The content of fake news tends to be more surprising than factual news. It is surprising because it is less likely.
Generally speaking, the more unlikely a message is, the more information it carries. Thus, fake news appears to have higher information content then factual news to people unable to detect that it's fake.
Fake news can be generated with far greater volume than truth.
Fake news can be specifically engineered to appeal to various cognitive biases promoting virality.
Truth serves reality. Falsehood can, and very often does, serve specific partisan interests who have a hand in promoting its spread.
These are four powerful factors favouring falsehoods and their dissemination.
There are also deliberate actions, evicenced in documents and testimony, to obscure objective truths. There is a distinction between reasonable differences of opinion, and abject falsehoods.
The principle of anekāntavāda is of many sidedness. It is not of any sidedness.
So if I post a story claiming Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza place basement, that is unequivocally false. If I run a story saying Hillary Clinton is an evil person seeking to lead the country astray, that may or may not be true depending on many different factors, definitions, personal beliefs etc. It would be wrong to label it as fake news,for this reason.
This is something that's usually said by people who want you to drop your defenses and believe in lies they concocted.
To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing we've seen so far that would suggest we aren't all inhabiting the same, shared, physical universe - so there is objective truth. There are facts about the world around us, and when you're reporting them accurately, you're reporting the truth. If you deny those facts, you are reporting falsehoods.
Now one of those facts is that we all observe the world through a limited and biased sensory and cognitive apparatus. We can't perceive the entirety of the universe, only a small fraction of it. This sometimes leads to "contradictory truths".
The best analogy I've come up with so far is projections. Imagine the universe as a 3D space, and anything of interest as a 3D shape - but what each of us is observing is 2D projections of it. So there is a cylinder in that universe, representing an issue. I can claim the issue is circular. You can claim the issue is rectangular. We've both identified the true aspects of an issue, but our views are incomplete. Our views combined can help us understand the full form of the issue. But what's most important, if someone comes in and says they see a spiked star, they're just wrong. There's no "multiple often contradictory truths here".
This is the way I like to think about the world and debates on issues. Each of us operates on a set of facts and intuitions that are a result of a heavy dimensionality reduction. We operate on projections. But there is an objective reality, of which our conflicting views are different projections, and that reality makes it so that only some projections are valid, and others are wrong.
And just because an issue is primarily social doesn't mean it's magically not about the observable reality. Human beings are physical, material objects. Just damn complicated ones.
That stat refers to money spent buying new books and ebooks, I think. It excludes e.g. newspapers, journals, magazines, and online reading, like blogs and special-interest websites, doesn't it? An extremely large majority of which is non-fiction, I'm guessing.
I'm suggesting that it has a general information theoretic advantage.
I like to point out the rose colored glasses of the early internet, when the awesome signal-to-noise ratio was going to have a catalytic effect on human knowledge.
#Whoops
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-...
Besides, of course, the stupid lists of factoids that used to get emailed around - duck quacks don't echo etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
Facts matter, yes. But a false narrative, even, or especially where constructed at least in part on true facts, is vastly more significant.
A characteristic of virtually all Big Lie Narratives is that they contain, often major, nuggets of truth. But the arrangement of narrative amonst these, and eventual insertion of false (or at the very least, unverifiable) facts, eventually proves these out.
A classic example I've run across is "It's All a Rich Man's Lie", an epic 3h 40m YouTube conspiracy yarn which, at least in its first hour or so, sticks largely to the domain of underlying truths: yes, there are "secret societies" at Ivy League schools, yes, many major US industrial firms maintained operations or divisions in Nazi Germany, etc. But no, actually, Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech (mentioned about 20 minutes in) was not about the Yale Skull & Bones group, but instead about the Soviet Union, and its practice of leveraging unflattering or inconvenient reporting from the US itself against the US.
(The question of whether or not Kennedy was right in asking for self-restraint on this basis is a matter for another discussion.)
Often the individual elements and false narrative become apparent by pulling back ever so slightly from the presented story, and looking at the greater context of facts offered. A few paragraphs of surrounding context from the Kennedy speech ("catnip for conspiracy nuts" according to one source) make painfully clear that its topic is not what the conspiracy nuts would make it to be.
The fact that such checking is expensive and takes time makes the fabricators' job all that much easier, and the debunkers' harder.
Another interesting case is the "J.P. Morgan Bankers' Manifesto" hoax, by one Thomas W. Gilruth, first published in 1892, and still making the rounds on social media over 120 years later. I'd run across it by way of an meme whose message appealed to me, though thinking it might be too good to be true, I dug deeper.
To my knowledge, this is the most substantial debunking of the Gilruth hoax ever published:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...