When the world woke on 9 November 2016 to find Donald Trump had won the US presidential election, it was like a break in mainstream, consensual reality. This topped even Back to the Future’s joke, when Doc Brown asked Marty, ‘Then tell me future-boy, who’s president of the United States in 1985?’ and his incredulity at being told it was Ronald Reagan, the actor—‘Then who’s Vice-President? Jerry Lewis?’ Reagan, at least, had a political career. Trump was a celebrity-businessman, cameo film-actor, member of the WWE Hall of Fame and reality-TV host who had never held any public office.
Sweeping aside the conventions of professional political polish and presentation, Trump blustered, bluffed, fluffed, and incoherently shouted, threatened and tweeted his way to the presidency, surviving—and even gaining in strength from—character flaws and failures that would have torpedoed a normal campaign. Now he’d defeated probably the best-qualified presidential candidate in living memory. In the aftermath of his election, reality itself seemed broken. The fourth wall of the television screen had been smashed and the public had ‘hired’ the boss of The Apprentice.
But Trump wasn’t just a sign of a broken reality; he was the beneficiary of it. Mainstream consensual reality had shattered a long time ago; it was just that shattering hadn’t gone mainstream. Trump was the moment when that alt-reality seized the political stage. His success was the result of a violent abreaction, an outpouring and release of dispossessed discontent that had one credo: continually articulating itself against the establishment, the elite, the mainstream, the political order, the neo-liberal economic order, the global order, the established way of doing things—against, that is, the entirety of the hitherto existing mainstream reality. Much of this discontent was justified, such as the pain of the economically marginalized Rust Belt workers, and there were many good reasons to vote for an outsider against Hilary Clinton’s more-of-the-same neo-liberal centrism. But much of the discontent had a more dubious origin and cause, such as the ‘Whitelash’ of left-behind, angry white males, lamenting the multicultural PC-world where they thought only black lives now mattered and taking revenge on eight years of a black presidency.
There was, if you looked into it, a world of these claims, entire world-views disconnected from what appeared in the mainstream media, in an inter-linked, pick-and-mix online ecology of information, opinions, facts, narratives, and claims. Trying to decipher the world-view of these Trump voters, the press soon found their scapegoat. It was precisely this unreality that was responsible: it was ‘fake news’ that had won Trump the election. It was a convenient explanation too, allowing the mainstream media to direct blame at the internet—that upstart threat to their eyeballs and advertising revenue—and especially at the apparent cause of all this fake news, social media.
Within days, Facebook was getting the blame. Most people today get their news from Facebook, the argument went, hence their susceptibility to any and every story appearing in their feed. Fake stories, pushed into its ecology for political reasons, gathered attention and garnered shares and ‘likes’, projecting them virally through the network, spreading lies through social media and, therefore, through the heart of the social itself. By 11 November, Zuckerberg was on the defensive, telling a Californian technology conference, ‘The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way I think is a pretty crazy idea…Voters make decisions based on their lived experience’.1 Zuckerberg criticized the media’s interpretation of the result, saying, ‘I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election’.2
Others disagreed. On the 17th, ex-president Obama aimed some very-pointed remarks in Facebook’s direction at a press conference, saying, ‘If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems…If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect’.3 The problem was fundamental to democracy: ‘We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted’.4
Coming under increasing criticism, Facebook was forced to respond. On 19 November, Zuckerberg reversed his scepticism, acknowledging the issue and announcing new steps to counter fake news. ‘We take misinformation seriously’, he wrote in a post, ‘We know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.5’ He said the company has ‘relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not’, and claimed Facebook penalizes misinformation in the News Feed, just as it does clickbait, spams, and scams, ‘so it’s much less likely to spread’.6 By 6 December, Facebook was reported to be testing a tool designed to identify and hide fake news, and on 15 December, Facebook announced it would now be flagging fake news stories with the help of users and outside fact-checkers. Reader alerts would now lead to stories being sent to five independent fact-checking agencies, including ABC News, AP, Factcheck.org, Politifact, and Snopes. Stories that failed the test would be flagged with the warning ‘disputed by 3rd-party fact-checkers’.7
This was a significant reversal. Facebook had long denied being a media or news company and claimed not to be responsible for what its users post on it. Indeed, this was the default position of all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and web platforms, based on Section 230(1) of the 1996 US Communications Decency Act which established the principle of immunity from liability for providers of an ‘interactive computer service’ who publish information produced by others. The problem was, Facebook’s denial was disingenuous. They had a long history of removing material that offended against their ‘Community Standards’ and Terms of Service. Only a few months before, in September 2016, they had made headlines worldwide for their decision to delete a post by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland that featured ‘The Terror of War’, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut showing children, including the naked nine-year-old Kim Phúc, running away from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War.8 Facebook may not have wanted to be a media company, but they published information and exerted editorial control over it.
