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What is fake news? And what contributes to its spread?

Fake news is most commonly used as a catch-all idea to describe the propaganda and disinformation presented as legitimate news stories in order to deceive an audience. This is probably the definition most people think of when they hear the expression.

Fake news is also used for parody and satire, as in this headline from the Onion. What happens when someone takes a clearly humorous but false story as the truth, and then sends it – with the best of intentions – to another? What if the recipient takes it as truth, too?

Of course, most people aren’t usually that misinformed or gullible. People often know that some of the lies being spread are not real, but will nevertheless tolerate or accept them as long as they help them reach their own ends.

Clinging to disbelief is sometimes rooted in a society itself, where its public discourse may be so poisoned and polluted that it becomes difficult to know what to believe; or, worse, a person’s discomfort with who holds the reins of power results in paranoia and conspiracy theories.

We often see fake news stem from the elaborate rituals of “political theater”. Taken from pro-wrestling, the idea of kayfabe or ‘make-believe,’ creates the suspension of disbelief necessary to spread false narratives and fake news in a political forum, where the ultimate goal is to “pile-drive” your opponent to the mat.

Additionally, when our minds have met their physical limits (i.e. through fatigue, stress, etc.) we often shut out new information, regardless of its veracity; the result of information overload is that we sometimes cling to false beliefs amid a flood of valid alternative viewpoints. In other words, we ‘satisfice’, or stop learning new things because there’s just too much to sift through. We make the somewhat sensible choice to not change our minds by the very fact that cognitive dissonance can be so very painful. This helps fake news persist.

Clinging to disbelief is sometimes rooted in a society itself, where its public discourse may be so poisoned and polluted that it becomes difficult to know what to believe; or, worse, a person’s discomfort with who holds the reins of power results in paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Given how malleable the digital online environment is, information can also lose its context, stripped of the containers that once helped to ground it. Information can more easily float untethered to established reality in such a “post-truth” society that appears to value power and its attainment over ethical and moral concerns.

What are the common denominators for fake news?

Considering all of the factors that comprise fake news and fuel its spread, it is hardly surprising that it can be so effective. Without getting a clear understanding on the phenomenon, however, we may be powerless to neutralize its impact.

Our research is an attempt to get a handle on this bundle of interrelated phenomena and to sense how others in higher education perceive it.  As a result of all this confusion, we believe there ought to be a more comprehensive way to think about fake news, one that touches upon any number of these definitions and factors and looks at the concept from broader societal perspectives.

We have come to see fake news, then, as an exchange of information between two entities – e.g. the actors who initiate it, and the acted upon who receive it – with the main purposes (either intentional or not) of invalidating generally-accepted conceptions of truth and to alter established power structures

We have come to see fake news, then, as an exchange of information between two entities – e.g. the actors who initiate it, and the acted upon who receive it – with the main purposes (either intentional or not) of invalidating generally-accepted conceptions of truth and to alter established power structures. This useful definition seems to incorporate many of the variant perspectives about the concept that we have come across.

How do teaching faculty conceptualize fake news?

With a more elaborate concept of fake news in mind, we wanted to find out what other faculty members at our university thought about the phenomenon. How, we wondered, do they conceptualize it? How comprehensive is their understanding of it? Do they feel threatened or affected by it? Do they consider themselves susceptible to it?

In brief, some of our findings showed the following about teaching faculty at our institution:

• Faculty appear to have varying definitions of what fake news is;
• There is little consensus about its definition across gender, rank, discipline, and age;
• However, the issue of fake news is of concern to nearly all faculty surveyed (88%), with only 9% neutral and 3% not concerned;
• Despite the concern, a large majority of faculty (68%) do not consider themselves susceptible to fake news;
• Finally, faculty say they most typically encounter fake news in Social Media (93%), through oral communication (60%), and from watching television (55%); the least in newspapers (19%) and magazines (15%).

Our findings also revealed a few interesting areas that might be worth focusing on in the future.  We found it especially interesting that lecturers (i.e. non-tenure track faculty) in general seemed to provide a more holistic understanding of fake news in comparison to tenure-track faculty. We speculate that lecturers, who are primarily teaching the bulk of lower-level, multidisciplinary introductory courses at our university (e.g. first-year composition), may need to more frequently address the issue of acceptable academic resources with their students. Tenure-track/tenured faculty might not have to address the issue so often in the higher-level, discipline-specific classes they teach.

The negative effects of fake news should be a concern for all interested in higher education and life-long learning.

We also noticed a statistically significant difference between women and men in terms of their self-reported feelings of susceptibility toward fake news. 75% of women surveyed reported feeling not susceptible to it compared to 59% of men. We are not sure why, however.

Ultimately, we hope that our findings as well as our comprehensive definition of fake news can be of use for further studies. The negative effects of fake news should be a concern for all interested in higher education and life-long learning. We believe that the issue will only grow in importance as technology advances and the means for the dissemination and manipulation of information becomes increasingly sophisticated.