In conjunction with possibly detrimental misinformation and disinformation is the assumption that Internet users are savvy searchers and consumers of information because they are proficient with technological tools. Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) refer to this as participation in “mediascapes”; mediascape participants are Internet users who are well versed in the mechanics of playing games, photoshopping, creating memes and mashups, and so on, but who aren’t necessarily able to discern the information that is being manipulated and presented to them. Participation in mediascapes is a way for online users, especially younger adults, to communicate, interact, and be seen by their contemporaries. Use of the latest digital tools and media facilitates instant gratification and allows users to receive quick and widespread attention (Lankshear and Knobel 2011). The creation of memes, mashups, and photoshopped images is more about their producers and their “surface images, style, and brands associated with markers of identity and status” than it is about the content and subjects contained within these digital products (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998, 82). Frequently, mediascapes involve celebrities or other public figures; these are images and personalities “that are often confused with the realities” and worlds of the people creating said digital products (Lankshear and Knobel 2011, 14).
Internet traffic, in the form of clicks and views, equates to revenue. Generating activity on a website to earn money is a driving force behind the creation and dissemination of fake news. There is a dimension of political economy that undergirds this era of online journalism and content production. Simply stated, political economy refers to the study of production (of a product), trade, and money earned from said production in trade. In many ways, the news media and journalism outlets engage in political economy—they produce a tangible product (a news report, whether in print, online, or in an audiovisual format) and they receive money for that product. To this end, it pays, literally, for a news source to be the first outlet to produce and disseminate a story, and to produce their product in quantity.1 Fake news is now the newest version of this product, and in addition to an increase in quantity, there is a significant decrease in quality.
Once a rudimentary understanding of political economy is in hand, it becomes easier to identify the effects of political economy and recognize the influence that moneymaking has on our information consumption, particularly in and around social media. An amazing example of this hit the United States news in June 2017, when it was reported that there was a vending machine in Russia that allows users to purchase “likes” for their Instagram photos; for a price, and the alarming amount of uncertainty that accompanies providing a Russian vending machine with personal passwords and log-in information, customers can purchase hundreds of new followers and likes for their social media content.2 Not only is this capitalism at its best (or worst), but it speaks to the deep-seated and compulsive need to be liked that manifests so clearly on social media, and has reshaped how people seek and share information—a need for instant gratification, a need for attention, and a need to further cultivate a filter bubble. Former Google product manager Tristan Harris says that consumers are addicted to social media and online content, which is exploited by online content developers, again, to earn online traffic and revenue. “Brain hacking,” as it’s called, capitalizes on information consumers’ incessant need to check digital devices and see what new content has been posted, pushed, or highlighted online (Cooper 2017).
Holiday (2013) provides a fascinating account of how information is massaged, manipulated, and pushed up the media food chain where it receives buzz and high levels of attention and credibility, with little or no verification or validity. Most of what is considered mainstream, commercial, or traditional news and mass media comes from surprisingly few sources (Columbia Journalism Review 2017; Craft and Davis 2016, 87–96; Miller 2015, 315; Selyukh, Hollenhorst, and Park 2016; Vinton 2016). The highly concentrated nexus of media ownership revolves around a few large media conglomerates like Viacom, CBS Corporation, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, Walt Disney Company, Hearst Corporation, and the Comcast Corporation (Le 2015; Pew Research 2017). The media oligopoly (the term used when a few companies dominate a market) also includes radio, print, and Internet holdings and venues that also produce and disseminate news. These entities also typically have blogs and other subsidiary sites attached to them.
Blogs, which the self-proclaimed media manipulator Ryan Holiday (2013) uses as a broad term to encompass social media and online information sources, need content, and a lot of it; they have no real news cycle like newspapers and television channels; rather, they need constant content in order to keep their followers engaged. “The site that covers the most stuff wins” (14). There is a certain power and cachet that comes with being covered by blogs and social media, and they need to maintain their reputations, even if these reputations are not based on providing high-quality information.
The economics of the Internet have created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth. With the mass media—and today, mass culture—relying on the Web for the next big thing, this has created a set of incentives that have massive implications. The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real-world events. Blogs need traffic, and being first drives traffic, so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen. This is just one facet of the economics of blogging, but it’s a critical one. When we understand the logic that drives these business choices, those choices become predictable. And what is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however you or I choose (Holiday 2013, 15–16).
The cycle of fake news begins with hyperlocal sites that have low or no barriers for information to enter the stream. Holiday describes the process of information, however questionable, being picked up by small blogs that seem to be monitored by the Huffington Post and other popular sites. Once that information is picked up, the “news story” is on its way. The key is to have knowledge of the right entry points that will facilitate the rise and spread of this fake, or partially fake, information. Similarly, there is legacy media, the “sister sites” of mainstream media outlets such as the blogs of newspapers and television stations. These sister sites benefit from the same branding, URL, and assumed quality of the main site. “Places like the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and CBS all have sister sites like SmartMoney.com, Mainstreet.com, BNet.com, and others that feature the companies’ logos but have their own editorial standards [that are] not always as rigorous as their old media counterparts” (Holiday 2013, 21). Once information hits the sister sites, it is easier for it to reach national media platforms; these platforms need content and page views too, and are prone to look for and publish information that’s trending and “bubbling up on the Internet” (23). The national media is taking the news at face value and is also not doing due diligence in regard to fact-checking or vetting information.
