If you are friends with certain types of people or follow certain types of groups on Facebook, you may have seen this headline crop up on your feed sometime between late August and early November: “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.” This patently false story has garnered about 1 million shares, reactions, and comments since it was first posted online.
In the weeks following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the furor over fake news has reached a boiling point. Pundits, media analysts, and even some fake news writers themselves have gone so far as to credit fake news stories like the above for tipping the election in favor of Trump.
But before one can really judge the validity of this claim, it’s critical to understand who the people are behind these stories and why they are posting them.
The Pope headline, like many other popular fake news stories posted during this election season, was the brainchild of a young adult living in the small town of Veles in Macedonia. An investigation by Buzzfeed news found a whopping 100 pro-Trump websites being run out of this single town, and many of them consistently peddled false and outrageous headlines in order to amass more clicks. Their motivation: securing easy cash, especially as residents of a country where, due to a sluggish economy, teenagers are barred from working. Many of these Macedonian purveyors of fake news run other sites related to popular topics like health and wellness or sports for the same reason, but switched to U.S. election-focused sites when they realized, as one website runner put it, that “people in America prefer news about Trump.” They had discovered a new truth of the internet: the good money is in Trump clickbait.
So how exactly do they cash in and make this good money? The equation is actually quite simple—the more outrageous and partisan a story is, the more likely it is to be shared online by highly-partisan groups with large numbers of followers, directing more traffic to the story’s website, and making ad space on that website highly lucrative as more and more people see those ads.
Self-Service ad programs run through tech giants like Google and Facebook make it easy for just about anyone to get in on this money making flowchart. In essence, these programs allow websites to opt into efficient, no-hassle advertising in which advertisers select the most lucrative sites to place their ads. So the more views a website gets, the more likely advertisers will choose to place their ads on that website, and the more likely they are to pay good money to do it.
It’s not only Macedonian teens who get in on this action; there are plenty of American-run websites spreading fake news online as well. These websites can reportedly garner anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 a month in ad revenue.
The system runs on the gullible sharers, those who don’t fact-check before posting an article claiming that “Wikileaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS…Then Drops Another BOMBSHELL!” Despite lacking even a kernel of truth, this story racked up 789,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.
Buzzfeed’s investigation into fake news in the election cycle found that from August until November 8th the top 20 fake news stories garnered 1.4 million more shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook than the top 20 mainstream news stories. These fake news stories skew heavily pro-Trump and anti-Hillary, leading many to cry that fake news influenced the election results and provided a Trump victory.
One of the most ubiquitous purveyors of fake news, Paul Horner, echoed this sentiment clearly in a post-election interview with The Washington Post. While he, somewhat nonsensically, views his fake news stories as satire in line with media outlets like The Onion, he went so far as to take personal responsibility for the election results, claiming “I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact check anything—they’ll post everything, believe anything… Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].” Much of Horner’s “satire” made its rounds on the internet this election cycle; his fake story that anti-Trump protesters were getting paid $3,500 to show up at rallies was even retweeted by Trump’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.
Assessments like Horner’s have led many to lay blame at the doorsteps of the two tech giants whose self-service ad policies seem to have incentivized the spreading of misinformation—Facebook and Google. Facebook has been hit with the brunt of the blame: CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the idea that that fake news influenced the election results “pretty crazy,” and insisted that Facebook plays no role in influencing the decisions of its users, and claimed that 99% of content on the site is authentic (although he failed to give a source for this figure).
Some rouge Facebook employees unsatisfied by Zuckerberg’s response informed the New York Times and Buzzfeed that they had formed an internal secret task force to take serious action in eliminating fake news from the site.
As angered calls for reform grew, Google and Facebook officially announced that fake news websites would no longer be able to use their advertising programs. However, Zuckerberg stayed firm in his denial that the stories actually played a role in the election and further warned that in routing out fake news we must not become “arbiters of truth” because “identifying the truth is complicated.”
The prevalence and highly partisan nature of the fake news that circled through social media this election cycle certainly makes it a concerning issue worthy of serious analysis and action, but it would be myopic to paint fake news as the sole source Trump’s victory.
First of all, the majority of well-reputed political science models that predict the outcome of presidential elections anticipated a Republican victory in 2016, most making such a prediction before the presidential primaries had even been decided. These models are based on economic and psychological factors and have little, if anything, to do with the candidates themselves or how people are informed about them. So the idea that fake news is the single factor determining the election simply ignores the fact that many larger issues are at play in determining an election victory, most, if not all, of which have nothing to do with specifics about the candidates like who the Pope does or does not endorse.
But even if you don’t take such an expansive view of the presidential election outcome and do take the candidates themselves into account, placing all the blame for the Democratic loss on the prevalence of misinformation sweeps under the rug some key failings of the Hillary campaign in this election season. Fake news cannot explain, for example, the Democrat’s failure to excite their traditional electoral base, nor can it explain their inability to connect with a disenfranchised and resentful white middle class.
Moreover the claim assumes that those sharing and reacting to fake news stories are not simply reaffirming beliefs they already held. How many independent or undecided voters follow highly-partisan websites like Ending the Fed which consistently posts fake news stories alongside real ones, or follow highly partisan Facebook groups that would link them to such websites?
In reality, people’s experiences on Facebook—what they see, what they share, and what they react to—are most often just an echo chamber of what they already believe. Mainstream news consumption has increasingly morphed into a partisan bubble in which people expose themselves to sources that simply reaffirm their pre-existing beliefs. Depending on who you follow, like, and friend you may find yourself exposed only to FOX, The Wall Street Journal, the National Review or MSNBC, the Huffington Post, and Slate.
Sure, it’s unfortunate that millions were mislead into thinking the Pope “Shocked the World” and endorsed Trump. And of course, Facebook should do its best to rid its feed of such falsehoods by ending the monetization of tabloid fodder in the guise of journalism. But if those Facebook users hadn’t seen that fake story, they would have just seen a different one which, although perhaps less outrageous, would have been no less successful in reaffirming their support for Trump. We’re all in a bubble of our own beliefs: in this election cycle, fake news seems to have been just another form of insulation.