During a press conference on Jan.11, then-President-elect Donald Trump refused a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta by saying, “I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news.”
What is this seemingly new phenomenon called “fake news,” and how can we avoid accidentally reading it?
The New York Times considers “fake news” to be “the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news,” saying that it “is creating confusion, punching holes in what is true, causing a kind of fun-house effect that leaves the reader doubting everything, including real news.”
But it’s easy to distinguish “fake news” from real news, right? In an interview with the New York Times, Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from Minnesota, said, “Fake news is subjective… It depends on who’s defining it. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Unfortunately, certain websites use something called “website spoofing.” This is when a website is designed to appear as another more popular news site. An example would include ABCnews.com.co on which Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump tweeted a fake news story from the site. Websites such as these are able to gain popularity through Facebook, because it has almost 1.8 billion active users.
In an interview with the New Yorker, former President Obama stated, “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal – that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”
Some articles are also written as satire. The most popular satirical news site would be the Onion. This is a website strictly dedicated to writing satirical pieces. The top-right corner of their homepage reads “TU STULTUS ES,” which roughly translates to “YOU ARE AN IDIOT” in Latin. Last year on ClickHole, a satirical news site run by the Onion, an article was published about astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and became widely shared. It stated that an 8-year-old girl named Liza visiting the planetarium at which he works told him she wanted to live on Jupiter. It goes on with pictures of fake tweets by Tyson such as “Things #Liza thinks: ‘I can’t wait to suffocate to death on Jupiter!’” The writer and radio host Neal Larson mistook the satire for real news and wrote an article about it. This led to Larson quitting his job as a writer.
ClickHole has a disclaimer that reads, “ClickHole uses invented names in all of its stories, except in cases where public figures are being satirized. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental. ClickHole is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.”
The website gets its name from the word “clickbait.” Oxford Dictionary defines “clickbait” as “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.” Articles or ads are distributed throughout social media with titles that tempt you to click on them. An example would be an article titled “How to Eliminate Student Debt in Seconds!”
When someone “clicks” on these articles or ads, they are often taken to a website with even more ads. The website then can make a profit from the revenue generated by the ads on their sites. This has evolved from simply being ads about student debt or weight loss into websites distributing fake news. Facebook and Google have started cracking down by blocking ad revenue to these sites.
Overall the easiest way to determine actual news from fake news is by checking their sources. Often fake news articles do not have sources at all or link to other sites with the same goal in mind.
Google News is also an effective, and easy, way to check a source. It uses methods to block “fake news” sites from its service. If you are not sure about the legitimacy of a news website, simply type the main address into the search bar (for instance, if you are unsure about http://randomwebsite.com/randomarticle, then simply type randomwebsite.com into the search bar at http://news.google.com). If this does not generate any results (the name of the website is usually found in green text under the article’s title in the search results), then one could generally conclude that this website lacks credibility. Be sure that you do not type the address into http://google.com, the main website, when you are checking a source, but rather http://news.google.com, because the main search engine does not exclude fake news sites.
Amid the current political discourse, it is extremely important to check your sources for accuracy. In doing so, we are taking the first step towards establishing a well-informed public.