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False information (known as "fake news") in theUnited States has been a subject of discussion and debate, especially since the increased reliance on theInternet andsocial media for information.
According to the website of theCambridge English Dictionary, the term fake news "is that something is believable no matter what¨ which is seen as damaging to an agency, entity, or person.[better source needed] However, is by no means restricted to politics, and seems to have currency in terms of general news."[1]False news has been defined as "political speech."[2]
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In 1762, theGrand Assembly of Virginia enacted the following law to punish "divulgers of false news."
Be it enacted, That what person or persons soever shall forge and divulge such false reports, tending to the trouble of the country, shall be, by nextJustice of the Peace, sent for, and bound over to the nextCounty Court, where, if he produce not the author, he shall be finedtwo thousand pounds oftobacco, (or less) if the Court thinks fit to lessen it [sic], and besides, give bond for his behavior, if it appears to the Court that he didmaliciously publish and invent it.[3]
On December 6, 1809, U.S. RepresentativeGeorge W. Campbell ofTennessee, in a speech on the House floor, said that:
Your publick [sic] prints teemed with falsehoods, and misstatements on this subject; insurrections were announced in some quarters ofthe union as likely to take place, and dreadful stress stated to prevail every where. These groundless misrepresentations, circulated for party purposes alone, went abroad, and had, no doubt, considerable influence on the conduct of foreign nations.[4]
TheArgus of Western America,Frankfort, Kentucky, related on November 10, 1830, that:
The practice of givingfalse news for electioneering purposes, in this country, originated with the"National"Intelligencer. Its servile co-workers abroad, of the[Henry] Clay school of politics, have adopted it, and the confident tone in which they now utter falsehoods, proves that the opposition rest their hopes of success upon the gullibility of their readers. . . . ThoseSiamese twins, the"National" Journal and"National" Intelligencer, of this city [Washington], are constantly in the habit of playing into each others hands by giving false news to their readers. [All italics are in the original.][5]
After the1840 election, theNew York Commercial Advertiser opined that
TheVan Buren leaders of this city have much to answer for, in regard to the false news of success which they dispatched to the South on Friday. In Washington the office-holders were thrown into a delirium of joy, and fell into the most extravagant antics. Mr. Van Buren himself was heard to declare that he wasnow "Certain of success, for I now know," he added, That "New York is mine!" [Italics are in the original.] He awoke from his reverie, probably, at half past 11 o'clock yesterday morning."[6]
In December 1848, theHeraldo newspaper ofMadrid, Spain, denied a report in theNew York Herald that the United States was in negotiations withSpain to purchase the island ofCuba. TheHeraldo chastised "Anglo-American" newspapers as being "famous, throughout the world, for the false news and dates which they delight to propagate, adorned with a thousand details, intended to give them an appearance of truth."[7]
An 1861editorial in theMemphis Daily Avalanche of Tennessee recommended legislating "apenal offense to send false news over thetelegraph line." The editorial noted, however, that it would be "unjust to reproach the telegraph company or agents, for the telegraph is a simple agent for the conveyance of news, and is no more responsible for what is sent over the wires than a horse which conveys false news in the mails. . . . The telegraphers are much annoyed when they are forced by their position to send or receive false news, known by them to be false."[8]
Under a headline reading "Government Connivance at the Transmission of False News Reports," theBurlington (Vermont) Sentinel complained on May 22, 1863, that "disgraceful falsehoods" had been "telegraphed throughout the country regarding the state of affairs in the army and its movements" and that the reason for them "is pretty correctly hinted at by the N.Y.Evening Post, which claimed thatcabinet stockspeculations were at the bottom of this false information."[9]
TheIndependent of New York City stated:[9]
It is difficult to dismiss the suspicion that some pretty high parties have been attempted to operate in the gold market. [Italics in the original.] Correspondents here endeavored in vain yesterday to telegraph to their friends that there was not a word of truth in the wild stoies . . .but the government censor would not permit the denial! This is certainly very strange. [Italics in the original.]
