By Vivian Medithi
Did you know that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in the election, and if we tossed out all of their votes, Hillary Clinton would have lost not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote? I read it on Facebook, so it must be true …
Post-election coverage has been a mad scramble to decipher precisely why our nation chose to elect Donald Trump. Large swaths of these explanations are really explanations of why Clinton lost and in many ways rob Trump supporters of their agency and political voice.
To be fair, many of the reasons enumerated for Clinton’s loss are legitimate and did have a significant impact on the election: voter suppression, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the inherent unfairness of the Electoral College, and a presidential bid cut off at the knees by a total disregard for traditional on-the-ground campaigning.
But explanations such as Clinton failing to appeal to working class white Americans, while also true, just do not seem to paint an accurate picture. Clinton never lost working class white America, because they were never hers to lose; that demographic was galvanized by Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primaries but ultimately chose Trump in large numbers.
In search of these explanations, we end up at fake news. Facebook, long decried by the youth as an obscenely clunky and dated social network, is still the world’s preferred online forum. A report from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation found 44 percent of Americans use Facebook as a news source, indicating that news stories on Facebook will find a broad audience if they prosper. Facebook is complicit, of course; ad revenue is ad revenue, and Mark Zuckerberg’s continual push away from the human touch and into the digital embrace of the all-mighty algorithm compounds the issues at hand. According to Buzzfeed, which claims itself as the “first true social-news organization,” the top 20 objectively false news stories from across the web garnered 1.3 million more views than the top 20 news stories from 19 legitimate news outlets. These statistics suggests a significant degree of misinformation in this election cycle.
To be clear: Fake-news is not a partisan issue. Whether you wanted Trump to win or lose, the deliberate misinformation of the American public is not a good thing, and our willingness to feed into our own confirmation biases and fail to see lies for what they are is disturbing. Being a Democrat doesn’t suddenly make you smarter and less likely to fall for click bait; a popular Trump meme among liberal circles is a fake quote from People magazine in 1998 in which Trump calls Republicans “… the dumbest group of voters in the country.”
Yet it is hard to ignore the raw data. In an interview for the Washington Post, Paul Horner, well-established for years as a fake-news mogul of sorts, asserted fake news that validated conservative morals objectively outperformed fake news that pandered to liberals, citing a refusal to fact-check. Horner even goes as far as to say “I think Trump is in the White House because of me,” a bold claim that may be truly unverifiable.
He cited Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his sharing of a story Horner made up about a protester being paid $3,500 to protest a Trump rally through Craigslist as an example of how his fake stories become legitimate and taken as truth.
Ultimately, fake news is a natural outgrowth of all-too-human tendencies to disregard information that runs counter to how we view the world. Cognitive dissonance is painful, and many would rather not have to confront it. But if we are to prosper in a post-truth world, we will all have to confront truth and learn how to spot it. Knowledge is power, and knowing how to obtain it is half the battle.