In 2017, a guy called James McDaniel created a news website called UndergroundNewsReport.com. Within a week and a half, he had more than a million page views. His articles were shared far and wide on social media. But what many people didn’t notice was that each page had a disclaimer at the bottom, warning the posts "are fiction, and presumably fake news."
McDaniel had deliberately created a fake news website, just for fun. He wanted to see just how gullible people could be. He tried to make sure his stories were too crazy to be true, and shared links to them in several Facebook groups. Some stories were tied to real news events, but mostly, he just made stuff up.
"I was surprised by how gullible the people in the Trump groups were, but as I continued to write ridiculous things they just kept getting shared and I kept drawing more viewers," McDaniel told PolitiFact. "I saw how many fake ridiculous stories were making rounds in these groups and just wanted to see how ridiculous they could get."
Shortly after launching the site, McDaniel wrote a post to tell people what he was up to. He made sure to link it to each article. Still, some people were none the wiser. And things started getting a bit too serious. Whoopi Goldberg told a talk show that one of the stories had actually endangered her life.
McDaniel took down his site not long after launching it. According to Huge Domains, UndergroundNewsreport.com is now on sale for $8,395. And McDaniel’s experiment has been used to showcase just how deadly fake news can be.
There are times in life when fact is stranger than fiction, as some of these crazy headlines show. In this day and age, with the popularity of social media and “shared many times before”, it’s become super important to be able to separate fact from fiction. Statistics show only 23 percent of Americans are very confident in their ability to recognize fake news. More than 38 percent have accidentally shared a fake news story recently.
Fake news isn’t a new thing. As researcher Amy Watson wrote, “presenting false information as fact was utilized as a means of propaganda during the First and Second World Wars, and by the 21st century became a major problem.”
Fake news really made headlines during the 2016 U.S elections. You might remember it being one of Donald Trump’s favorite phrases during that time. The Independent reported in 2020 that Trump “called journalists and news outlets ‘fake news’ nearly 2,000 times since the beginning of his presidency, averaging more than one daily broadside against the press over the last four years.” CNN wrote “Trump calls things ‘fake news’ not because they are, in fact, fake, but rather because he doesn’t agree with them or they paint him in a bad light.”
Dictionary.com decided to add the phrase the year after the election. Possibly because so much fake news had been flung around. This is their definition: “false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared or distributed for the purpose of generating revenue, or promoting or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc.”
And the Oxford dictionary announced, “After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is… post-truth.” According to Oxford, “post-truth is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
As fake news was thrust into the limelight, there were accusations that Trump might not have won the election without the help of a whole lot of fabricated stories. A Stanford University research paper found that 115 pro-Trump fake news stories were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times. 41 pro-Clinton fake stories were shared a total of 7.6 million times. And that was just in the three months leading up to the elections.
