In one of the sorriest pieces of real news for months, “fake news” has been named the word of the year, according to dictionary publisher Collins.
This is depressing for two reasons — not just that the very reality of news is now so intentionally fabricated, but also that a dictionary publisher should overlook the reality that fake news is, of course, two words.
I will overlook that last gloomy observation. Far more important is the extent to which willfully-invented content, designed to distort readers’ perception of the world, has taken hold this year.
Fake news stories, as the world would have us believe, are like black tendrils weaving their way into the collective human conscious, taking over the soul and directing perceptions with politically-charged narratives until readers become zombie consumers — unthinking, unquestioning, unfeeling.
Being serious, however, the impact it can have across a society is quite corrosive. Indeed, there were over 159 million visitors to fake news websites a month ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Meanwhile, research from Buzzfeed found that fake news stories had higher levels of engagement on Facebook, compared to factually correct ones.
Reasons for fake news might focus on a particular political bent but, more importantly, it is based on a simpler goal: money. Some, like the veritable “factory” of Macedonian teenagers who pumped out hundreds of right-leaning stories in 2016, may indeed cater to a conservative mindset, but their prime motivation is to profit by creating an audience against which advertising can be sold.
In fairness to social media platforms, they are trying to take decisive action in the fight against fake news. Facebook ran an experiment in which stories were deemed “fake” if a sufficient number of commenters wrote the phrase “fake news” beneath the article. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook and Twitter have more recently said they will commit to the implementation of trust indicators, which will, in turn, enable each platform’s user base to better spot the validity of news content.
There will undoubtedly be many more measures to come from these platforms, yet it is also encouraging to see the seriousness with which platforms are trying to tackle the problem.
I truly believe that the advertising industry has a crucial part to play in this, too, especially as our sector spends billions across all facets of digital media. Until now, there have been too few methods of stopping it. But the emergence of the IAB’s Ads.txt initiative , with which publishers can stop domain manipulation by only allowing certain ad exchanges to bid on their inventory, shows the community can come together to develop the right solutions.
The industry has made a good start this year with Ads.txt and we can continue on this good work in a really simple way. Advertisers need to pay particular attention to where their ads are and what they are placing. The more scrutiny that is placed on this, the better we, as an industry, will be able to fight fake news. We will likely see advertisers and platforms increasingly seek to work together to find a solution to fake news, while actual consequences are being applied to those who publish such falsehoods.
While fake news might have been 2017’s word of the year, if both advertisers and platforms work closer together, next year we’ll hopefully see that this most modern phenomenon was just a flash in the pan.