Ryan Weissinger
Final Paper
POLS 4060
Abstract: Social networks have emerged as a critical factor in information dissemination, search, and an important tool for news sharing. As a result, we do not yet understand dynamics of information spread on networks or how the structure of the network affects it. How do different social media platforms such as Facebook share, spread and make viral certain news stories? Are these platforms aiming for being a journalistic source such as CNN or FOX news or is the platform meant to be a platform where pet videos and memes are shared among friends? Has the process of quickly sharing information to friends, family, coworkers become so mainstreamed that it removes critical thought from sharing it? This paper analyzes the spread and impact of new digital modes of spreading news in recent national elections in the US. Comparing the amount of stories regarding both major party presidential candidates in 2016 and how the stories are shared on social media.
Facebook, the popular social media website and smart phone application, has integrated itself into the daily lives of millions of American citizens as well as people residing in other areas of the world. Launched in the early months of 2004 out of Harvard University by Mark Zuckerberg Facebook has become a popular website for people of all ages to come together and become friends. Over the course of its 14 year run people have used it to share events, birthdays, news articles and a plethora of other things. This has helped spread millions of stories across the internet and connecting people together. Both good stories and bad stories, some stories were down right untruthful or flat out lies. This paper, acknowledging full well that hard and definitive numbers on fake news stories within the context of the 2016 Presidential election may never be released to public use, conservative but assurable estimations have been made and agreed upon. This paper looks at analyzing how fake news was spread on facebook and its impact on the 2016 Presidential election.
The first thing to note is that fake news stories are not strictly limited to the world of politics and the sensationalized headlines cross over to so many different cultures across Earth and has become an issue that will never have a true resolution as fake news will show itself in many forms across different platforms, from spam emails to legitimate looking news articles from not as well recognized news sources. The phenomenon of factually incorrect news articles, commonly referred to as “fake news” was rampant on Facebook in respect to the two major party candidates running in the 2016 Presidential Election. In fact Facebook was the number one disseminator of false news publishings. More so than any other single website or traditional news source such as radio, television news or printed media during the 2016 election cycle.
According to the study what stories were deemed “fake” reached were wide spread but did not offer much depth or detail for people to remember and thus the news story did not stick as well as a real hard news storyline. Facebook became so infamous for fake news that in April of this year it had to take to television as well as its own website to issue an official apology in a minute long advertisement saying that they would do better to prevent the spread of potentially fake news.
The terms “fake news” and “alternative facts” will be forever engrained in the 2016 Presidential election. “Fake News” is defined “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.” The spread of fake news across facebook was nearly unavoidable for people who logged in regularly (3 times or more a week). We bring the focus on fake news articles that have political implications, with special attention to the 2016 US presidential elections.
Donald Trump managed to garner the Republican nomination from a field of over a dozen candidates. Then he overcome democratic candidate and political powerhouse Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the United States. Fake news stories tended to be positively skewed towards Trump while the positive fake news stories about Clinton were fewer and farther between by comparison. While Trumps rise to political power was a move that very few saw coming, the seemingly endless onslaught of news stories on Facebook regarding both Trump and Clinton was also a move that few expected to see.
When analyzing the numbers of these stories the headlines of certain stories did surface among the statistics. Some of these headlines read “Hillary Clinton sells weapons to ISIS.” while “Pope Francis Endorses Trump.” The high level of fake news bombarded millions of timelines across the US and the globe. This caused many people to become genuinely confused and unsure of their ability to determine genuine news from fake news. Fake news, reaches the benchmark of 1,500 people more quickly than true news stories reach that same mark, in some cases almost as six times as long. This may imply that the false news stories would stop once it hits 1,500 people and wait for the true news story to catch up. That is not the case, once it hits 1,500 the fake news story is going to continue to spread, garner more viewership and exposure while the the true news story lags behind. An accurate analogy that has been attributed to this is that the true news story spreads at the same rate of dial up internet from the turn of the current century while the fake news runs like it is on a fiber optic network.
So how and why does fake news spread so much more quickly? Sensationalized headlines grab the attention of potential viewers. Titles of articles are given catchy headlines that are made to be “Click Bait” a term which in this context means “a sensationalized headline or piece of text on the Internet designed to entice people to follow a link to an article on another web page.” An example of this headline was a screenshot image of a tweet that read and I quote “I love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio and ripping up the absentee ballots that vote for Trump.” The ensuing fallout of this image of a tweet from October of 2016 caused many Ohio voters to call in and check that their absentee ballots had been registered and accounted for. This caused undue stress for voters, the postal service had to handle an increase in phone calls as well as in person complaints.
Given that the state of Ohio is an important swing state in every presidential election, many people both from Ohio and other parts of the United States reacted wildly from cheering on the action to heavily condemning it. While it was later deduced by snopes.com and other sources in and around the Columbus post offices that a person matching the description of the twitter account could not be verified as a worker. The fact that an event like that sounds plausible is what made it catch on and explode across the internet so quickly and the twitter account itself is tracked to an email based out of California. That tweet, prompted the United States Postal Service to do a full inspection of their branches in the Columbus metropolitan area. That is just one example of fake news and its broad reaching impact, in the long term there was no real news to be had outside of someone using social media to spread something inaccurate.
Fake news, clearly while fake only needs to sound like its real or just real enough to be shown to a friend or family member or shared widespread on social media sites. Social media sites have made the process of sharing and spreading information so simple that it takes just a few seconds to share the content on ones personal time feed and spread that our to the time feeds of the people who are friends or followers of the person sharing. While technologically savvy people are able to share and spread information across multiple platforms in a condensed period of time. The convenience of being able to share things so quickly eliminates the time that brains may require in order to think about the accuracy of the content posted. the legitimacy of the source who wrote the news article or how that article can be misinterpreted.
