What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016
by James Carson

It was at Donald Trump’s first press conference as President-elect when the term "fake news" broke out of media discussions and into the mainstream. "You are fake news!" he pointed at CNN’s Jim Acosta while refusing to listen to his question.
Since then, the now President of the USA has been calling out major media outlets several times a week for being ‘FAKE NEWS’ via his Twitter feed - particularly CNN and the New York Times. But why is Donald Trump using the term ‘fake news’ so frequently and where did it come from?
Bending the truth for political gain is certainly nothing new. In the Second World War, the propaganda machine was used relentlessly by all sides across the media spectrum. This sort of propaganda was largely funded and controlled by governments, but the blatant bias it carried waned as the ideological struggles became less apparent. Added to that, as populations became more used to mass communication, they could more easily see through it.
The rising trend of fake news during 2016 was very different to largely state controlled analogue modes of 20th century propaganda. What we saw oftener here were small groups of people taking advantage of social media interaction and algorithms through creative hyperbolic articles around a major political event: the US presidential election.
Propaganda and Internet fake news do, however, hold similarities: both are methods of distorting the truth for emotional persuasion, seeking to drive action. Although this action appears to be political, the motivation in the 2016 US election was not necessarily. Many creators of it were moreover looking for a path to quick dollars by distributing content and gaining an audience that would view advertising. Before the Internet, publishing fake news and gaining an audience that could be monetised was nearly impossible for three reasons:

1. Distribution and cost: Distributing information on any kind of scale needed a prohibitively expensive logistics operation.
2. Audiences and trust: Building a large audience took much longer, and because it was expensive to acquire and built on trust of information, publishing fake news would be damaging to reputation and thus have economic consequences.
3. Law and regulation: Because it was expensive to distribute information, there were far fewer players. These abided by media law and could be regulated. Publishing fake news would likely end up with the publisher being sued. But this gate of information exchange was unlocked around 2007, with the beginnings of the social media revolution. The creation of social networks like Facebook and Twitter allowed people to exchange information on a much greater scale than ever before, while publishing platforms like WordPress allowed anyone to create a dynamic website with ease.

The five types of fake news
Stories classified as fake news can generally be put into five categories, as experts try to develop a way of warning readers what they may be encountering.

1. Intentionally deceptive
   These are news stories created entirely to deceive readers. The 2016 US election was rife with examples claiming that “x celebrity has endorsed Donald Trump”, when that was not the case.
2. Jokes taken at face value
   Humour sites such as the Onion or Daily Mash present fake news stories in order to satirise the media. Issues can arise when readers see the story out of context and share it with others.
3. Large-scale hoaxes
   Deceptions that are then reported in good faith by reputable news sources. A recent example would be the story that the founder of Corona beer made everyone in his home village a millionaire in his will.
4. Slanted reporting of real facts
   Selectively-chosen but truthful elements of a story put together to serve an agenda. One of the most prevalent examples of this is the PR-driven science or nutrition story, such as 'x thing you thought was unhealthy is actually good for you'.
5. Stories where the ‘truth’ is contentious

On issues where ideologies or opinions clash - for example, territorial conflicts - there is sometimes no established baseline for truth. Reporters may be unconsciously partisan, or perceived as such.

Is fake news actually influential?
While often used statistics - 62 per cent of Americans using social networks as a source of news, and 44 per cent primarily using Facebook - could be used to reinforce that fake news has real influence, they are really quite general figures. We simply don't know what the large interaction numbers that are attributed to fake news really mean in an "influence" sense: what does a Facebook Like mean in this context, for example.
Fake news as we have come to know it on Facebook is more of a menace than a game changing influencer. However, the term has now jumped from the referral of a small scale menace into one often used to refer to the established mainstream media, accounting for thousands of professional journalists.

What is happening now?
Some claim that the term has now been co-opted by politicians and commentators to mean anything they disagree with - making the term essentially meaningless and more of a stick to beat the mainstream press with than a phenomenon in itself. Donald Trump said recently that "any negative polls are fake news".

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/