Role of Fake News in Political Elections: Analytical Essay

It’s the year 2016. A young girl living in New York City is on her way to the Javis Center. She walks with confidence; she is hopeful. Hopefully because this is the last time she will do this walk and the next time she walks home all the months of hard work, endless late nights and dismissed canvassing calls will have paid off. Tonight, is the election night and deep down she knows the evening will end with victory. Indeed, there will be victory and history will be made tonight, but not in the way she and millions of others had hoped.

Working on the Hillary campaign was one of the greatest highlights of my life. So, having been being personally emerged in the working in the environment of the campaign it seemed only right for this report to focus on Question 9 and delve into the reach and effect of fake news through social media and the organisations that ensured it would be news worthy for many years to come. Lots of blood, sweat and tears (literally) went into the 2016 election and whilst there are so many things I could rant on about I will endeavour to put my personal feelings and political leanings to one side and deliver an analytical report.

Politics has come a long way since the Founding Fathers but the same requirement remains; persuade the people to vote for you! As of Election Night 2016, 240 years have passed since the Declaration of Independence. The Founders’ reputation and accomplishments are still legendary and by enlarge relevant. Their decisions and actions resulted in historic change; creating a system of government where people are entrusted (albeit loosely) to govern themselves, rather than have a monarch or a dictator do the job.

Even today, the Founders represent a benchmark. In a debate, advertisement, opinion piece, book, classroom, boardroom, political office, website, blog, poll etc, the question is often asked ‘what would the Founders think’ or ‘how would the Founders respond to an issue or situation’. American political figures have used the Founders’ words and actions as a means of promoting their own political beliefs and agendas for as long as they have been given a platform to speak. It happens time and time again especially during a favourite time of year for Americans, election season. And no, amendment to the Bill of Rights is more popular the right to free speech or specifically, Amendment 1: Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.

So, why is this relevant in an analysis of social media and the influence and accessibility of ‘fake news’? Well, free speech is a wonderful notion and certainly a fair assertion that it should be a borne right. It perpetuates openness, understanding, lack of judgement. It is untethered and freeing but by its very nature is uncontrolled and unstructured. Still a wonderful notion until personal agenda becomes involved, until opinion becomes fact and until two opposing ideals wish to exercise their right to free speech. How far does free speech go… public discourse, online rants, political rhetoric? How long is it before one man’s free speech becomes another man’s hate speech. Hate speech is after all, just an opinion (albeit a terrible, misguided opinion but an opinion none the less) so should it be considered unconstitutional to block or restrict it? I digress here and I should note I am not advocating hate speech but I am simply trying to align this report with the ideas that have underlined a national way of thinking basically since its inception.

Either way, despite their remarkable reputations and accomplishments, the Founders were unable to resolve all the issues they faced in their own time and would have todays issues simply unfathomable. Just look at the way we consume information now and the sheer volume of avenues that one can not only receive information but also how we out it out there. From public meetings, to the printing press, to news lines, radio, television, to the internet and beyond communication has evolved incredibly quickly. With each onset of a new medium came a new, more rapacious way to consume information. However, the greater the desire for information the lesser desire there was to validate its quality. As author Neil Postman suggests in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business “In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion… But it is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week’. He continues that the advent of television was ‘…altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation.” Postman’s analysis was centered around Regan-era America, a time strangely comparable to today’s political landscape. What even he could not have predicted was the explosion of the internet and the utter break down of reputable, quality news.

Social media played a huge part in the 2016 election and there are many reasons why fake news is one of the main factors that caused the election to end the way it did. In a 2017 study by researchers from NYU and Standford it was concluded that “Social media plays a bigger role in bringing people to fake news sites than it plays in bringing them to real news sites. More than 40 percent of visits to 65 fake news sites come from social media, compared to around 10 percent of visits to 690 top US news sites.” So, why is this important? Well, it comes back to the wonderful motion of ‘free speech’ and the capacity to put anything out there for consumption and the intention behind it. It is near impossible to regulate the amount of information that lives in the world wide web. The publics willingness to consume regardless of where they consume from or why means there is a fundamental lack of care or knowledge about the quality of the information. This saturation of information means there is an inherent acceptance of information and the desire to seek neutrality and actual ‘facts’ can be easily bypassed and replaced by consumption of fake news.

It has been suggested that more than one-quarter of voting-age adults visited a fake news website supporting either Clinton or Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. New York Times journalist, Neil Irwin, wrote on the subject, “It may be less that false information from dubious news sources is shaping their view of the world. Rather, some people are willing to believe anything that sounds plausible and fits their preconceptions about the heroes and villains in politics.”

Just one week after the 2016 presentational election, ‘fake news’ became the talk of the town and quickly turned into one of the most loaded and controversial labels in America. Although, many journalists and commentators would have you believe fake news prevails because of the dumbed-down audience it should be remember that ‘fake news’ is just the term we are currently using and fake news stories have been around for centuries. Yes, they may have just been called disinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, or hoaxes; but they have existed and been both ridiculed and influential in equal measure. Whether it was comic extremes like the laughable headlines of the National Enquirer. Or its use in historical regimes to scapegoat a whole race of people through the purposeful misleading of the public with targeted, vile propaganda; a word that is now synonymous with evil, tactical, misrepresentation.

