It’s nice when people agree with our opinions. From our most trivial thoughts to our deepest reflections, having the same ideas as someone brings them closer to us. It also strengthens our opinions, validating them via the wisdom of the crowd. As a result, online platforms like Facebook and Google have latched onto this idea, altering our feeds and search results based on what we have shown interest in. However, doing so creates a bubble in which you are only shown information that fits in with your viewpoint. This reduces our ability to be critical of the information we receive, leading to the rise of the phenomenon of fake news.

Politics and propaganda have always been intertwined with each other. Before the advent of the internet, however, the nature of traditional forms of media imposed certain restrictions on dissemination. For instance, high distribution costs and media regulations made it difficult for untruths to be spread as news. This is where social media platforms like Facebook come in — not only do they evade legal and financial boundaries, their tendency to group like opinions together enables greater bubbles to develop, further perpetuating lies and portraying opinion as fact. A study by BuzzFeed found that the final three months of the campaign saw the twenty top-performing fake news articles get 1.3 million more shares, reactions and comments than the twenty top-performing real stories.

However, blaming the fake news epidemic solely on social media algorithms would be an oversimplification of the problem. The nature of U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters also catalyzed and maintained the power of fake news. This was a candidate whose strategy was rooted in being an outsider to politics, who promised to Make Our Government Honest Again. These anti-establishment sensibilities involved him supporting conspiracy theories and denouncing major news corporations, characterising the media as an untrustworthy entity. He has even gone so far as to label major news organisations like CNN, NBC and the New York Times as fake news. In doing so, Trump primed his supporters to be more receptive to reading and sharing actual fake news. A Stanford study done on the false news stories published in the three months before the U.S. election found that those supporting Trump were shared a total of thirty million times on Facebook, while those supporting Hillary Clinton were only shared eight million times.

Although the increase in sharing of false news reports does not necessarily lead to voting behaviour, it has certainly changed the conversation. While our understanding of how fake news affected voters remains clouded, it is interesting to note how fake news has affected other figures within the Trump administration. November of last year saw Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser of the U.S., repeat the false claim that democratic senators in Florida had voted for the imposition of Islamic Sharia Law. As much as the preservation of untruths is troubling, it is not as worrying as when government officials openly lie. This was especially evident during the press conference following Trump’s inauguration earlier this year. Aerial pictures released by the National Parks showed fewer people than had been present at both of former President Barack Obama’s inaugurations in 2009 and 2013. The Trump administration vehemently denied this, prompting Press Secretary Sean Spicer to mysteriously declare that sometimes we can disagree about facts.

If nothing else, the scandal surrounding fake news has made Trump’s turbulent relationship with the media more apparent. His hyperbolic and mercurial personality seems to lend itself perfectly to comedy and writers at shows like Saturday Night Live, and they have been quick to act on this. The television program has also lampooned other members of the administration, including Sean Spicer and Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. Less extreme forms of parody have also been done by The Onion, an online satirical newspaper. Although the organization has repeatedly mocked Trump, editor-in-chief Cole Bolton has lamented the difficulty of making fun of characters who “already seem like walking parodies of themselves.” This sentiment makes sense especially given the ubiquity of fake news in the months leading up to the election. Fake headlines were supposed to be funny, at least in a context where a collective understanding of the truth could be settled upon. The polarizing nature of this past election, however, has made this increasingly difficult by making it harder for us to agree on basic facts. What this signals for the future of news is hard to tell, but as some experts have claimed, perhaps we are approaching the age of the conspiracy theory.