Fake news is hard to stop because it is nearly impossible to know where the next one will come from. The New York Times Newspaper did a case study of Texas resident Eric Tucker. A normal person who did not have a large following on social media until Mr. Tucker made a misinformed post, taking a photo of buses in Austin, Texas and making the claim that they were full of people being paid to protest Donald Trump in a nearby rally event.
Mr. Tucker debated about deleting the post in hopes of fading back into the normal life he had enjoyed. A simple misinterpretation of events and not truly seeing what he was looking at caused a viral storm on him and his family to where he had to go to a local news source and apologize for his misinformed post. The company who had their buses featured in his photos also had to issue a statement, said Sean Hughes, Director of Corporate Affairs “at no point were Coach USA buses involved in the Austin protests.” But that did little to stem the online furor.” The article by Sapna Maheshwari continues to state that the photos Mr. Tucker took, one day after the election in 2016 were shared at least 16,000 times on Twitter and more than 350,000 times on Facebook. For someone who only had 40 twitter followers at the time of the post that is an exponential increase in people interacting with him, his timeline and the content he posted. A simple misjudgment, thrust this seemingly mundane 30 something year old into internet headlines for his fifteen minutes of fame. While he has been able to go back to his life before this infamous posting and the company who owned the buses is still operating normally it was a mess that was easily avoidable if Mr. Tucker had asked the people there rather than google.
This brings in the next factor, the environment and culture created on facebook. Back when facebook was just beginning it was a more peaceful and less politicized place. This doesn’t mean that politics weren’t discussed back in the mid 2000’s on Facebook. It just means that politics on facebook were not as hyper partisan as they have become in more recent years because the amount of non political content made the political content more infrequent. According to Facebook year in review data base in both 2015 and 2016 the Presidential Election was the most widely discussed topic on facebook, out doing every other subject from Harambe, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali to the NFL protests regarding the National Anthem and the Black Lives Matter movement. Those all passed in due time and while some of them still linger on the nooks and crannies of the internet they failed to maintain their prominence on Facebook in the same manner that the 2016 election cycle has been able to.
The issue with fake news, is that it provides just enough details to seem believable, just enough to make people hit the send button on an email chain to there friend and caption it “you aren’t going to believe this!” Some of the most absurd headlines that were confirmed to be false “RuPaul claims Trump touched him inappropriately in the 90s.”, “Hillary Clinton in 2013: ‘I would like to see people like Donald Trump run for office; they’re honest and can’t be bought.”, “#Pizzagate.”, “Donald Trump sent his own plane to transport 200 stranded marines”, "Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president.” Each of these headlines is enough to grab peoples attention, some may read it and believe it to be true, some may read it and wish it was or wasn’t true but the view it just the same and the ability to share it to one, two or a whole multitude of people is just a few screen taps away before it is sent out again onto the internet. While a Boeing 727 with the Trump brand did escort Marines home, Trump didn’t personally order it to be done, the Pope did not endorse Trump for presidency, #Pizzagate was a dark and twisted story that no one should ever hope is true, and Hillary was never on any official record stating that Trump or people like him should run.
The 2016 election cycle caused an epidemic of fake news. The debate among political savvy communities as well as internet chat rooms continues to this day. Stanford University Economist Matthew Gentzkow studied the phenomenon and states “Fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared a total of 30 million times, nearly quadruple the number of pro-Hillary Clinton shares leading up to the election” This is clearly a lopsided fake news victory in favor of Donald Trump and when the scales are tilted that heavily towards one side it may impact voters decisions on election day and early voting. Mr. Gentzkow continues “only 14 percent say they relied on Facebook and other social media sites as their most important source of election coverage.” Which to most people is satisfying to hear that traditional news sources, such as radio and television as well as printed media are still more widely accepted as peoples primary source of news. Television is still the dominant source for news in respect the the month leading into election day.
Mr. Gentzkow also calculated the work that would need to be put in, on a per voter basis to get voters to change their ideas. Meaning that every single last voter would have to see this amount of fake news or advertisements, in order to change their vote. “For fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake news story would need to have convinced about 0.7 percent of Clinton voters and non-voters who saw it to shift their votes to Trump, a persuasion rate equivalent to seeing 36 television campaign ads” This assumes that every American voter has access to a TV with a standard cable tv package. This easily can be denounced as an impossible feat to do.
According to the Pew research center, about 60% of young adults, ages 18-29 stream TV shows on websites such as Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu or use a fire stick to plug into their TV. All of this means that they don’t use cable TV, where most political advertisements have traditionally been found. Younger votes are trending away from cable TV packages as the internet and its various websites are more customizable and cater to their specific interests in TV shows, movies and other interests. Cable TV packages can be customized to individual station but doesn’t not offer the level of convenience that can be offered by streaming sites and it has caused a drop in young TV viewership numbers. The number of thirty-six tv advertisements is a tough number to attain as far as getting people to watch.
So, if TV seems to be on the downhill and internet is on the upswing it would make logical sense to see an increase in spending on the internet side of things from the perspective of a campaign manager. In the 2016 cycle campaigns a total of $9.8 Billion dollars was spent on campaign ads. Spending on TV advertisements dropped by nearly 20% in comparison to the 2012 cycle between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Radio also declined from 2012 to 2016 by about 23% where accumulative $621 Million was spent. Meanwhile digital ads, includes video ads, mobile, email, social and search, broke the billion dollar mark, reaching $1.4 billion, and growing a staggering 789% from $159 million in 2012.
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