Step one is to consider that fake news may be a fight not over truth, but power, according to Mike Ananny, a media scholar at the University of Southern California. Fake news “is evidence of a social phenomenon at play — a struggle between [how] different people envision what kind of world that they want.”
Ideological fake news lands in the social media feeds of audiences who are already primed to believe whatever story confirms their worldview, said Angela Lee, a journalism and emerging media professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Readers also share stories for the LOLs. “You don’t only share things because they are true,” Lee said. “You share things that entertain you, that start a conversation between you and your friends.”
Stories such as Pizzagate aren’t meant to inform, but to seed doubt in institutions, distract and flood newsfeeds with conflicting and confusing information. And if fake news isn’t about facts, but about power, then independent fact-checking alone won’t fix it — particularly for readers who already distrust the organizations that are doing the fact-checking.
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