Abstract
Jared M. Wright on the true functions of fake news.
“Fake news” is a buzzword that has been thrown around a lot in recent years by many different players. With the reelection of Donald Trump for a second nonconsecutive term as President of the United States, now is a vital time to revisit this concept. After all, Trump has repeatedly stated that he will be a “dictator” and threatened to take “revenge” on his perceived enemies, including some members of media outlets he labels as being “fake news.”
The concept of “fake news” was largely popularized by Trump during his first campaign for the U.S. Presidency. In some ways, it reflected the atmosphere of uncertainty that was beginning to characterize the global political climate. In fact, Oxford Dictionaries designated “post-truth” the International Word of the Year in 2016, indicating that the consensus on what is objectively “true” in society is now up for dispute. In other words, facts and knowledge authorities seem to have lost significance in public discourse. But what does “fake news” actually mean? For a term with so much importance, there is surprisingly little agreement on its definition.
What does "fake news" actually mean? For a term with so much importance, there is surprisingly little agreement on its definition.
Indeed, most scholars have eschewed “fake news,” choosing instead to focus on distinguishing between “truthful” and “false” information, or what has become known as misinformation and disinformation. The key difference between these two concepts is the intention behind them. Misinformation is typically understood as false information that is spread unintentionally, such as when social media users share rumors or false stories without realizing they are untrue. For instance, we all have that family member on Facebook who, genuinely believing them, reposts conspiracy theories that are clearly off the rails.
Disinformation, in contrast, is false or misleading information that is intentionally created and/or shared. Here you might think of a political group spreading fabricated information in order to influence public opinion or a website creating fake news articles in order to attract more clicks (and ad revenue). Examples include state-sponsored Russian troll farms attempting to manipulate public perceptions in the United States as well as the political economy of online platforms like Facebook and YouTube (and how it creates perverse profit incentives).
The important thing here is to understand that disinformation created by bad actors is often spread exponentially as misinformation by unwitting accomplices. For example, in 2023, researcher and journalist Marc Owen Jones analyzed 30,000 tweets containing disinformation about the earthquake on the Turkey-Syria border. He found that just four Twitter accounts—one of them a bot—had been the original sources of disinformation, responsible for nearly all the traffic.
This attention to mis- and dis-information has led to an explosion of valuable research on the distortions and manipulations of social media and our public sphere. Still, in their 2023 book Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood, Johann Farkas and Jannick Schou argue that focusing on figuring out what’s fake news versus accurate reporting misses the bigger picture. To them, the crucial thing is grasping the way the term “fake news” is being used as a discursive signifier. In other words, these scholars want to underscore this phrase as a linguistic weapon used to delegitimize political opponents and note its centrality to an ideological battle over the definition of our social reality.
In earlier work, Farkas and Schou exhaustively analyzed American and British news and magazine articles from November 2016 to March 2017 that referenced “fake news.” Over this period, “fake news” went from being marginal to nearly ubiquitous.
The authors wrote, “This pattern is no coincidence, as the term was mobilized to critique and delegitimize political opponents from the outset, acting as a key component in a political power struggle between the American left and right.” They noted that a variety of journalists and scholars in the news stories attributed “fake news” to right-wing partisanship, arguing that rightwing voters were more susceptible to false information and irrationality. Indeed, a variety of studies have shown that individual social media users who are politically to the right believe and share false news stories with greater frequency than others.
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From the political right, however, we see that “fake news” is a now-common refrain among President Trump and his supporters as they disparage mainstream media outlets like CNN and The New York Times. Even social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been accused of anti-conservative biases, leading billionaire Elon Musk to purchase Twitter in 2022 and transform it into so-called “free speech platform” X. According to Farkas and Schou, right-wing political players define and construct fake news as “a symptom of a fundamental, democratic problem, namely that mainstream media companies are biased and deliberately attempting to promote liberal agendas instead of representing ‘The People.’“
Strikingly similar rhetoric has shown up in other parts of the world as well. By 2018, “anti-fake news” laws had been passed in countries including Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. On the surface, these laws are meant to punish those who would spread false information; however, critics say that they actually serve to muzzle independent media. For example, Turkey passed its “disinformation” law in 2022, giving the government the power to imprison people for up to five years for spreading false information online, as well as the authority to block access to social media platforms in the aftermath of events like earthquakes or terrorist attacks. Some scholars, like Alev Yücel, are calling this “hybrid digital authoritarianism.” France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and many others have considered measures to remove or block online hate speech, harassment, and so-called “fake news” as well, moves that have raised serious concerns about the freedoms of speech and the press.
Fake news means different things in different contexts. In our highly polarized political climate, sorting factual from false seems less about sussing out truth than gaining political traction.
Put simply, “fake news” means different things in different contexts. In our highly polarized political climate, defining true and fake is most often really about promoting or denigrating an ideology. It is not so much that facts no longer matter, nor that we are in a “post-truth” era. I’d argue that ours is an age of “hyper-factuality,” or obsessive concern about sorting factual from false, not to suss out truth, but to gain political traction.
To some readers, this may seem like a “no kidding” conclusion, but we cannot underestimate the importance of being able to verify or discredit claims through systematic, peer-reviewed data and analysis. That is how science works; anything else is just anecdotal. That digital misinformation researchers are already being targeted by authoritarian governments must serve as a crucial wake-up call: The public—all of us, including journalists, academics, and policymakers—need to acknowledge how “fake news” has become a weapon, and its continued weaponization only undermines confidence in our social institutions and contributes to the already problematic polarization of our public sphere. That’s not an individual problem, but a structural one demanding a real structural solution.