seven different fake news organizations are employing hundreds of teenagers to plagiarize stories for different U.S. based companies and parties.