The United States is a nation divided: that is one of the most dominant narratives that emerged during this year's presidential race.
That reality—missed by pollsters, pundits and political experts alike—helped to explain the popularity and stunning electoral victory of Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The other story of 2016 is the rise of so-called “fake news” and its spike on social media outlets. Facebook, in particular, has come under fire, having surpassed Google as the biggest driver of audience on all social media platforms.
This week, Trump again invited controversy — a move now commonly called a “tweet storm” — by tweeting out a claim of voter fraud during the November election that he says denied him the popular vote without citing any evidence.
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
The "fake news" phenomenon has rattled the web, not to mention mainstream journalists, scholars and ordinary users of social media, many of whom are tweeting and writing op-ed columns, news stories and guides on how to spot inaccurate news stories and fake news websites.
All this has put unprecedented pressure on Facebook, where, according to an News, fake election stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election articles from 19 major news outlets in the final three months of the election campaign.
The heat on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg prompted the company to tweak its algorithm to weed out inaccurate information, and later, as the outcry grew, the company is taking to reduce what Zuckerberg called "misinformation."
He prefaced his post with a familiar caveat:
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There are legitimate sites, journalists and scholars who are paying attention to the prevalence of "fake news." Among them: Snopes.com, , The Poynter Institute and Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack University, who wrote a Google document with tips on how to spot "fake news" sites or inaccurate news stories for her students.
According to these fact-checkers, we must first understand what "fake news" is - and isn’t.
“We classify 'fake news' as specifically web sites that publish information that's entirely fabricated," said Kim LaCapria, content manager for , a website that tracks misinformation on the web.
“Right now 'fake news' is being applied to 'slanted and/or inaccurate news,'” added LaCapria. “So there's some conflation.”
And that conflation of what information can accurately be described as fake or misleading or maybe only partially true, coupled with the warp speed of digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter, have created a perfect storm of confusion, said University of Connecticut philosophy professor and author Michael Lynch.
“Confusion and deception is happening…. and mass confusion about the importance of things like truth follow in the wake of that deception," said Lynch, who wrote a this week about impact of "fake news" on the health of America’s political system. “And that is absolutely corrosive to democracy.”
LaCapria, like Lynch, also has seen first-hand how branding everything that is verifiably false "fake news" isn’t really what is happening on social media. “One long-circulating rumor held that Hillary Clinton was fired from the Watergate investigation for lying,” LaCapria said.
“If I recall correctly, we rated it mostly false because the claim originated with someone who had changed his story over the years. But in our politics category, the news is not fake per se. It's often false, mixture, mostly false or unproven.”
LaCapria points out distorted or false information has existed for a long time.
“This is the first real social media election we’ve ever experienced. And we had two social media candidates: [Bernie] Sanders and Trump,” she said.
“Now that people are upset about Trump, they're looking at social media as a culprit. And it may be a mitigating factor, but this has all definitely been affecting politics hugely for many years.”
The Poynter Institute’s Alexios Mantzarlis, who leads the International Fact-Checking Network, agrees that there is a bit too much angst over "fake news."
“Politicians distorting the truth isn't a new phenomenon. Voters choosing politicians based on emotions rather than facts is not a new phenomenon,” Mantzarlis said in an email. “Moreover, we know from that fact-checking can change readers' minds."