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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked that yours is the only comment on here that actually remembers what happened. The actual "fake news" that was entirely fabricated as click bate was discussed for a few weeks even on This American Life if I recall correctly. There was even an interview with a guy from Georgia (the country) who made a mint making up stories that appealed to Trump supporters and now nobody remembers how that important concept was hijacked by the demagogue.

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Fake news was an own goal by the left wing press. After selling a fable to their readers about a Clinton landslide, they tried to deflect by blaming the election outcome on fabricated stories. But there was never any evidence these stories had more reach and influence than what mainstream outlets were peddling. Same way there is no evidence Russian Facebook ads and social media postings eclipsed the millions e.g. the Clinton campaign spent to Correct The Record. Similarly, laments about r/the_donald were categorically ignoring how the default news and politics reddits had become unofficial Clinton cheering squads with moderators complicit.

Most ironically, lefties lamented the ignorance of right wing voters in accepting stories that confirmed their bias and preconceptions, while they themselves eagerly accepted the fake news narrative.

Fake news was not an important concept. Media manipulation however was, and the two got conflated for very obvious reasons.

I don't know if the original fake news was important to the election. I do think though that it's a very important issue in general. How do we prevent entirely fabricated click bait from going viral?

You really don't know, do you?

> Following the 2016 election, a specific concern has been the effect of false stories—“fake news,” as it has been dubbed—circulated on social media. Recent evidence shows that: 1) 62 percent of US adults get news on social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016); 2) the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories (Silverman 2016); 3) many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016); and 4) the most discussed fake news stories tended to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton (Silverman 2016). Putting these facts together, a number of commentators have suggested that Donald Trump would not have been elected president were it not for the influence of fake news (for examples, see Parkinson 2016; Read 2016; Dewey 2016).

https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf

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