Disinformatyza helps reduce trust in institutions of all sorts, leading people either to disengage with politics as a whole or to put their trust in strong leaders who promise to rise above the sound and fury. This is a fairly common tactic in Russian politics and it's been raised to an art form in Turkey by President Tayyip Erdogan, who uses it to discredit the internet, and Twitter in particular. Instead, it's trying to pollute the news ecosystem, to make it difficult or impossible to trust anything. This is news that's not trying to persuade you that Trump is good and Hillary bad (or vice versa). On a medium like Facebook which gives primacy to information shared by friends, political propaganda spreads rapidly, reaching a reader from all sides, and can be difficult to distinguish from fact-based news.Ī third category of 'fake news,' relatively new to the scene in most countries, is disinformatzya. Many citizens are skeptical of claims made by politicians and parties, but are less apt to question news shared by their friends. But tools such as Twitter and Facebook may make propaganda harder to detect and debunk. (Some scholars argue that the inscriptions on ancient Roman coinage should be understood as propaganda, designed to strengthen an emperor's rule over a massive territory.) Propaganda may be an inevitable feature of electoral contests, and vicious propaganda campaigns, such as the 'swiftboating' of Senator John Kerry, proved effective even before the age of social media. Propaganda has been around for a long time, preceding the era of mass media. Propaganda is weaponized speech that mixes truthful, deceptive and false speech, and is designed explicitly to strengthen one side and weaken the other. There's another type of 'fake news' that surfaces during virtually every political campaign: propaganda. While media outlets overfocused on the non-scandal of the emails, this wasn't 'fake news' so much as it was 'false balance,' with newspapers playing up a Clinton 'scandal' to counterbalance an endless sequence of Trump scandals. There's a compelling argument that the release of Clinton and Podesta's emails by Russian hackers - and the media firestorm that ensued - were key to the outcome of the US election.

'Fake news,' in this usage, means 'real issues that don't deserve as much attention as they're receiving.' This form of fake news was likely an important factor in the 2016 campaign. It's tempting to say that Trump is using 'fake news' to mean 'news I don't like', but the reality is more complicated. CNN did not reproduce the dossier ( online news outlet Buzzfeed did), but the president-elect was incensed that CNN would call attention to the story based on unverified documents. Trump's evasion referenced his anger at CNN for reporting on an intelligence dossier that suggests Russian authorities have been compiling compromising information on Trump in the hope of blackmailing him. Faced with questioning from CNN reporter Jim Acosta during his first press conference in six months, President-elect Donald Trump refused to take Acosta's question, declaring, ' You are fake news.' 'Fake news' and its detrimental effects on democracy has become a major theme in contemporary politics. But the strangeness of the election was complicated by news stories that seemed just plausible enough to be true: a papal endorsement of Donald Trump, the fiery suicide of an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton's emails, Black Lives Matter as an attempt to create a race war in the US.Īs you likely know, these stories aren't true, though they did circulate widely on Facebook and other social media sites. Watching the 2016 US presidential election was already a surreal experience, as dozens of qualified candidates lost out to a failed businessman and reality television star.

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