Fake News and the 2016 Election
Social media has become an outlet where people of all kinds can get news according to their own personal biases, but with an out let such as social media anyone can post anything. Anyone can post and repost fake news. Fake news has become an issue not only in the past, but in the most recent presidential election. The reason it is such a big deal right now is because of the prevalence of it on social media.
According to Hunt Allcott in his article “Social media and fake news in the 2016 election,” “62 percent of US adults get news on social media (Gottfriedand Shearer 2016); 2) the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories (Silverman 2016); 3) many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016); and 4) the most discussed fake news stories tended to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton (Silverman 2016). Putting these facts together, a number of commentators have suggested that Donald Trump would not have been elected president were it not for the influence of fake news.”
This article discusses the impact of fake news on journalism and discloses where some of the fake news originates from and it rules out things like unintentional news mistakes, satire and rumors as those are not fake news. The model for fake news from the article is difficult because it describes how fake news gains trust of its readers as a site they can come to for news. Some of the data on the article shows how fake news shared on social media helped the Trump campaign instead of the Clinton campaign. A study done in the article was pretty awesome. It showed what people saw and remembered from different news sources such as big true news, small true news stories, fake news stories and placebo news stories. The conclusion allows the reader to understand the depth of the fake news and the effects that fake news has. The article was insightful in that it allows the reader to understand just how much fake news had a part in the 2016 election.
“Fake news” may be the most relevant example of intentionally failed communication in recent memory. The goal of fake news is to confuse and spread misinformation, ultimately obfuscating the truth. A rhetorical study if fake news would be really interesting: basically, progenitors of fake news make intentionally bad rhetorical decisions to have their desired effect. I think there is a lot of interesting material in this area to study if you want to keep going in this direction.