In this book, I offered a few major conclusions in my investigation of fake news. First, examining the language of fake news and how it is talked about in various settings, I find there is no single, unifying definition. It is a contested concept, with fake news’s meaning being socially constructed in different ways depending on how people talk about it and the political environment within which they operate. Fake news, if one asked Donald Trump and his allies, is a catchall term referring to any message with which they disagree and see as a challenge to their political values and agendas.
Other societal actors have different understandings of fake news. Reporters privilege a definition emphasizing false news reports and information sources that traffic in dubious, factually inaccurate claims. The public has many definitions of fake news, seeing it as tabloid “reporting,” false or factually questionable news stories, conspiratorial content presented as truth, and reporting that fails to question powerful governmental actors trafficking in one-sided rhetoric and propaganda. Finally, the common understanding of fake news has also shifted over time. The term mainly referred to political comedy programming, false stories, and government propaganda masquerading as news prior to Trump’s political ascendance. Its meaning shifted and splintered into even more competing definitions once he became president. All the competing definitions make it difficult to discuss fake news intelligibly, especially with those who do not share one’s ideological worldview.
Despite competing definitions, fake news became a central feature of US politics during Trump’s presidency. Although he left office in 2021, the term continued to be commonly used in political discourse. Since fake news does not appear to be going anywhere as a concept, it makes sense to understand the ways it is used to describe media content. In Chapter 5, I documented how fake news is fueled by powerful governmental and business actors to promote their agendas, and to push dubious information that confuses the public on salient issues like war and the environment. In Chapter 6, I explored how fake news takes on a partisan bent and was used by Trump and his allies to try to discredit reporting that emphasized corruption in his administration. I discussed how fake news was weaponized by Trump and his supporters, ironically, to pedal falsehoods in their attempts to undermine discussions of presidential corruption on Russiagate and Ukrainegate. In Chapter 7, I analyzed the rise of fake news pertaining to conspiracies, including Republican propaganda on health care reform, Obama’s birthplace, Pizzagate and QAnon, and Covid-19 misinformation. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, I showed how fake news is weaponized to target perceived political enemies through “othering” and the social construction of reality in favor of falsehoods.
Aggregating my findings across eight case studies from the modern digital era (Iraq was not included), social media use (for all survey respondents) was never once associated with being more likely to form liberal-left opinions. Looking at subgroups of users, for three case studies – the environment, Russiagate, and Ukrainegate – Democratic social media users were significantly more likely to hold liberal opinions. In only one of these cases – the environment – were Republican social media users more likely to hold right-wing beliefs. In two of the cases – the death panels and birther conspiracies – survey data was not available on social media users, although Facebook and Twitter were mobilized by Republican officials – Sarah Palin and Donald Trump – to promote disinformation. Finally, for three cases – “Big Lie” election propaganda, QAnon, and Covid-19 misinformation, social media use (for all survey respondents) was significantly associated with forming right-wing beliefs. In total, there is evidence of rightward influence from social media in six of the eight case studies – for opinions on the environment, election fraud, the death panel conspiracy, birtherism, QAnon, and Covid-19. In contrast, there is only evidence for liberalizing social media effects in three cases – the environment, Russiagate, and Ukrainegate, and in not a single case is social media use (for all survey respondents) associated with forming liberal views. To summarize, there is much more evidence for right-wing effects and social media use than there is for left-wing effects, although there is evidence that “both sides” fall into online echo chambers.
With allegations of election fraud, QAnon, and Covid-19 misinformation, the effects of fake news were felt beyond right-wing echo chambers, with social media use overall being associated with holding reactionary political beliefs. These findings reinforce the conclusion that much of the polarization in social media is asymmetrical – working to favor right-wing political views. This phenomenon is harmful to democracy, particularly when Americans are encouraged to develop reactionary political views that are based on conspiracy theories and misinformation. For a democracy to function, it requires the public to engage in rational political discourse and to be relatively well informed, or at least not grossly misinformed.
How to Combat Fake News: Recommendations for Individuals
As individuals, we are responsible for our political and social education, and we can make better or worse decisions when it comes to the quality of information we consume. At a time when fake news is producing an epidemic of misinformation, I provide recommendations for how to combat the problem of mass confusion and for improving one’s civic and informational literacy, knowledge, and competence.
