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The hidden side of Fake News
While reading about forgery and fake, I bumped into the notice that in October 2018 the UK Government banned the term “Fake News” from policy documents and official papers because it is “a poorly-defined and misleading term that conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference in democratic processes”.
Everybody knows, broadly, what fake news is: a type of news, found in traditional newspapers, social media or fake news websites, that has no basis in fact, but is presented as being factually accurate. Fake news is, quite simply,news (material reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast) that is fake (false, counterfeit).
However, fake news doesn't exist since ever. I mean, of course history is plenty of examples of false information.
During the first century BC, Octavian famously ran a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory in the final war of the Roman Republic against his rival Mark Antony, portraying him as a drunkard, a womanizer, and a mere puppet of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.
“The du Bourg hoax” is also well known: on 21 February 1814, a uniformed man posing as Colonel du Bourg, arrived at Dover, England, bearing news that Napoleon I of France had been killed and the Bourbons were victorious. Heading to London, he spread this news, which had a significant impact on the London Stock Exchange. The value of government financial assets climbed in the morning, after the news from Dover began to circulate among traders.
Another instance of fake news was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. The New York Sun published articles about a real-life astronomer who, according to the hoax, had observed bizarre life on the moon. The fictionalized articles successfullyattracted new subscribers, and the paper suffered very little kickback after it admitted the next month that the series had been a hoax. Such stories were intended to entertain readers, and not to mislead them.
"The War of the Worlds" is a 1938 episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Directed and narrated by actor and filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898), presented as a series of simulated news bulletins. Although preceded by a clear introduction that the show was a drama, it became famous for allegedly causing mass panic. This event was an example often mentioned of society's dependency on information from print to radio and other media.
So, even though the use of misinformation and disinformation is old, the term “fake news” is quite… new.
Fake news appears to have begun seeing at the end of the 19th century, but it entered into general use in the first decade of the XXI century to designate information in part or entirely not corresponding to the real, disclosed intentionally or unintentionally through the WEB, media or digital communication technologies, and characterized by an apparent plausibility, which facilitates the sharing and dissemination even in the absence of a verification of sources.
Used predominantly in the political field, the neologism has known very wide diffusion from 2016 onwards, and entered in the journalistic vocabulary thanks to the use in 2017 by the newly elected Donald Trump to substantiate its campaigns against the media.
I don't want here to go inside the (sometimes really serious) consequences of the ‘alternative facts’. Let's say that Fake News is pervasive. And if you care about reading truthful stories, you need to be on high alert.
It’s not that readers are stupid, or even necessarily credulous: it's that the news format is easy to imitate and some true stories are weird enough to justify the possible truthfulness of false stories.
In its purest form, fake news is completely made up, manipulated to resemble credible journalism and attract maximum attention and, with it, advertising revenue. It turns out, in fact, the production and publishing of fake news is a relatively lucrative business, where businessmen collect revenue that comes from the advertisements shown on their websites. Fake news is capable of directing much traffic to these websites, which is then converted into profits.
I was surprised at first to learn that there are some creative writing courses that invite you to practice creating fake news (they suggest topics such as “Write a fake news story with the headline Man Eats 20 Light Bulbs, And Asks for More”). But thinking about what fake news is, that's not really amazing: as for many stories, even for fake news fantasy, creativity and imagination are part of the writing process, as well as real facts from which you can take inspiration.
Just write something plausible enough you don't doubt it, and just improbable enough you're compelled to share it.
So here we are again: as in many other fields where fake is common, like art, branding, design etc., creativity is the key word hidden in the fake news.
Are you dying to create your own fake news to see if you can get a hoax to go viral, but you lack the necessary imagination and creativity? Try one of the fake news generators online. They let you plug in a name and choose from different locations and professions to auto-generate a hoax story.
If you can't beat them, may as well join them.
HFG Law&Intellectual Property
