What Is New and True 1 About Fake News?
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1 WHAT IS NEW AND TRUE1 ABOUT FAKE NEWS? Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela E. Jaffé, Eryn J. Newman, and Norbert Schwarz Following Brexit and the 2016 US presidential campaign, the Oxford Diction- ary selected “post-truth” as the Word of the Year 2016, which the dictionary defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford-Dictionary, 2016). A year later, the Collins Dictionary desig- nated “fake news” as the Collins Word of the Year 2017 in response to a 365% increase in its usage in the Collins corpus of the English language (Collins- Dictionary, 2017). As the dissemination of fake news flourished and became a topic of public discourse and concern, designating something as fake news became another tool in the repertoire of political propaganda. From US presi- dent Donald Trump accusing journalists and mainstream media of spreading fake news about him (e.g., Pengelly, 2017) to the mainstream media tracking fake news spread by Donald Trump (Kessler, Rizzo, & Kelly, 2019), and the German party AFD (Alternative für Deutschland) returning to the Nazi term Lgenpresse (lying press) to describe mainstream media, accusations of spreading fake news has become a daily occurrence. Against the background of this gen- eral climate, the present volume presents insights into fake news from multiple scientific disciplines and perspectives. What is fake news and what is misinformation? Fake news can be defined as “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting” (Collins-Dictionary, 2017). Analyses of Google searches indicate that, prior to 2016, the term was used to locate satirical news, as offered by the satirical print magazine The Onion and the satirical tele- vision show The Daily Show. By the end of 2016, the use had shifted to searches pertaining to the US presidential election, Donald Trump, Twitter, and CNN 2 Rainer Greifeneder et al. (Cunha, Magno, Caetano, Teixeira, & Almeida, 2018). The dissemination of false information under the guise of news reporting had become serious business. What sets fake news apart from news reports that are merely false is the inten- tion to deceive. As the Council of Europe (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) noted, the public discussion of fake news often subsumes disinformation, misinformation, and mal-information. The term “disinformation” refers to false information that is created to harm a person, social group, organization, or country, whereas “misinformation” is merely false but not intended to harm. Because intention to harm is often difficult to determine, the term “misinformation” is also used for false information in general and the contributions to this volume follow this usage. Of course, harm can also be achieved by spreading factually correct information with harmful implications – for example, by leaking factually true private information that should not have any bearing on public issues – a type of information that is sometimes referred to as “mal-information”. All of these classes of information are more influential when the information is accepted as true and is shared with others. Once accepted, false information is very difficult to correct and can continue to influence related beliefs even when people no longer endorse the false information that gave rise to those beliefs (for a review, see Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz, & Cook, 2012). The contributions to the present volume focus on the processes involved in accepting, sharing, and correcting false information. In the public discourse, the term “fake news” is usually associated with the political realm, but fake news stories are not confined to it; fabricated informa- tion is disseminated in all areas, perhaps most prominently in the domains of consumer products, health, and finances. But even reputable scientific journals are not free of fake news in the form of deliberately deceptive reports based on manipulated or freely invented data (Bar-Ilan & Halevi, 2020). Fake news has gained public attention for several reasons. First, misinforma- tion has become part of everyday life (see Lyons, Merola, & Reifler, 2020). For instance, Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) estimated that the average US-American adult has consumed one to three pieces of fake news in the months prior to the 2016 US presidential election and the fact checkers of the Washington Post reported that President Trump made 10,796 false or misleading claims in the first 869 days of his presidency (Kessler et al., 2019). Furthermore, Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral (2018) found in analyses of Twitter data that false information is retweeted more rapidly and more often than true information, particularly news on politics. Second, to the extent that people believe misinformation and act upon it, fake news can have serious consequences. To illustrate, during what has become known as Pizzagate (Wikipedia, n.d.), a piece of fake news about an alleged connection among