Fake News: How the “Attention Economy” Puts Truth in Danger

David Cortez

July 19th 2017

We all remember when President Donald Trump thrust his pointer finger towards Jim Acosta and bloviated the phrase, “you are fake news,” during his January press conference this year. Mr. Trump has good reasons to want to use the term that is inherently a pejorative aimed at the news media. He doesn’t often receive positive coverage from them.

However, the term itself has become an ever-increasing topic of discussion as dozens and dozens of disreputable websites have been exposed to be churning out demonstrably false news stories in the recent years. There is a trend amongst the online fringe press to publish stories containing information that has not been independently verified, opting to break almost any story in order to cash in on the attention the story will undoubtedly receive.

The concept of publishing false or misleading news stories is nothing new in journalism, but the ubiquity of the stories and the ease with which they can be convincingly faked and disseminated is a outgrowth of the technological environment that the so called “new media” finds itself in. A case can be made that the increase in frivolous and false journalism is a direct consequence of the economically lucrative arms race for attention that has been fostered on the web. This degraded state of journalism is a real cause for concern for the American democracy. The slow diminishment of our society’s exaltation of truth in favor of “alternative facts” makes our democracy venerable to authoritarianism.

So, how did we get here? Essentially, it has been a three-step process.

First, the desire to maximize user attention on the web has fostered an arms race in incredibly sophisticated marketing techniques that are powerfully designed to keep us coming back to the web. Businesses such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and of course the news media, are all competing for our attention inside of what technology ethicist Tristan Harris calls the “virtual city”. In much the same way as businesses operate in a physical city replete with billboards, posters, and ads that drive city goers into making certain purchases or spending time in certain areas, these online platforms use classic persuasion techniques well understood by business, advertising, and even casinos to win your attention inside the virtual city.

The subsequent arms race to obtain better and better techniques for coercing time and attention from consumers is what Tristan Harris calls the “attention economy”. This arms race is not benign. In conversation with neuroscientist Sam Harris, Tristan Harris explains the following:

People don’t realize that technology is not neutral. The best way to get attention is to know how people’s minds work. You can push some buttons so you can get them to not just come [to your platform], but to stay as long as possible. Because of the link that more of your attention or more of your time equals more money, [businesses] have an infinite appetite for getting more of it. Time on site or ‘active seven day users’ are the currency of the tech industry. The only other industry that measures users this way is drug dealers. Because of the business model of advertising, there is simply no limit on how much attention that they would like from you.

No longer do businesses need to rely on you randomly passing by a swath of town that they have placed their ad in, but rather they can reach you right in your own pocket. The immediacy and the addictive quality of all the possible ways to get at the web are not an accident of technology. It is technology designed with the express purpose of maximizing your attention.

One recent instance of the ever-increasing power of these attention-maximizing techniques was Cambridge Analytica’s ability to maximize consumer attention for their client, Donald Trump. During the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Trump hired the firm to organize his media strategy, traditional and social media alike. Currently on the Cambrdge Analytica website you can watch a short video of them boasting of the effectiveness of their attention persuading techniques to drive citizen towards certain content. They even make the bold claim that they were instrumental in voters electing Donald Trump as president.

We are living in world where social media and big data companies have pushed the persuasion game to a whole new level. Companies like Facebook and much of the Internet are using technology that is running an auction for your eyeballs 100,000,000 times a second asking itself “what is it that you want”. It’s an algorithm that does this. It’s a piece of technology. It’s not inherently evil, but it is incredibly persuasive, incredibly powerful, and is the basis for the economy that exists online today.

This nefarious arms race for attention is only the first step in the process that brought our news environment to its current abysmal situation. The second step is that the attention economy has hijacked the news media into pursuing what gets the most clicks and views rather than what is objectively true.

What gets the most clicks and views is ultimately a matter of psychology and biology. “Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good news report” states author Ray Williams in Psychology Today, “experts say that our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately for survival. Many studies have shown that we care more about the threat of bad things than we do about the prospect of good things. Our negative brain tripwires are far more sensitive than our positive triggers” (Williams).

The Harvard Kennedy School did a study on the lopsided nature of the coverage during the 2016 Presidential Election and convincingly corroborated Ray Williams’s analysis. They found that 77% of Donald Trump’s coverage was negative and Trump’s coverage time more than doubled Clinton’s (Patterson). This means that the winner of the election and owner of the vast majority of the coverage was receiving largely negative press. Due to the fact that we give more attention to negative media, the attention economy demands that the news media gives us more of that. We want outrage, Donald Trump proved it, and the media followed the prescription of the attention economy to give it to us.

The media using the attention economy business model to select headlines rather than selecting what truly needs to be heard is media hijacking.

Tristan Harris claims that the attention economy is maximizing outrage and polarization in the media due to the desire for the media to follow the clicks. This claim brings us to the third step in the fake news process.

The one two punch of the attention economy business model leading to media hijacking creates an environment where “alternative facts” can proliferate. When outrage is maximized, conversations that are not grounded in reality also proliferate. One example of this is when BuzzFeed decided to publish all 35 pages of the Trump Russia dossier, social media exploded with conversations and even memes regarding some of the more “private” allegations.

The problem was however that Buzzfeed could not verify the allegations in the dossier. Millions of people were discussing something that simply had no basis in fact. This happened thanks to BuzzFeed’s business model of following the clicks. According to journalist Brandon Ambrosino ,“Buzzfeed said it hadn’t been able to falsify [the allegations]”, but was “making the information available ‘so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect.”’ (Ambrosino). Letting Americans make up their own minds about unverified allegations is not the role of journalism. What it should be doing is reporting the facts.