Tips for Identifying Fake News
The American Library Association offers a list of 10 tips to help media consumers identify and “protect yourself” from fake news. They are reproduced here in full, and provide guidance for assessing informational sources:
1. Does the headline sound unrealistic? Don’t believe everything you read.
2. Check the URL. Does it have any odd suffixes or substitutions?
3. Check the author’s credentials. Skip anonymous news reports.
4. Make sure the headline and/or picture matches the content.
5. Consult and compare competing sources.
6. Fact-check and compare competing sources.
7. Fact-check stories with sites like Snopes, FactCheck, and PolitiFact.
8. Dig deeper. Follow up on cited sources and quotes.
9. Beware online “filter bubbles” that show you only items that are similar to items you have liked.
10. Be open minded. Ask questions.
While these tips are helpful for spotting fake news, we should also consider how to develop empirical-reasoning skills through the application of social scientific research methods.
Going Further: Tips from the Social Sciences for Developing Information Literacy
Part of the problem with the rise of partisan propaganda, conspiracy theories, and misinformation is the failure of large segments of the population to appreciate and utilize social science reasoning when assessing information. Developing a social science approach to critical thinking is not as difficult as some might think, considering that Americans are already exposed to the scientific method as part of their K-12 education. Unfortunately, the steps of the scientific method are primarily emphasized in relation to observation of the natural world, while their value to the social world is routinely neglected or ignored.
Adopting a social science method for assessing information, individuals should consider a number of questions. These include:
1. What is the claim that is being offered?
2. Is it a hypothesis that can be confirmed or falsified? In other words, has the author left open some clear and transparent measure of assessment in which it is at least possible that the hypothesis can be disconfirmed? Much of the time this condition is not met in political and media discourse, with pundits and officials claiming they are right, but with no systematic process of inquiry that provides a mechanism for assessing whether their claims are accurate.
3. For the claim that is offered: What evidence is presented in favor of it?
4. Does the individual making the claim rely on a reputable data source? To help assess the source, one should ask: Have professionals and experts of various kinds – including journalists from reputable news outlets, academics and academic institutions, governmental research-based and professional organizations, or fact-checking groups – weighed in on the claim, and what have they said?
5. How many experts have assessed the claim in question, and is there agreement between them, or do some disagree?
If any red flags arise in relation to the aforementioned questions, one would do well to be critical of the claim being offered.
Sources of Information for Exposing Oneself to Diverse Perspectives
Aside from the recommendations mentioned previously, it is important to limit one’s exposure to informational echo chambers. Such environments encourage individuals to become complacent and overly confident in their views, while fueling intellectual laziness and ignorance because the individuals participating in them do not expose themselves to contrary claims. Effective education should be difficult, with individuals engaging with many different and competing positions. This is not supposed to be a comfortable process, as we should always be questioning our prior beliefs. In the spirit of encouraging individuals to pursue a pluralistic education and expose themselves to many viewpoints, I provide recommendations in the following passages for those looking for sources of reputable information, on the left, right, and for mainstream media. I also identify dubious informational sources that traffic in misinformation despite claiming to be news.
Reputable Mainstream News Sources
Reputable Conservative-Right Sources
The National Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal (opinion columns and editorial page), The Daily Mail, and Law & Liberty
Reputable Liberal and Progressive-Left Sources
The Nation, Salon, Democracy Now!, CounterPunch, Common Dreams, and Truthout
By exposing oneself to different venues, ideologically speaking, individuals can enhance their ability to engage in thoughtful analysis of important political questions, and to formulate beliefs based on a more cosmopolitan exploration of diverse perspectives. But some media venues have developed a reputation for trafficking in conspiracy theories, misinformation, and other extreme content. These sources are not legitimate news venues, have little interest in social scientific reasoning, and often have active contempt for it. One would do well to avoid them entirely, short of examining them as part of a sociological research project on the problems of fake news and misinformation.
Combating Fake News with Political Reform
Resistance to fake news should not only occur at the individual level, especially when we are talking about a society-wide problem like mass misinformation. In this section, I provide some proposals for policy reform that will aid in combating fake news, disinformation actors, and misinformation. These include: (1) A renewed focus on promoting civic and informational literacy and competence in K-12 and collegiate education; (2) Government regulation of social media venues that can help in the fight against rising fake news and misinformation; and (3) renewed taxpayer support for nonprofit public media sources, with access to quality information and journalism provided as a basic human right and a public good.
