… This paper uses active audience approaches to media consumption to investigate and critique the phenomenon known as “fake news.” …
Regardless of what “fake news” actually means, it is typically tied up with anxieties about the democratic ramifications of the shift from consuming news from broadcast television and newspapers to consuming news on social platforms. Thus, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been heavily criticized for their role in spreading, facilitating, and even encouraging “fake news.” However, today news spreads through digital networks as only one element of a constant feed of information.
Whether people are likely to trust a story has less to do with who published it than who shared it. Moreover, many “fake news” or hyper-partisan stories reinforce narratives about race, class, and gender that help build and reinforce collective identity, especially on the right. Sharing fake news must be understood within this context of self-presentation and reinforcement of group identity.
This paper examines the social roles of various types of problematic information, including “fake news,” hyperpartisan news coverage, misinformation, and disinformation, proposing a sociotechnical model of media effects to understand how and why such content spreads through social media. CONT.
Alice E. Marwick (UNC), Georgetown Law Technology Review