Understanding Very, Very Bad Fake News
Exploring the Many Meanings of Fake News and How It Impacts Advertising
Fake news is bad. Very, very bad. Trust me. You want nothing to do with it. Crooked, crooked, crooked. That’s what we’ve been hearing the last few months, right? But the problem with simply saying “fake news is bad” is that fake news itself is such a broad term, and it’s causing miscommunication about what’s going on in advertising right now.
Here’s the deal: Digital companies, like Facebook and Google, are adjusting their advertising policies to (supposedly) stop fake news from spreading by preventing ads on fake content. But if you’re shrewd, skeptical American citizens, as you should be, then you might be asking yourselves, How well are companies like Facebook and Google actually keeping ads off the most damaging fake content? And how do they even define fake news to begin with?
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as unbiased, fair, and balanced news.
Ah, that’s the question. Well, lucky for you, I am here to help. As someone who’s written for the conservative Fox News Channel and the liberal Huffington Post, I like to think of myself as Britton Marketing & Design Group’s resident fake-news expert. (Hold your applause.) And as this self-proclaimed expert, I’d like to take this opportunity to help you detangle the many meanings of fake news so that you can better understand what’s going on with Google.
Let’s start with some definitions.
Fake News as Deceptive Liberal Bias
Perhaps the most notorious use of fake news is the way President Donald Trump uses it to talk about liberal bias in the traditional news media.
“We are not going to let the fake news tell us what to do, how to live, or what to believe,” Trump said at a rally in Florida. In this case, fake news is a term used to degrade long-standing organizations, which conservatives believe are pushing a left-wing agenda on the American people through their news coverage.
Should people be free to post whatever they want? Or should a governing body monitor the web for fake news, and who gets to decide what qualifies?
But the New York Times is not what Facebook and Google consider fake news, because the term here is used as more of a political put-down. The news might have a political slant, but it is still ultimately based on facts. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as unbiased “fair and balanced” news, because reporters (like all people) are biased by nature. Even something as small as the decision to interview person A over person B is a form of bias. So while news organizations should still work to be as honest and thoughtful as possible in their coverage, calling them fake because they present facts from a certain angle is misleading.
It’s more a matter of opinion. Let’s move along, shall we?
Fake News as False Content
Perhaps the longest-running use of the term fake news has been to describe news-satire outlets like the Onion. With headlines like “Paul Ryan Grudgingly Impressed by Angry Protester Who’s Matched His Running Pace for 9 Miles,” the Onion uses outrageous exaggeration to make a point, much like the newspaper version of a comedy skit. While critics might say news satire is a form of libel (or false information that damages people’s reputations), the writing form was legally protected as free speech in the 1988 US Supreme Court case Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell.
Ultimately, this protection hinges on intent. News satire must be written with a nod and wink that ensures that the reader knows it’s not true, or, as the courts say, an “objectively reasonable person” can tell that it’s false. It can’t be deceptive. If it is false and intentionally deceptive, that’s where you run into a problem.
Fake News as Deceptive, False Content
The most lethal type of fake news is a combination of the two aforementioned types: verifiably false information that is written to deceive people. This includes stories like “9/11 Terrorists Funded 20% of Hillary’s Presidential Campaign,” “Denzel Washington Backs Trump in the Most Epic Way Possible,” or the infamous “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.” These headlines circulated on Facebook in the weeks before the election, and their popularity sparked debate about whether companies like Facebook and Google have an obligation to monitor their sites for fake news. Should they allow people to post and promote what they want, or should they extinguish the wildfire spread of misinformation?
Google followed suit, permanently banning 200 sites and blacklisting 340 others. However, it also quietly replaced the words fake news in its advertising policy with the words misrepresentative content.
The problem with answering these questions is that they raise larger questions about the freedom of the internet. Should people be free to post whatever they want? Or should a governing body monitor the web for fake news, and if so, who gets to decide what qualifies?
As you might imagine, there’s a lot of power at stake here. For digital companies like Facebook and Google, the power is in clicks, page views, and ad revenue. Deceptive, fake content gets a lot of clicks and shares on these platforms, and the people who create it often pay to promote it, so the platforms make even more money.
Another power struggle is defining what qualifies as fake news in the first place, and determining who gets to make the calls. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, said that we should avoid creating any central bodies to decide what is true or not. But we must also encourage gatekeepers like Google and Facebook to continue combating misinformation. His organization will be addressing the spread of misinformation online as one of its initiatives during the next five years. And it seems that Facebook and Google are both taking steps in the right direction too.
In December, Facebook announced that it will still allow people to share deceptive, fake news, but it’s working with third-party fact checkers to flag stories that are widely disputed. Then, once a story is flagged, it can’t be promoted or made into an ad, to reduce the likelihood that it will go viral.
Google followed suit, permanently banning 200 sites and blacklisting 340 others. However, it also quietly replaced the words fake news in its advertising policy with the words misrepresentative content. So it’s still allowing verifiably false propaganda on its site, so long as that content doesn’t misrepresent itself.
Perhaps the biggest lesson we can learn from the fight against fake news so far is that we need to pay special attention to how we define the terms that we’re talking about. Otherwise, we’ll leave loopholes for deceptive, false information to continue corrupting our news.
And that would be bad. Very, very bad.
Photos: Shutterstock
Originally published at www.brittonmdg.com.
