Political impact of fake news is independent of its creators’ actual motives

Evidence

One must of course be careful when speculating about motive. The FBI and congressional investigations of Russian hacking in the 2016 presidential election are still underway and we do not yet know how deeply coordinated these efforts might have been. What does seem clear is that whether or not most of the originators of fake news in the US presidential election had ideological motives, their actions had political impact. How many people who read the story about Hillary’s “ballot stuffing” believed it and may have shared it with others who had not yet decided how to vote? Similarly, how many stories in Breitbart and other right-wing outlets that speculated over whether Hillary had a brain tumor amounted at least to “disinformation”—if not outright fake news—intended to have a political effect? Indeed, can’t carelessness or willful ignorance serve an ideological goal? After the election, when businessman Eric Tucker tweeted a photo of buses in Austin, Texas, and said that he thought they were being used to bring in paid protestors against Donald Trump, he didn’t make a dime, but he certainly had a hand in poisoning the news with his fact-free speculation. His post was shared 16,000 times on Twitter and more than 350,000 times on Facebook, eventually reaching Trump himself, who tweeted that professional protestors were now being incited by the media. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 217

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the German hacker case from earlier chapters and to the broader fake-news chapters of this book on motive versus effect. — connects to: Belief in just two of three viral fake headlines predicted defection for 2016 voters — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 528; Pro-Trump fake news earned vastly more ad revenue than pro-Clinton content — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 214; Fake news is deliberately false and evolved from clickbait to political manipulation — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 213 (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: the irrelevance of motive — why the money-versus-ideology debate misses that both produce the same epistemic poisoning.