How Fake News Stories Outperform Real News
DAVOS, Switzerland — One of the major conversations at Davos this year is fake news. It has become the expression of the moment since the U.S. electoral victory of Donald Trump, with many supporters of Hillary Clinton blaming the phenomenon for her defeat and Trump turning the term against mainstream media reporting critically on him.
From stories about Pope Francis endorsing Trump for the presidency to pieces accusing Hillary Clinton of selling weapons to ISIS, fake stories bubbled up on Facebook newsfeeds across the world in the weeks leading up to the U.S. election.
But how much impact fake news actually had on the presidential race has been the subject of intense debate. For its part, Facebook — in public at least — disputed the idea initially. Speaking after Trump’s win, founder Mark Zuckerberg told a tech conference, “Personally, I think the idea that fake news, of which it’s a small amount of content, influenced the election is a pretty crazy idea.”
But data analysis of fake news put out during the election suggests that Zuckerberg’s assessment may be too modest.
In the data visualization below, you can see how Facebook’s data on engagement — a cumulative number counting reactions, shares and comments — shows that fake news became more and more engaged with over the course of the election, with some of the top fake stories matching or even outperforming real news.
The chart, which visualizes data collated by BuzzFeed using its content analysis tool, shows that in the three-month period before Election Day, four out of the top five most-engaged-with stories from Facebook were false.
The data doesn’t say if those engaging with this content were condoning or condemning a story, and hundreds of real stories that didn’t go viral still shaped the election debate. But at the very least, the data suggests how public discourse during the election was preoccupied with stories that were not real.
The fake stories ranged from the roughly plausible (“Pentagon Officials Furious After Clinton Announces U.S. Response Time for Nuclear Launch During Debate”) to the wildly improbable (“African Billionaire Says He Will Give $1 Million to Anyone Who Wants to Leave America if Donald Trump Is Elected”). Many of stories had hundreds of thousands of engagements, according to the data.
The outlets putting out the stories were often websites exclusively publishing fake news, such as Ending the Fed and Heavy Metal, as well as some posing as real outlets, such as one pretending to be America’s ABC News.
But there is also a lesson to be learned about real stories. Despite being grounded in real facts, the non-fake articles that were most engaged with were mostly heavy-handed op-ed pieces, perhaps reflecting the polarization and substance-light nature of political discussion in the U.S.
Facebook now appears to be acknowledging the possible impact of false stories on its platform. The company has announced initiatives to fight fake news in the U.S., and this week it unveiled a plan to combat it in Germany.
Amid accusations that technology companies-turned-publishers are not taking enough responsibility for the content on their platforms, the initiatives suggest Facebook may have accepted that there’s a problem. But it remains to be seen how effective these measures will be.
