Back To The Future | How the Google and Facebook era drove news back to yellow press excesses
Exaggerated headlines, clickbait and provocative statements not backed by facts – the “black magic” of a bygone age – are returning to undermine a business that is essentially about trust
In June, a story with a screaming headline, “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump”, set cyberspace abuzz. The fact that the story was broken by an obscure website called WTOE 5 hardly mattered. By the time it was debunked as a bogus satire piece, it had already travelled far and wide in social media.
A few weeks later, the site “Conservative Post” published a story claiming Tom Hanks had switched his support from Hillary Clinton to the Republican nominee. This too was proven to be erroneous.
Thanks to the “filter-bubble” phenomenon – in which people become increasingly isolated in their own ideological bubble and separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoint – many people still believed these “news” stories were true weeks after they were exposed by mainstream media.
The 2016 US presidential election was marred by controversies and fake news. A BuzzFeed news investigation found that during the last three months of the campaign, the 20 top-performing fake news stories drove more engagement than the 20 top-performing reports from major news outlets.
Many of these featured high in Google searches and were widely circulated on social media platforms like Facebook. Facing growing criticism, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced last Friday that his company would come up with “new measures” to cut down on fake news. Google announced a similar plan to ban sites that deliberately distribute misleading information. Even Barack Obama waded in. At a news conference in Berlin last Thursday, the American president warned that fake news could poison politics to the point that “we don’t know what we are fighting for”.