Renewed Civic and Information Literacy
The United States has done a poor job educating our youth to develop critical thinking skills and information literacy. Recent education reform, including the Common Core curriculum, does not mandate social scientific literacy as a central component of K-12 education. While the Common Core initiative lists “English Language Arts and Literacy Standards” as one of its two pillars of learning, a closer examination of “literacy standards” reveals goals that are woefully inadequate for combating the rise of fake news and mass misinformation. The Common Core’s highest “History/Social Studies” standards, listed for 12th graders, reference student learning to:
“determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text” and “determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source,”
cite “specific textual evidence” from “primary and secondary sources,”
“evaluate various explanations for actions or events” to “determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence,” and
“integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media” (Common Core, Reference Collins2021).
These pedagogical goals are important in demonstrating that students are learning how to identify meaning and claims, assessing competing viewpoints, and synthesizing information to draw larger lessons. But these are relatively limited forms of learning, relative to higher levels of knowledge building, as commonly understood for example in Bloom’s taxonomy, which includes as the highest form of learning and education the development of “knowledge” through the creation and production of original research. This level of learning involves utilization of the scientific method for the study of the social world, and involves a commitment to hypothesis testing. While it is unrealistic to think that high school seniors will develop the necessary skills to undertake an original, professional academic research project of the kind produced by graduate students or scholars in higher education, it is not unreasonable to say high schoolers should at least be made aware of the process of knowledge building in the social sciences through the scientific method. This is hardly a radical notion, considering students are already introduced to the steps of the scientific method for inquiries into the natural world as early as elementary school.
Simply stated, K-12 educational institutions in the United States have failed American youth in their low expectations for promoting civic and informational literacy, as related to application of the scientific method to the social world. “Social sciences” does not even appear in K-12 educational curricula for the Common Core, but rather the lower threshold of learning designated as “social studies.” A complete revamping of social inquiry is necessary to familiarize students at a young age with the scientific method and hypothesis testing as applied to the social world. Whether such a reform is done in a decentralized way, with the states opting for different educational standards as they did in the Common Core, or through the more centralized approach of a federal mandate, is something that should be discussed and debated by educators, administrators, and legislators working in the K-12 education system.
Americans should also consider introducing minimal civic and informational literacy requirements, again based in social science inquiry, at the collegiate level and earlier. It is difficult to argue that one is engaged in “higher learning” if there are students completing a four-year college degree without taking at least a survey class emphasizing how social science inquiry works in the context of hypothesis testing and the scientific method. Furthermore, minimal standards could be introduced in colleges and universities for ensuring that students gain hands-on experience in developing information literacy by assessing and engaging with specific media outlets, to determine whether they are credible sources of information. This requirement should be introduced in K-12 educational institutions as well.
Government Regulation and Taxpayer-Funded Journalism
This book documented in detail the failure of social media to equip the American public in the battle against misinformation and conspiracies. These platforms play an active, primary role in exacerbating these problems. Without serious reform, there is little reason to think much is going to change when it comes to combating the rising misinformation crisis. It is not realistic to think that traditional gatekeeping media will effectively beat back rising misinformation, considering declining consumption of these venues and their own role in promoting the propaganda of powerful government and business actors.
Between 2000 and 2020, the total annual circulation of US daily newspapers declined from 55 million to 25 million – or by 55 percent – despite the population growing by 18 percent (Pew Research Center, 2021b). While the number of people relying on online newspaper websites and other digital news sources increased during these decades (Pew Research Center, 2021b), newspapers found themselves in an increasingly precarious position, since online viewership does not produce the same advertising revenues as the larger volume of ads sold in traditional print newspapers. Reinforcing this point, as consumers flocked away from print newspapers and toward online news sources, US newspaper revenues declined from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018 – by 62 percent – while the number of reporters employed by newspapers fell by almost half during this period, from 71,000 to 38,000 (Grieco, Reference Grieco2020). Total US newspaper revenues fell even more dramatically from the early 2000s through the late 2010s, from $48.7 billion in 2000 to $14.7 billion in 2018 – a 70 percent decline (Hendrickson, Reference Hendrickson2019).
