Characteristics of Fake News

[Image ID: Four wooden blocks against a red background that spell out "FACT" or "FAKE" depending on if one looks at the upper or lower angle of the blocks.  Source: Scientific American.]

Characteristics

Topics: What is fake news likely to be about?

Politics

        Often focuses on political outrage or current events

 

Conspiracies

Any attempt to assert that secret groups are controlling world events, usually maliciously

 

Nature

Heartwarming stories or “creature features” about unusual natural events

 

Health

 Spurious or manipulative information about our bodies and diets

 

Celebrities

Any form of gossip about famous individuals

 

 

Mechanisms: How does fake news draw attention?

Urgency

Often taps into current events or claim time limits to share information

 

Outrage

Anything that makes people angry is likely to incur page clicks

 

Fear

Either stoking existing fears or creating new ones about potential risks will draw attention

 

Trust monopoly

A tactic that involves claiming that one’s own channel is the only one that delivers honest and unbiased reporting, in order to prevent engagement with other (real) news sources

 

Gaslighting

An attempt to deny reality through claiming that others have biased perceptions or that readers cannot trust their own senses

 

Stoking egos

Focusing on ways that readers or their groups have desirable qualities

 

Us vs. them mentality

Creating a sense of competition between groups, and tearing outgroup members down

 

 

 

Qualities: What makes fake news persuasive and “sticky” or viral?

Emotional appeals

Affective content draws attention and stays in the mind

 

Share appeals

Unlike real news, fake news often contains direct demands to be retweeted or shared

 

Pseudo-profound bullshit

Overwhelming any attempt at criticism through use of technical language or fake expertise

 

Doctored footage

Using information that engages the senses, which will often be remembered long after metacognitive tags of fakeness have been forgotten

 

Fauxtos

Deliberate misinterpretations of images or videos to make them more shocking

 

 

Formats: How does fake news tend to package itself?

Few/no/bad sources

Generally no links (or only links to non-factual sites), and no resources on where the coverage is coming from or how the author obtained this information

 

Short

Fake news is usually no more than a few paragraphs long, and often occurs in single-paragraph or even single-phrase formats

 

Memes

Although memes cannot really convey real news, they often convey fauxtos, outrages, share appeals, and other forms of fake news

 

No meta-data

Fake news generally lacks information on the time of an event, the time the story was posted, the author’s name and contact information, the news organization’s contact information, and other paratextual elements

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Example

Sample: What does fake news look like?

[Image ID: This fake photo has been altered to show President Trump leaning out of rescue boat to hand a campaign hat to a man clinging to a fence while in waist-deep floodwaters. Source: Snopes.]

Characteristics of this fake news item include: fauxto, outrage, politics, us vs. them mentality, no sources, share appeals, urgency, emotional appeals, celebrity gossip, short format, no meta-data

• What's the truth?
• President Trump did visit Houston in the weeks following the Hurricane Harvey floods, and did give material gifts to some of the victims
• No president would be allowed to venture into dangerous floodwaters as depicted here
  
• This photo is not from Houston, did not originally contain Donald Trump, and predates his use of red hats as campaign merchandise
  

• Who made up this story?
• Originally posted on a liberal site with a caption falsely claiming that outgroup member President Trump had given out campaign hats rather than providing real help to Houston flood victims
  

• Where did it spread?
• Widely shared on both liberal and conservative social media
  
• Liberal posters often cast this moment as reprehensible behavior from a powerful figure who stoked his ego rather than helping an individual in distress
• Conservative posters often cast this moment as an authority helping those in need with both material and emotional aid
  

• How can we tell this is fake?
• Inaccuracies in photo
• The president is wearing a white shirt that is perfectly clean in spite of the waist-deep muddy water that surrounds him
• The man reaching toward the boat is slightly misaligned; he would not be able to grasp the hat or the hand of a rescuer from that angle
• President Trump is a large man, but his end of the boat is sitting higher in the water than that of the smaller rescuer — his image was edited over that of a different person, and his size was exaggerated to draw the eye to him
  

• Lack of information
• The photographer is not credited, nor is the news site
  
• The longest versions of this fake news story were only a sentence or two that (with various biases) restated the contents of the photo itself
  
• Searching Google News and similar news-compiling sites for this story does not produce any corroborating coverage

• Low plausibility
• President Trump is present without Secret Service or even a life vest in an extremely dangerous situation, the kind of risk that presidents are forbidden from taking
  
• Even those who oppose Trump can acknowledge that it would be highly irregular for any politician to hand out campaign merch to a man seconds from being swept away by floodwaters