Subsequently, DJs, news anchors, and other “on-air” personalities now report on what they’ve seen and heard on blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms, instead of newspapers, television, and other more traditional sources of journalistic information. They are discovering and borrowing celebrity and gossip-based news that lacks credibility, but gains them viewers and listeners. They are engaging in what is referred to as iterative journalism—media personalities are reporting what they’ve heard, not what they have discovered or sought out directly. Their emphasis is on getting information first, whether it is right or wrong; false information can always be corrected later, even if no one sees or hears a correction or retraction (Holiday 2013, 167). The audience will have moved on by that point, with the false or inflated information still in hand. With iterative journalism, there is little distinction between truth and fiction, and there are no mistakes, just updates. This form of reporting is more about opinion and commentary than it is about the objective facts that journalism has traditionally been based upon.
This age of iterative journalism is due, in part, to three factors: the rejection of gatekeeping and control, “frustration with homogeneity,” and the embracing of individual preferences. Added to this is the proliferation of online sources and information that seem to exist primarily on social media platforms. Holiday (2013) argues that our news media has become fragmented as a result (314–15).
Instead of the homogeneous news world of the past, in which most stories and reports essentially were the same, the fragmented news era boasts a heterogeneous news environment wherein accounts of one issue, topic, or event can differ significantly depending on the source. The proliferation of online news, particularly when mediated through social media or “micro media,” provides niche content producers with a large number of platforms for targeted exposure to specific audiences. With a simple click of the mouse, change of the channel, or file download, consumers can choose a news media outlet that is most aligned with their ideological preferences. This is fragmentation in news. It provides more choice and possible exposure to wider perspectives in the news, though at the cost of a radical increase in the amount of biased or unbalanced reports propagating in the mass media (Holiday 2013, 315).
These high levels of personalization and preferences for heterogeneity, especially in online spaces, provide the perfect unmonitored environment in which fake news can grow and thrive.
The continual rise of blogs and the proliferation of information of all kinds represent a new era of information production, distribution, and consumption. In his book Information 2.0, Martin De Saulles (2015) discusses the explosion of citizen journalists; average individuals have so much access to technology that it is all too easy to capture pictures, audio, and video and upload them to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and any other online sites. These on-the-ground reporters are not only content consumers, they are also content producers, and they can publish this content themselves, or sell it to the highest bidder (e.g., the paparazzi). While some of this amateur-produced content is best described as gossip, some of this information is promoted as a means for social change and is viewed as a method of resistance and protest (e.g., videos of police shootings). Because there are low to no barriers for publishing citizen-produced content, it often circumvents vetting and traditional channels of dissemination. De Saulles refers to this as disintermediation (79). Technology changes the way information travels from its producers to its audiences. In most cases, these alternative pathways lead to “the disintermediation of traditional gatekeepers, including information professionals. Disintermediation is the bypassing of established players in a value chain either through the introduction of new technologies or via new business processes.” Disintermediation is yet another reason why fake news thrives, because information can travel from content producer to consumer in a matter of seconds without being vetted by intermediaries such as reputable news organizations. And this lack of vetting or confirmation can be a disservice to the consumer, who may not be aware of the low quality of the information being consumed or may not have the skills to discern otherwise. So where does this leave information professionals, who for years have been teaching and promoting information literacy skills and education? We continue to do what we’ve always done, but we need to address the development of critical thinking skills with greater context. The cognitive and emotional dimensions of learning and information acquisition need to be considered, and in addition to teaching patrons and students how to evaluate information that is presented to them, we need to teach them how to think about the production of information and the back-end workings of their favorite information sources. Information professionals are increasingly tasked with teaching patrons to prepare for “critical analysis for responsible engagement” (Miller 2015, 315).
There is a danger that users of these information services will be unaware of the filtering that is taking place and assume the information they are being presented with is representative of the broader universe of data that exists on the open web. So rather than simply showing users how to perform better searches, a role for many information professionals will be to help information seers better understand what is going on in the backend systems of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other Internet services. (De Saulles 2015, 126)
Patrons need to know the “what” of the information they’re consuming, and they also need to recognize and understand the “who,” “why,” “how,” and “when” of information production, dissemination, and consumption. Librarians (along with educators and journalists) are now in the position of being “truth workers” in an age of “factual recession” (Head and Wihbey 2017), taking their information literacy skills, messages, and outreach to a whole new level.
NOTES
1. Fake news producers are keenly aware of the media’s need to be first with a scoop, and they recognize that news outlets will run with a story even if it has not been completely vetted or confirmed. In July 2017, the television journalist Rachel Maddow claimed that she was sent fake National Security Administration documents; presumably the goal was to have Maddow run the story so a campaign could then be launched to attack her credibility, costing her viewers’ trust (Borchers 2017). Fake news producers are in many cases savvier than the average media or news consumer, and they are proactively trying to undermine the people and venues that seek to expose them. The post-truth era is a precarious one.
2. B. Feldman, “In Russia, You Can Buy Instagram Likes from a Vending Machine,” June 8, 2017, http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/you-can-buy-instagram-likes-from-a-russian-vending-machine.html; Y. Tan, “There’s a Vending Machine Selling Fake Instagram Likes, Because This Is What We’ve Become,” June 7, 2017, http://mashable.com/2017/06/07/instagram-likes-vending-machine/#QRODfQKZNmqa.