However, one thing did make this modern incarnation different; this time around it was suddenly everywhere and was considered to the thing that cost Hillary her much-maligned victory.

Let’s dig into this a little. We cannot say with complete confidence that fake news won Trump the victory but we can, with little doubt, say it had a far reaching and surprising effect on the outcome of the election. But where does this fake news come from?

Ever heard of Veles, Macedonia? No? Neither had most people, especially the great American voters. That is before this quiet, former industrial town became the 2016 American election ‘fake news factory’. Over 150 fake news sites have been traced back to Veles, Macadonia and nearly 40 million views on the websites created there were in the last few months of the election. Sites with names like USA Newsflash or USA Online Politics were developed by school students as young as 16 and 17. The students already knew how to make money from websites and they knew how to attract America Facebook audiences. However, by listing the websites as ‘News/Media’ outlets on the social media platform they could quantify the quality of the reporting with no intrusion from Facebook and as a result very few questions from the consumers.

The lack of scrutiny meant these websites could say and do whatever they pleased. A website called Total TW News, run by a 17 year old from Macedonia, told his ten thousand mainly American followers, that Hillary Clinton was facing FBI charges. Another, founded by another you Veles who made over 60,000USD in just 6 months by writing articles about Trump and the election, concocted articles that included a celebrity that wanted to kill Trump, that the Queen wants to meet Trump and that Trump and Putin had a secret meeting in Mexico; all fake news.

Trump was the game changer. He is not like any other Politician; no one can beat his supporters when it comes to social media engagement. He is even something of a hero in Veles. One 16 year old resident of Veles, Victor, who has a website News Today said “Donald Trump is good for me, I make money off of him.”

This is where todays willingness to consume and the power of social media really come into play. For Victor, it was for the money and as he said “there isn’t much to do around here in this town, no one really goes out, we are doing this out of boredom.” However, for the baying, gullible American voter thirsty for the articles these were factual reports about their future President. One fake news article wrote ‘Obama donated 300 million to Hillary Clinton campaign that he took from veterans.’ A perfect concoction for the Vet. loving Republican followers. Should you believe it, NO! but did they open it and believe the fake news article? Of course!

Post Trump’s victory the real story of ‘fake news’ did not just fade away. It was an issue that got more polarizing, complex and terrifying as the weeks and months went on. With more investigation, its reach and the scandal that went alongside got deeper and darker. The phrase even became a defense mechanism for the person accused of employing it with Trump using it as a term to add to the rhetoric of lazy reporting rather than a genuine attempt to highlight actual lies and misleading reportage or as an indictment of current journalism.

The investigation also threw up another name; one that it is hard to believe we have got this far without mentioning, Cambridge Analytica. This is one big organization that played an almost unbelievable part in the election.

It would be remiss to think we could delve into the depths of coercion, lies and influence that Cambridge lauded over the American Election in this report. A seemingly unknown British company who would come to be seen as the evil underbelly of the Trump campaign and a scapegoat of all that is improper in modern politics. However, they still prevailed and even managed to do so without breaking any definable laws… moral code not included! Cambridge was tasked with persuading potential voters to vote a certain way through the use of behavioral science. To do this they had to find a way to Cambridge found a way obtain raw data about millions of users. Then they had to use that data to make predictions about user’s personalities. This is where data analytics, the science of extracting useful information from raw data, comes in. Ultimately and is largely simplified terms, this means predicting the personality of the individual voter and then targeting that voter with specific content in the hope to win their vote. Simple when you know how.

Cambridge Analytica’ influence over the election is undeniable. Countless documents relating to work in nearly 70 countries showed the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on a near industrial scale were released once the house of cards began to fall. This also evidenced how they apparently funneled dark money into politics though a comlex network of shell companies. Did this money end up with one of the students, propagandists in Veles, who knows but it is not beyond the realms of possibility?

Facebook, Veles, Cambridge Analytica, that girl in New York on the way to the Jordan Centre. They all played a part in the election. They all added value in their own way. However, most people that were effected by each of these, will never know. That is the power of social media. From a media behemoth on nearly every computer screen in the world, to a reputable news site with the earnest journalists or the key-board warrior posting from the comfort of their bedroom, the information pool is the same and they can all make a difference.

Social media is touted as impartial and impassive a neutral soapbox for anyone who wishes to stand on it but actual fact it is a targeted and controlled data repository holding the personal information, opinions, desires and hopes of individuals all around the world. Its value is not predicated on product or industry but on information, data and access; commodities that are priceless when canvassing for votes.

It had seemed that the internet and social media had levelled the playing field but in fact, it paved over the grass and created a whole new game entirely. A game that I for one do not know who is keeping score.