The problem with Buzzfeed’s decision here is not that the dossier story is false, but that the story is unverified. The motivation to publish without verification is a real issue. This is a clear example of hijacked media. This is outrage journalism and it has everything to do with getting your attention, not with reporting the truth.

It is supposed to be journalism’s job to inform the masses, but as you can see, it has been hijacked by the attention economy. Ambrosino says, “If the standard for traditional journalism was to ask, ‘Is this verified?,’ the standard for new digital publications like Buzzfeed is to ask, ‘Is this clickworthy?’” (Ambrosino).

In a media environment that is brimming with these sorts of publications, our daily conversations are pock marked with unverified claims that many hold as true, simply because the claim was published by a news organization. In this environment citizens stop caring about what is objectively true and replace truth with their own sets of facts (warmly known as ‘alternative facts’). This is creating what many scholars are calling the “post truth era”. It is a world where truth is no longer valued and personal truth can be backed up by “alternative facts”.

This is how we get the fake news environment we have today. It is not a large leap from BuzzFeed publishing unverified content to 100% false stories like the one about President Obama banning the pledge of allegiance also being published by fake news websites. The story that was put out by a site called TD Alliance, received over 2 million likes, shares, and comments on Facebook last January alone (Snopes). This story is 100% false and, in fact, continues to make the rounds on social media by being republished by other fake news websites.

Known to be false stories circulating by the millions can only happen as a result of a post truth era where citizens consume what is most shocking without caring about whether or not it is true. Stories like this abound on the Internet, and one can draw a straight line from the arms race of the attention economy to the growing ubiquity of false journalism.

How many people were at Donald Trump’s inauguration? Did Obama wiretap The Donald? The most insidious aspect of this fake news phenomenon and the post truth era is that people like Donald Trump are using this to their advantage. In fact, he uses the same evasive tactics as BuzzFeed when confronted about his spurious claims.

In his notorious interview with CBS’s John Dickerson where Trump abruptly ends the interview after being asked about his claim that President Obama had wire tapped him, he says the following:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: well, you saw what happened with surveillance. And I think that was inappropriate, but that’s the way —

JOHN DICKERSON: What does that mean, sir?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You can figure that out yourself.

JOHN DICKERSON: Well, I — the reason I ask is you said he was — you called him “sick and bad”.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Look, you can figure it out yourself. He was very nice to me with words, but — and when I was with him — but after that, there has been no relationship.

JOHN DICKERSON: But you stand by that claim about him?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t stand by anything. I just — you can take it the way you want. I think our side’s been proven very strongly. And everybody’s talking about it. And frankly it should be discussed. I think that is a very big surveillance of our citizens. I think it’s a very big topic. And it’s a topic that should be number one. And we should find out what the hell is going on.

JOHN DICKERSON: I just wanted to find out, though. You’re — you’re the president of the United States. You said he was “sick and bad” because he had tapped you — I’m just —

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You can take — any way. You can take it any way you want.

Transcript CBSNews.com

When even the president of the United States is unable to falsify his own statements, you know truth is really going out the window. By saying, “figure it out for yourself” and “I don’t stand by anything”, Donald Trump is essentially making the same move BuzzFeed did to justify publishing their outrage piece, only in this instance it is to justify a Tweet containing very serious allegations of wiretapping by the former sitting president.

Dr. Timothy Snyder has just written a rather timely book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. In it, he details how authoritarian regime changes follow a pattern of slow and subtle picking off of important institutions in order to take power from under the noses of the people. He argues that when a leader with no regard for the truth like Donald Trump comes to power, what is at stake is the very fabric of a democracy. A weakened state of journalism is “good news” (pun intended) for the authoritarian minded because it is an institution that functions as a check to power. The fake news phenomenon shows that the institution of journalism is at risk today.

When Donald Trump makes a spurious claim and then point his finger at Jim Acosta claiming he is the source of fake news, it represents exactly what Timothy Snyder is saying about the targeting of important institutions by those in power. Journalism is under attack by both right wing power seekers capitalizing on the mass of citizens who have been parasitized by the post truth virus, and by the attention economy that propagates misleading and out right fake news.

We really need to be vigilant stewards of the technology that has been unleashed in our lifetime and educate ourselves about the power of media and media persuasion. We also need to be wary of those that would pounce on this weakened state of journalism and return a reverence for truth back to its rightful place in our country. When truth goes out the window, often so does freedom.

Citations

Harris, Tristan. “Waking Up With Sam Harris #71 — What is Technology Doing to Us?Interview. Podcast. YouTube, 19 Apr. 2017. Web.

Snyder, Timothy. “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The 20th Century”. Politics and Prose. 14 Mar. 2017. YouTube. Web.

Cambridge Analytica. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 July 2017 <https://cambridgeanalytica.org>.

Patterson, Thomas E. “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” Harvard Kennedy School: Shorenstein Center. N.p., 7 Dec. 2016.

Ambrosino, Brandon. “The new fake news: BuzzFeed decision favours clicks over truth.” The Globe and Mail. Special to The Globe and Mail, 12 Jan. 2017.

Williams, Ray. “Why We Love Bad News.” Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, 01Nov. 2014.

Dickerson, John. “President Trump’s interview in the Oval Office: Full Transcript.” CBS News. CBS Interactive, 01 May 2017.

Farhi, Paul. “Trump gets way more TV news time than Clinton. So what?” The Washington Post. WP Company, 21 Sept. 2016.

“President Obama Removes ‘God’ from Pledge of Allegiance?” Snopes.com. N.p., 04 Feb. 2016.