Paul Horner, one operator of a fake news site told the Washington Post that he specifically targeted Trump supporters during the election because he felt the group was more willing to accept his content, which more closely matched their world view.

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On Nov. 16, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the 2016 “Word of the Year.” Editors said the decision was based on a 2,000 percent spike in the word’s usage over the past year driven by the contentious Brexit referendum and the US presidential election—both of which were marked by the widespread use of misinformation and outright falsehoods.

The dictionary defines the term as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Following the election of real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump, a man whose entire campaign was dubbed by Politifact “the 2015 Lie of the Year,” some analysts have heralded the coming of a post-truth era, saying facts are being crowded out of public discourse in favor of sensationalism, fake news and infotainment.

Other commentators have questioned if “post-truth” is really a novel phenomenon. Politics have always relied on manipulating people’s emotions and prejudices, they argue. After all, the word “demagogue” is rooted in Ancient Greek, implying that the problem is as old as democracy itself.

However, American democracy was founded on the ideas of the Enlightenment and premised on the belief that the collective wisdom of the people would guide the nation to the correct course through open debate based on rationality. As people’s beliefs become increasingly disconnected from a basis in observable fact, the foundations of democracy begin to crumble and any notion of “truth” becomes relativistic.

Cognitive bias
The outsized role that fake news played in the current election is unprecedented both qualitatively and quantitatively. According to BuzzFeed News, the top 20 fake news stories from hoax and hyper partisan websites outperformed the top 20 news stories from major media outlets in terms of social media engagement. Fake news stories received more than 1.5 million more shares, reactions and comments than the top stories from mainstream agencies.

The rise of the Internet and social media has played no small part in the dislocation between objectively quantifiable facts and subjective social realties shaped by cognitive biases.

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people access and process information about the world around them, sharpening the effect of cognitive bias. One form of cognitive bias is information-processing shortcuts, or heuristics, which are used to digest large amounts of information.

The exponentially rising amount of information in the Internet age prompts many to rely on such shortcuts when consuming news. In the context of a two-party democracy, the heuristic becomes simplified: News consumers look for clues about the author’s party alignment and extend credibility based on it.

The Internet has the potential to expose people to a wide range of views, but in practice, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter tend to create echo chambers or, in the context of American political discourse, two broad clashing echo chambers.

Confirmation bias is also amplified by the Internet. In particular, search engines have the potential to reinforce fringe beliefs and conspiracy theory by favoring the websites that play host to them.

For example, a popular conspiracy theory among conservatives is that Hillary Clinton was responsible for a series of political murders over the course of her career. If one enters the search string “Hillary Clinton murder” on Google, the top result is a Huffington Post article debunking the theories, but the remainder are a series of sensationalist, partisan websites, including WorldNet Daily, a site that received funding from a pro-Trump Super PAC, and www.whatreallyhappened.com, a page where Holocaust denial stories are sandwiched between ads for gold bouillon and holistic medicines.

A conservative reader, who may not be inclined to trust the left-leaning Huffington Post, might look at the results on the page and conclude that the preponderance of evidence lends credibility to a conspiracy theory that they are already predisposed to believe in. They are also likely to disregard evidence that contradicts what they believe.

 

Market incentives
Another way in which the rise of the Internet has fostered the problem of fake news is by weakening traditional media, which is subject to self-regulation by the market, while simultaneously creating massive financial incentives for fly-by-night fake news purveyors to operate without accountability.

Traditional media, like newspapers and TV stations, have a financial interest in maintaining their credibility by adhering to established journalistic best practices, like transparent sourcing, fact-checking and running corrections when errors are made. As corporations, they are also subject to libel suits should they print false information.

The sole motivation of fake news sites is to generate clicks by whatever means, including plagiarism or even wholesale fabrication. NPR recently interviewed the operator of a number of fake news sites who was responsible for another fictional Clinton murder story that was shared nearly half a million times. He said operations like his could make anywhere between $10,000 to $30,000 a month. Though the man professed to be a liberal, he said pro-Trump fake news was much more lucrative because liberals seldom “take the bait.”

An array of similar stories have come out since the election, demonstrating that the problem is widespread. More than 100 pro-Trump fake news sites were linked to an enterprising group of teens in Macedonia, who used them to generate income off of ads paying less than a penny per click.

But it should be noted that not all of the fake news sites are purely money-making ventures. Many of them are controlled directly by partisan operatives linked to both candidates.

LifeZette, which was responsible for the popular “Hillary Body Count” video, is run by Laura Ingraham, a front-runner to be Trump’s press secretary. Breitbart, a mouthpiece for the white nationalist “alt-right” movement, unquestioningly parroted Trump’s widely debunked claim that thousands of Muslims cheered in response to the 9/11 attacks. Its founder Steve Bannon went on to become Trump’s campaign strategist.

 

Solutions
Tackling the problem of fake news is no easy task, and it will require the coordinated effort of multiple sectors of society, including the press, fact-checkers, social media companies, academia and the general public.

Civil libel law is ill equipped for the job because the rapid proliferation of fake news sites makes the cost of litigating all of them astronomical. Therefore, the burden falls on the social media industry and the press in general to self-regulate, but it is still unclear if they will be able.

Facebook has vowed to come up with a plan for preventing fake news from going viral, but the sheer scale of the problem poses a challenge. The company and all similar gatekeepers face a dilemma: They can’t arbitrarily blacklist media, especially when the line between fake news and real news is blurred, but at the same time, they cannot afford the resources to fact-check every story.

In an interview with Bloomberg Tech, Alexios Mantzarlis, head of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, suggested focusing fact-checking efforts mainly on the top trending stories to “cripple the reach” of repeat offenders.

Another approach is the development of third-party fact-checking organizations, but according to the people who run them, they are already overwhelmed with requests. Also, the neutrality of some of them is nearly as dubious as the fake news they purport to expose. For example, a website of anonymous “experts” called PropOrNot.com recently published a blacklist that used specious evidence to tie a number of sites to alleged Russian media manipulation.

For its part, Google has cut off its ad services to a number of websites flagged as fake news, denying them a major source of revenue, but a seemingly endless number of other ad services exist to fill in the vacuum. And that exposes a central problem in US democracy: Truth isn’t cost-effective, while fiction will continue to be highly lucrative.

Cyberspace has become the new battlefield of America’s Culture War, dramatically polarizing public opinion to the point where most Americans are living in two entirely separate social realities, neither of which is entirely based on facts.

This unbridgeable divide in public discourse will inevitably translate into paralysis in government as leaders struggle to implement any kind of agenda in a divided nation. Unless the public can work together to bring facts and reason back into the debate, the next four years are likely to be a political quagmire.