Importantly, Facebook also drew from liberal US traditions of freedom of speech and had declared on 12 November, ‘I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves’.9 Their own censorship and control compromised that lofty aim, though not fatally, but the new flagging and fact-checking system put them squarely in the position they had recently disavowed. The fake news scandal finally forced Zuckerberg to accept a different definition of his company. In a post on his own Facebook page announcing the changes, he admitted the business had a ‘greater responsibility’ to the public than just being a technology company:
Facebook was ‘a new kind of platform for public discourse’, with ‘a new kind of responsibility’.11 It made for a bad end-of-year for the previously unassailable and reverentially treated social media giant.While we don’t write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize we’re more than just a distributor of news. We’re a new kind of platform for public discourse – and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed.10
Of course, the outrage at Facebook and the technology companies was most vociferously expressed in the traditional news organizations, especially in newspapers. The mainstream press hadn’t simply lost the fight with the internet—accepting declining print sales and developing online sites where they mostly gave their work away for free—more importantly, they had lost control of people’s attention and interest to social media. There was a deep resentment within journalism that their profession didn’t matter as much now. Their entire livelihood was built on a technological system and in an age in which only a select few could broadcast their opinions to the masses. Now, anyone could, and we were more interested in our friends’ opinions—or, if we were honest, our own opinions—than those of a professional elite. Journalists had spotted the change. In a column in January 2007 entitled ‘Dear reader, please don’t email me’, LA Times journalist Joel Stein honestly expressed his disdain for the public’s opinions:
‘I get that you have opinions you want to share’, he says. ‘I just don’t have any interest in them’.13 The Web 2.0 world, therefore, had turned everyone into a writer and publisher. It was true that few said much worth reading, but it was important to them and their friends and it didn’t need an audience anyway as it wasn’t trying to gather advertising revenue or justify public funding. This is a cultural shift whose import we are still barely beginning to understand.That address on the bottom of this column? That is the pathetic, confused death knell of the once-proud newspaper industry, and I want nothing to do with it. Sending an email to that address is about as useful as sending your study group report about Iraq to the president.Here’s what my internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don’t listen to them either.12
But social media were also part of the economic threat to journalists’ livelihoods. As far as they were concerned, social media was a parasitic organism which allowed its users to post their journalism for free whilst benefiting from the resulting advertising revenue that had shifted from the newspapers themselves. Hence their hostility to social media, their schadenfreude at its difficulties now and the sometimes-self-righteous tone of their fake-news-scandal reportage: whilst social media posted lies that threatened democracy, they were the repositories of truth, of quality, of fact-checked information, of verified, objective and impartial reporting. Suddenly, it seemed, journalists had rediscovered their values. They wrote about truth and objectivity as if they were employed by The Washington Post or The New York Times, standing in a smoke-filled, 1970s newsroom, all wide-lapels and sideburns, pulling all-nighters on the typewriter whilst publishing the Watergate stories or Pentagon Papers. Facebook, it turned out, wasn’t the only one being disingenuous about its activities.
Because the problem of ‘fake news’ isn’t confined to social media. What began as a highly-specific problem of deliberately written false stories designed to gain traction online in order to hurt a specific political cause or candidate soon mushro...