On January 6, as public officials met to certify Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 Presidential Election, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the capitol by mob, resulting in a riot that left five people dead.

In the days leading up to the riot, supporters of President Trump used a myriad of mainstream and fringe social media sites to organize and discuss the possibility of violence. Websites like Parler and TheDonald.win were rife with posts about storming the Capitol, according to an article in The Hill.

According to reporting by the New York Times, as Donald Trump ended his afternoon rally by calling on protestors to march on Congress, right-wing groups immediately took to these sites to promote the attack. At least 12 people openly posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol building, with others recommending tools that could help pry open doors.

Some were dressed in Viking costumes, some looked like soldiers in camouflage military uniforms, and others carried with them symbols of hate.

But they all united as they had been for months around a common falsehood: The election had been unlawfully stolen from Trump, who deserved the victory.

Fake news, from what it is to how it spreads, has been a hot topic throughout the past few years, especially amidst the recent election.

In the weeks following Election Day, President Trump has been making claims of widespread fraud that wrongfully resulted in Joe Bidens win.

Jeff Hemsley, Professor of Information Studies at the iSchool, says that there are always minor amounts of fraud in every election. Out of nearly 160 million votes, he suspects that only a tiny fraction of ballots may have been fraudulent. Probably less than 1%.

[President Trump] is essentially creating and instigating a fake news story, he said.

Hemsley argues that these instances of fake news are really just propaganda something that has been around since there have been governments and churches at all.

At its core, propaganda is simply distorted information thats published for someones political gain. And whether its a wartime newspaper ad or a seemingly innocent social media post, propaganda is only successful to the extent that people believe it and it spreads.

So what is it that makes something go viral?

Hemsley says the key thing to remember is that stories dont go viral unless a lot of people share it (a lot being relative to the audience and platform).

A CNN video with a million views, for example, isnt necessarily viral. CNN simply has a lot of viewers.

But if that video is frequently shared and spreads as a result, then we might call it viral.

According to Hemsley, one reason fake news spreads is because its often inflammatory in some way. That makes it exciting and worth talking about it.

The things that tend to spread are things that are remarkable, he said, Remarkable just means people are talking about it, or remarking on it. And thats virality.

For example, the Black Lives Matter movement is largely the result of many viral events linked together, Hemsley argues. The general public became aware of the severity of police brutality and racial injustice ultimately because videos from bystanders went viral again and again.

Another well-known example is Pizzagate, a fake news story started on the conspiracy-oriented online message board 4chan.

In 2016, a 4chan user fabricated a story about the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in Washington, DC, falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic elites used the pizza shops basement as a site for child sexual abuse.

In response, a North Carolina man attempting to investigate the conspiracy himself drove to the restaurant and fired a semi-automatic rifle inside in order to break the lock to a storage room.

As it turns out, Comet Ping Pong doesnt even have a basement at all nor does it engage in any of the alleged illicit activities.

Pizzagate is often considered to be a predecessor to other conspiracy theories such as QAnon, whose central premise is that Satanic cannibals run a global child sex trafficking ring that plots to overthrow Donald Trump.

While admittedly far-fetched on its own, in August 2019, the FBI published a report calling QAnon a possible source of domestic terror.

These stories and countless others show just how severe the consequences of fake news can be, though the logistics of preventing it can be difficult to sort out at scale.

Hemsley does think that public pressure can play a significant role in shaping the prevention of fake news. Facebooks decision to disable the share button on viral posts after a certain limit, for instance, likely came about as the result of public concern.

More recently, these companies have cracked down even harder in an effort to mitigate social tensions. Facebook banned thousands of QAnon accounts in October and, following the attack on the Capitol, placed an indefinite suspension on Donald Trumps account there at least until his term is over.

Twitter also made the move to permanently suspend the Presidents account, while Amazon, Apple, and Google have all withdrawn infrastructure support for Parler by denying service from AWS, the App Store, and Google Play, respectively.

He warns us, however, to be careful about the way we answer the question of whether online platforms and media outlets should limit fake news.

Once we say that a decision needs to be made, it becomes tricky to determine exactly who gets the power to decide. Who becomes the arbitrator?

A more pragmatic approach would be to take individual responsibility for the information we receive and evaluate it critically.

Hemsley recommends checking out the interactive Media Bias Chart published by Ad Fontes Media.

The tool plots news media outlets on a graph with axes representing political bias (from most extreme left to most extreme right) and overall source reliability (from fabricated info to original fact reporting).

Almost all news organizations are biased, but some lie more than others, Hemsley said, If youre going to look at Fox News, also look at MSNBC. If youre going to look at things on the far right, look at things on the far left. But focus mainly on the sources in the middle.

The best news, he says, tends to come from the center and is less driven by value statements than by factual statements. These include outlets like Reuters, the Associated Press, and CBS Local.

At the end of the day, the most important thing to do is to pay attention and seek out the truth regardless of your own personal beliefs and biases.

The world can change as the result of viral events, Hemsley said, The thing we need to understand is that [it] can change for better or for worse.

If it turns out that the lie is sexier than the truth, then were in danger of undermining our very democracy.

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When Fake News Turns Into Conspiracy Theories: The viral factor in today's media landscape, and what we can do to stop it - Syracuse University News