Local newspapers suffered a similar fate, experiencing crisis-level decline. Visits to local news websites grew by nearly 90 percent from 2019 to 2020, looking at consumption rates before and after the onset of the pandemic, and as Americans sought information about their localities and how they were affected by Covid-19. But again, increased consumption of online news did not translate into increased advertising revenues, with Gannett, the nation’s largest owner of local newspapers, seeing a decline in advertising revenues of 35 percent (Darr, Reference Darr2021). Approximately 2,200 local newspapers across the country closed between the mid-2000s and the early 2020s (Joiner, McMahon, and Just, Reference Joiner, McMahon and Just2021). By 2020, only half of the 3,000+ US counties had at least one local print newspaper, only a third had a daily paper, and more than 200 counties had no newspaper at all (Joiner, McMahon, and Just, Reference Joiner, McMahon and Just2021).
As I discussed in Chapter 7, with the decline of traditional print media, public reliance on social media for news increased from the late 2000s through the late 2010s. Based on this evidence, the problem with American misinformation is twofold: It stems from the decline of gatekeeping print media at the local and national level, and from the rising reliance on dubious informational sources such as social media. It seems unlikely at this point that the old patterns of media consumption will reestablish themselves in the 2020s, as more and more Americans gravitate away from “old” print media and toward “new” social media for their information.
Some critics support a government crackdown on social media misinformation (Klar, Reference Klar2021). But the heavy hand of government censorship carries risks and is unlikely to solve the problem of mass misinformation. For one, censorship is not an effective solution for helping individuals learn how to spot disinformation, misinformation, and fake news. That can be done only through better civics and information literacy education. Furthermore, government pressure on social media to censor content creates a slippery slope, raising the question of who gets censored and for what. The risk here is that social media suppress dissident political voices at the behest of government, and with minimal accountability, significantly altering national political discourse. Social media corporations are likely to oppose this sort of regulation, since pervasive censorship means providing users with reasons to abandon these platforms, while other venues may be there to offer a comparable service, and without silencing their users.
Considering these challenges, the path forward may lie in pioneering a system of nonprofit, taxpayer-funded journalism, to promote renewed civic education and help fight mass misinformation. But the current nonprofit public media system is heavily underfunded and quasi-privatized in orientation, with NPR receiving no direct taxpayer funding from the US government. Public television and radio receive radically less government assistance than public media in other wealthy countries, with the US funding public media to the tune of $1.35 per person per year, compared to $22.48 in Canada, $58.86 in Japan, $80.36 in the United Kingdom, and $101 in Denmark (Lee, Reference Lee2012).
A reinvigorated public media could address two problems at once – guaranteeing Americans access to information through increased taxpayer funding for local reporting and by increasing revenues for PBS and NPR affiliates, while ensuring the nation has access to quality journalism as a human right and a public good. Increased taxpayer funding, however, will not do much to address the public’s shift to dubious informational sources such as social media. This problem can be addressed through government regulations requiring platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to saturate users’ feeds with news stories produced by publicly funded media entities. This regulation could be implemented under a “you broke it, you fix it” rational, if Congress and government regulators were to draw attention to the scope of the information crisis documented in this book – which is due in large part to the public shift to relying on social media for their news.
Outside of these reforms, the problem of misinformation in other media venues – for example, in conspiracy content on Fox News, InfoWars, and elsewhere – can also be addressed by government regulation. Congress could legislate that news outlets arguing in court that they do not deal in facts – as Fox News and Alex Jones of InfoWars do to avoid being sued for promoting harmful lies and misinformation (Siemaszko, Reference Siemaszko2017; Folkenflik, Reference Folkenflik2020) – must inform their followers that they should not take them seriously as news sources. These outlets could be required to provide a warning label before each program acknowledging that they are not providing real news, as Fox News and InfoWars already argue in court. This sort of regulation would work similarly to disclaimers on cigarette packs warning consumers that smoking is hazardous to your health. With conspiratorial media outlets, users could be informed that these venues admit they are not trafficking in facts.
The United States is at a crossroads with the rising problem of information illiteracy and mass exposure to, and indulgence in, misinformation. Combating this crisis requires a renewed commitment to a political culture that values education and evidence-based reasoning, that respects various forms of expertise, that recognizes the difference between legitimate news and fake news, that rejects paranoia and conspiracy theories, and that recognizes learning is a lifelong process – not something that ends when one is “credentialed” after earning a college degree. But without a fundamental reordering of our national priorities, the problems of mass misinformation, rising anti-intellectualism, and intensifying public ignorance are likely to continue and intensify.
