Scott Brinton

When fake news met social media

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Because of fake news, a 28-year-old father of two from North Carolina opened fire with an assault-style AR-15 rifle at a Washington, D.C., pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong on Dec. 5. No one was hurt, thank goodness.

Reports –– entirely false reports –– surfaced on an array of social media sites in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 8 election that the pizzeria, owned by a Democratic Party supporter, was involved in a child sex-slave ring operated by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, her campaign chairman.

According to officials, the alleged shooter, Edgar M. Welch, apparently believed these insidious reports, which were packaged as news stories. The posts were so prolific that they attracted the attention of The New York Times, which ran a story on Nov. 21 attempting to debunk the wild accusations of unknown conspiracy theorists, “Fake News Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child Trafficking.”

By that point, however, the election was long over.

The fake report was one in a sea of unsubstantiated claims that swirled across the ether this presidential election cycle. There are those –– including President Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway –– who refute any assertion that fake news played a part in the final outcome. No one really knows how the spate of lies might have affected voters’ decision-making, however. As good a pollster as Conway apparently is, she could not see inside people’s heads to understand the host of issues –– and non-issues –– that bounced around their brains in the voting booth.

We know this: Trump rammed through the so-called Democratic “blue wall,” winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. There is little doubt that he played to disaffected audiences in those three states with targeted perfection. How do we know with certainty, however, that folks weren’t also swayed by fake news?

In fact, a new research paper by Hunt Allcott, of NYU, and Matthew Gentzkow, of Stanford, suggests that false reports played a role in the election. Whether they altered the outcome, though, remains uncertain. We’ll probably never know for sure.

The paper, published on Stanford’s website this month, found:

• That social media was an “important but not dominant” news source in the run-up to the presidential election, with 14 percent –– 14 percent! –– of Americans calling social media their most important news source.

• That in the three months before Election Day, pro-Trump fake news reports were shared on Facebook at least 30 million times, while pro-Hillary false reports were shared on the outlet only 8 million times.

• That the average American saw and recalled .92 pro-Trump fake reports, compared with .23 pro-Clinton false reports.

The authors noted a key gap in their research. They examined only false reports that showed up on prominent fact-checking websites, of which there are now an abundance. They did not examine false reports that escaped the fact-checkers’ view –– and there were too many of those to count.

Twenty thousand votes spread across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin decided the outcome of the election, in which a record-setting 134.5 million ballots were cast — 58 percent of the eligible voting population. Were those 20,000 voters swayed, even in small part, by fake news?

I’d like to believe they weren’t. I’d like to believe they voted for Trump out of a belief in his core principles. But who knows? Who knows what’s true anymore? How do we halt the proliferation of fake news?

For those who spend their days trolling Facebook for the juiciest gossip to spread, cut it out. You are undermining our democracy. If it sounds too outrageous to be true, it probably is.

Share news reports on Facebook, yes. Copy the links from the original news sites into Facebook and then publish.

Trust legacy news sites. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal follow a strict journalistic code that legitimate reporters are bound by –– the discipline of verification. It requires that they verify the facts of a story against a minimum of three trusted sources before going to print.

That is the same code followed by the majority of the nation’s 1,400 daily and 7,000-plus weekly newspapers, including the Heralds. We do not print unsubstantiated reports, and we certainly do not knowingly print false claims. That’s called actual malice, and real reporters who put their bylines on such stories can be sued for it.

The discipline of verification is imperfect, but it applies many of the core principles of the scientific process that arose during the Enlightenment in the 1600s and 1700s, and that have advanced human civilization ever since. In particular, journalists do not report on beliefs as facts. As reporters, we understand that there are knowable facts in any story that can be proven to be true through inquiry, regardless of the journalist’s biases. And all reporters have biases. The discipline of verification requires that journalists compartmentalize them and report truth, whether or not the facts of a story comport with their own sense of right or wrong.

That is why, I believe, newspapers must never die. They are the heart of our democracy.

Scott Brinton is the Herald Community Newspapers’ executive editor and an adjunct professor at the Hofstra University Herbert School of Communication. Comments about this column? SBrinton@liherald.com.