officials of the US Democratic party, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., and human trafficking instigated a young man to “investi- gate” the cause himself by firing a rifle inside the restaurant. Not all direct con- sequences of fake news are as dramatic; but, when individuals or groups act upon What is new and true about fake news? 3 disinformation, consequences may often not be to their individual, or societies- at-large, advantage. Third, peaceful human interaction and individual as well as societal prosperity strongly depend on interpersonal trust (e.g., Greifeneder, Müller, Stahlberg, Van den Bos, & Bless, 2011). Division of labor, trade between persons and countries, as well as democracies all necessitate shared beliefs that some things are true and that agents can be relied upon. Individuals found guilty of lying are not (or to a lesser extent) believed, and companies or countries known to have violated financial promises face serious backlash. Fake news about a government has the potential to erode society’s trust and therefore constitute a threat, especially to democracies. Moreover, denouncing established newspapers, broadcasters, and journals has the potential to erode trust in those organizations that take on the role of fact checkers in modern societies. In the United States, trust in main- stream news sources showed a pronounced partisan divide at the time of the 2016 election, with 51% of Democrats but only 14% of Republicans reporting “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of trust in mainstream news source (Swift, 2016). Brief history of fake news dissemination The intention to deceive is as old as humankind, and systematic fake news cam- paigns have been documented throughout history (see Posetti & Matthews, 2018). What changed is the ability to spread misinformation quickly and effi- ciently to ever larger audiences. When Ramses II pretended in 1274 BC that his attempt to capture the city of Kadesch was successful, word of his fake victory had to be spread by mouth and via wall paintings. When Octavian waged a propaganda campaign against Antony in Roman times, he could smear him as a womanizer and drunk in short slogans written upon coins that allowed for a wider distribution (Kaminska, 2017). Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1493 enabled one-to-many communication on a larger scale and with it the broad dissemination of true as well as false information. In 1835, a then New York based newspaper, The Sun, published a series of articles on the discovery of humanoid life on the moon that became known as the Great Moon Hoax (Thornton, 2000). The introduction of the radio further facilitated the dissemi- nation of any news, including extended disinformation campaigns in the lead-up to World War II (Herzstein, 1978; Kallis, 2005). However, the systematic use of print and broadcast media, and broad dis- semination of their products, required considerable resources, which limited the range of actors who could take advantage of these technologies. On the negative side, this allowed actors who enjoyed access to spread disinformation without much opposition; on the positive side, it also gave attempts to implement ethical norms of journalism a chance to shape reporting (Ward, 2015; see also the con- tributions in Bertrand, 2018). The introduction of the internet, followed by the development of social media, reduced the existing access barriers to the extent that most individuals are now able to participate in large-scale dissemination. 4 Rainer Greifeneder et al. With modern smartphone technology and online social networks, every internet user can be a broadcaster. To illustrate, the average Twitter user has 707 follow- ers (Smith, 2019) to whom information can be broadcasted within split seconds. This level of reach was previously impossible for individuals, creating a funda- mentally new era, where news dissemination is no longer an access-restricted privilege but available to all (internet users). Although this change has the poten- tial to empower citizens, it also enables the uncontrolled spread of misinforma- tion and calls for the development of new social norms of careful information evaluation and sharing. Today, social media sites decide the newsfeed for their users by way of algo- rithms. In particular, companies like Facebook filter the stream of available news and present their users with a curated feed. The details of the curation algorithm are unknown to users and undergo frequent changes. What is known is that the algorithm favors information that fits the user’s profile of preferences and withholds information that does not. The resulting filter bubble (Pariser, 2011) presents largely consistent information that reinforces the user’s worldview and presents few challenges, leaving users confident that their own views are correct and the views of others at best mistaken and at worst malevolent (for a discussion, see Schwarz & Jalbert, 2020). Many observers suspect that such filter bubbles contributed to the outcome of the 2016 Brexit vote (see Oyserman & Dawson, 2020).