TheSpringfield Republican was quoted as saying: "While the most ridiculous stories about the capture of Richmond were flying through the northern towns, no newspaper correspondent herewas allowed the privilege of denying the false rumors." [Italics in the original].[9]
TheNew York Tribune was charged byThe (Philadelphia) Times on November 26, 1879, with printing and editorially endorsing "false news" that brought about "the financial crisis of last week, which took several millions of dollars out of the pockets of men of moderate means to place this vast sum in thestrong boxes ofMr. [Jay] Gould and his fellow conspirators onWall Street." (Financier Gould was principal owner of theTribune.) According to thePhiladelphia Times, theNew York Evening Post, however, did "the cause of honest journalism a good service in unearthing astatute which seems to fit the case of . . . Gould exactly." The law forbade anybody from circulating "false intelligence, with the intent of depreciating or advancing themarket price" of stocks, bonds, merchandise or commodity. The penalty was set at afine of "not exceeding five thousand dollars and imprisonment for a period not exceeding three years, or either."[10]
ThePhiladelphia Times continued:
It would be well for . . . Gould to paste this law in his hat. His enormous profits on his last speculation, through the dissemination of false news, would enable him to pay the fine without pain to his pocket, but the imprisonment would give him some discomfort and the country some satisfaction.[10]
Five years later, theNew York Tribune was accused byThe Journal of Commerce with "willful and deliberate forgery" in printing "false news" concerning New York State's results in the1884 Presidential election.The New-York Times urged that theState legislature should "so amend the law as to bring within its provisions the most mischievous andflagitious of all the varieties of the offense of willfully publishing false news."[11]
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False news was recognized as a problem in the United States in the 1890s. Oneeditorialist wrote in 1896 that:
The American newspapers are fairly beating their own record at the present time in their success in getting up sensations and setting afloat fake news. . . . our people are in a frame of mind which accepts without question the most absurd statements the mind of man can conceive, and even try to invent excuses for their credulity.[12]
An "alleged confession" by the pastor of San Francisco's Immanuel Baptist Church that it was he who had murdered Blanche Lamont and Minnie Williams in a well-publicized 1895 murder case was "going the rounds" in a "fake report."Theodore Durrant was hanged for the crimes in 1898. TheSan Francisco Examiner, responding to a query, denied the report and called it a "false rumor."[13][14]
TheAuburn (Nebraska) Granger editorialized that the fake "adds further proof, if further proof be needed, that newspaper reports are unreliable and not to be depended upon."[15] TheCoffeyville (Kansas) Gaslight said: "The story was very cleverly concocted stating that the minister, on his deathbed, had made a full confession of the crime and that Durrant, who was convicted on purelycircumstantial evidence, had been fully vindicated. It now turns out that the story is a fake from beginning to end."[16]
During thePhilippine Insurrection, it was reported that:
Hong Kong is the headquarters of fake news from the Philippines just asShanghai is the source of most of the fake news aboutPekin andChinese massacres. There is a vicious and industrious Filipinojunta atHong Kong with a malicious Englishman at the head of it which manufactures the sensational news regarding American atrocities inLuzon and sends them out for the benefit of anti-expansionists andDemocratic organs in this country [the United States].[17]
Aheadline writer for theWashington (D.C.) Times, labeled a story about Secretary of the TreasuryL.M. Shaw a "Good Example of Fake News" over a July 9, 1902, article reporting that Shaw had "specifically stated . . . on several occasions" his belief that all officers of the Treasury should be limited in their terms of office to "four or five years."[18] Two weeks later, apress release from Shaw said that inquiries "from all over the country" impelled him to deny the story, which he termed "made out of whole cloth."[19] TheEvening Times-Republican ofMarshalltown, Iowa, chided that "These hot-weather tales are liable to float out most any time. The public would do well to accept sensational stories conditionally, awaiting confirmation."[20]
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The placement of false news stories, or the attempt, often as a joke, was so pervasive thatThe Evening Sun of Hanover, Pennsylvania, warned against the practice by noting that thePennsylvania law provided for a $500 fine and a two-year jail term in case of conviction.[21]
TheNew York Daily News published an editorial apologizing for an article from "a New England correspondent" that appeared in the newspaper on April 25, 1936, stating that "$20,000 inLindbergh ransom bills had recently turned up inAlbany and variousMassachusetts towns." The editorial said:[22]
We are convinced now that the story was a fake, though the New England correspondent still thinks there may be something in it. We are sorry to have published the story. We think any newspaper that does fake news is foolish. It is so easy to expose a fake news story, and as soon as the public finds out about it the newspaper that published the fake loses some reader confidence. Repeat the process often enough, and the paper loses the confidence of all the readers except the natural born and incurable suckers.
