Why fake news sells better than traditional news

In August, John Herrman of the New York Times published an article that demonstrated the irrelevance of traditional news media and their focus on issues and facts: "Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine: How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds."

Herrman showed how media that exist only on Facebook had been influencing discourse about the political campaign, with advocacy from the left and the right. “These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more.”

It was in that space that people were talking with their friends and deciding who to vote for. Polls and traditional media missed this conversation or underestimated its importance.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, responded to all the uproar by explaining why he thinks fake news is not a problem on the platform.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and John Borthwick came up with some suggestions for how Facebook and other social platforms should handle fake news. Among them was cutting off advertising revenue to obviously fake sites.

"We do not believe that the platforms should be put in the position of judging what is fake or real, true or false as censors for all. We worry about creating blacklists. And we worry that circular discussions about what is fake and what is truth and whose truth is more truthy masks the fact that there are things that can be done today."

Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post is urging Facebook to hire an executive editor to police the traffic.

Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for the New York Times, argued that if there is not an aggressive effort to counter fake news, it will drown out facts.

The Reuters Institute study mentioned above, which was completed before the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, offered a more sanguine view of credibility of traditional media. "Our research suggests that even in the era of social media and atomised media, news organisations and traditional news brands still matter enormously."

It went on: "Although aggregators and social media are important gateways to news, most of the content consumed still comes from newspaper groups, broadcasters, or digital born brands that have invested in original content. Across all of our 26 countries over two-thirds of our sample (69%) access a newspaper brand online each week, with almost as many (62%) accessing the online service of a broadcasting outlet."

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