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It's the phrase bombarding seemingly every platform of your life. Smushed between funny cat videos and celebrity tweets it finds its way into nearly every social media site you possess. It's talked about at the water cooler on Monday mornings and joked about on late night shows almost every evening. It reaches from the executive branch all the way to the random thoughts in your head. It is the idea and the reality of fake news.
The rise of fake news
The term has been growing in popularity since it first entered the public lexicon sometime last October (2016) according to google's trend data. Though the term first made its debut late in the election season, it reached its peak in January when President Trump calls out CNN for being fake news. Since then the phrase has gained so much traction that it was even named the 2016 word of the year by the Macquarie Dictionary.
But the words themselves are not to be feared by the public sphere, but rather the act of spreading false and slandering news as pure fact that fights information based on fact checking, interviews and research.
In fact in the last three months of the 2016 campaign, top performing fake news stories on Facebook generated more views, shares, comments and likes than top stories from major news outlets.
The impact on the public
With social media's vast accessibility anybody can be a perpetrator of fake news and even more people can be the victims.
Take for instance Twitter verified Mike Cernovich. Cernovich is described by The New York Times as an "alt-right news provocateur and promoter of Clinton health conspiracies."
In an interview Cernovich boasted about his page and opinions as the "fourth estate" which means it can "live along side The Times, The Boston Globe or The Washington Post" and do equal if not better traction.
In fact Cernovich blatantly informs all traffic to his twitter profile, via his bio, that he has 150 million views per month.
No longer does this mean the public can trust anything they read as fact. A problem for the world when many lack the time or desire to fact check all information they come across.
Furthermore even real news has become labeled as "fake news" for not matching up with a certain persons ideological views, only adding more confusion and chaos to the equation.
The impact on news outlets and journalist
All of this adds up to greater distrust in journalist and large news mediums.
In a recent Gallup poll results showed that only 32 percent of Americans surveyed trust that the media is presenting the news "fully, accurately and fairly," being the first time this annual number has fallen below 40 percent.
This can lead to a loss in advertising and funding to newspapers which leads to a loss in jobs for journalist today. In fact in 2015 the number of journalist was nearly 33 thousand, a number that is on its way to being half as much as it was just 15 years prior.
Finding a solution
If this idea is such a problem, the question becomes what are we doing to combat its already raging effects?
Facebook has been trying to set up its own line of defense by laying out a seven step plan including such things as third party verification and cracking down on ads with misinformation.
As for journalist, the best thing we can do is to continue to present the information as factually and unbiased as possible in hopes to over power those trying to corrupt journalism's reputation.
As The New York Times' writer Jim Rutenberg puts it, "the cure for fake journalism is overwhelming doses of good journalism."
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