In the run-up to the2016 presidential election, fake news was particularly prevalent and spread rapidly over social media by "bots", according to researchers at theOxford Internet Institute.[23][24] In a speech shortly after the election, former Democratic candidateHillary Clinton warned of the "real-world consequences" of fake news.[25]Google Trends shows that the term "fake news" gained traction in online searches in October 2016.[26]
Debate over the impact of fake news in the November2016 United States presidential election, and whether or not it significantly impacted the election of theRepublican candidateDonald Trump, whom the most shared fake stories favored,[27][28] led researchers fromStanford to study the impact of fake news shared on social media, where 62% of U.S. adults get their news from. They assessed that 8% of readers of fake news recalled and believed in the content they were reading, though the same share of readers also recalled and believed in "placebos" — stories they did not actually read, but that were produced by the authors of the study. In comparison, over 50% of the participants recalled reading and believed in true news stories. The authors do not assess the final impact of these numbers on the election, but seek to "offer theoretical and empirical background" for the debate.[29]
Republican candidateDonald Trump tweeted or retweeted posts about "fake news" or "fake media" 176 times as of December 20, 2017, according to an online archive of all of Trump's tweets.[30] Governmental bodies in the U.S. and Europe started looking at contingencies and regulations to combat fake news specially when as part of a coordinated intelligence campaign by hostile foreign governments.[31][32] Online tech giantsFacebook andGoogle started putting in place means to combat fake news in 2016 as a result of the phenomenon becoming globally known.[33][34]
Fraudulent stories during the2016 U.S. presidential election included aviral post popularized on Facebook thatPope Francis had endorsed Trump, and another that actorDenzel Washington "backs Trump in the most epic way possible".[35][36] Trump's son and campaign surrogateEric Trump, top national security adviserMichael Flynn, and then-campaign managersKellyanne Conway andCorey Lewandowski shared fake news stories during the campaign.[37][38][39][40]
In December 2016, an armedNorth Carolina man, Edgar Maddison Welch, traveled toWashington, D.C., and opened fire at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, driven by a fake online news story known as thePizzagate conspiracy theory, which accused the pizzeria of hosting a pedophile ring run by Democratic Party leaders.[41] These stories tended to go viral quickly. Social media systems, such asFacebook, played a large role in the broadcasting of fake news. These systems showed users content that reflected their interests and history, leading to fake and misleading news. Following aplea agreement with prosecutors, Welch pleaded guilty to the federal charge of interstate transport of firearms and a District of Columbia charge of assault with a dangerous weapon. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison on June 22, 2017 and agreed to pay $5,744.33 for damages to the restaurant.[42]
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In the early weeks of his presidency,Donald Trump frequently used the term "fake news" to refer to traditional news media, singling outCNN.[44] LinguistGeorge Lakoff says this creates confusion about the phrase's meaning.[45] According toCBS60 Minutes, President Trump might have used the term fake news to describe any news, however legitimate or responsible, with which he might have disagreed.[46]
After RepublicanColorado state senatorRay Scott used the term in 2017 as a reference to a column in theGrand Junction Daily Sentinel, the newspaper's publisher threatened adefamation lawsuit.[47][48]
Starting in July 2017,Trump's 2020 presidential campaign launchedReal News Update, an online news program posted on Facebook. The series reports on Trump's accomplishments aspresident of the United States and claims to highlight "real news" as opposed to alleged "fake news".Lara Trump introduced one video by saying "If you are tired of all the fake news out there...we are going to bring you nothing but the facts" and "I bet you haven't heard about all the accomplishments the president had this week, because there's so much fake news out there".[49] The show was labeled as "propaganda".[50]
In January 2018, it was reported that aGallup-Knight Foundation survey found that 17% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans "consider accurate news stories that cast a politician or political group in a negative light to always be 'fake news.'"[51] A June 2018 poll byAxios andSurvey Monkey found that 72% of Americans believe "traditional news outlets knowingly report false or misleading stories at least sometimes," with 92% of Republican and Republican-leaning independents and 53% of Democrats believing this.[52]
An investigation byThe Michigan Daily in October 2019 into statewide networks of conservative-leaning, pseudo local news sites, published byLocality Labs and theMetric Media Foundation, revealed connections between the operation andDan Proft, theLiberty Principles PAC, and theNexstar Media Group. Metric Media was reportedly planning on creating more sites across the nation in what critics dubbed a disinformation campaign that might have been attempting to influence the 2020 elections.[53]
As well as Trump, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have started using the fake news label to delegitimize established news media since 2016.[54] According to a 2020 study,[54] use of the fake news label strongly aligns with representatives' voting records in Congress, with more conservative members more likely to adopt the label.
ProfessorPhilip N. Howard of theOxford Internet Institute at theUniversity of Oxford studied web traffic in the United States prior to the election. He found that about one half of all news on Twitter directed atMichigan was junk or fake, and the other half came from actual professional news sources.[46] According toBuzzFeed, during the last three months of the presidential campaign, of the top twenty fake election-related articles on Facebook, seventeen were anti-Clinton or pro-Trump. Facebook users interacted with them more often than with stories from genuine news outlets.[55]
In 2019Christine Michel Carter, a writer who has reported onGeneration Alpha forForbes stated that one-third of the generation can decipher false or misleading information in the media.[56]
ACNN investigation examined exactly how fake news can start to trend.[57] There are "bots" used by fake news publishers that make their articles appear more popular than they are. This makes it more likely for people to discover them. "Bots are fake social media accounts that are programmed to automatically 'like' or retweet a particular message."[58]
Hunt Allcott andMatthew Gentzkow estimated that the average US adult read and remembered between one and several fake news articles during the2016 US presidential election period. Equating the impact of one such article to a television campaign ad, they suggested that the fake news articles they had studied would have only changed vote shares by hundredths of a percentage point, much smaller than Trump's margin in pivotal states.[29]
A situation study byThe New York Times in 2017 showed how a tweet by a person with no more than 40 followers went viral and was shared 16,000 times onTwitter.[59] The tweet concluded that protesters were paid to be bussed to Trump demonstrations and protest. A Twitter user then posted a photograph of two buses outside a building, claiming that those were the anti-Trump protesters. The tweet immediately went viral on both Twitter and Facebook. Fake news can easily spread due to the speed and accessibility of modern communications technology.
In January of 2024, theWorld Economic Forum highlighted disinformation as a top global threat over the next few years, citing concerns around AI and the disruption of elections, including in the United States.[60]