Donald Trump’s ‘Fake News” Propaganda Campaign Analysis

Donald Trump’s fake news propaganda campaign analysis

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Donald Trump’s fake news propaganda campaign analysis

US President Donald Trump during his election campaign accused leading US media of bias against him. Popular newspapers and television channels allegedly fought against the Republican information war. Mostly propaganda are used in elections. Meanwhile, on American social networks, fictional news praising Trump or brutally criticizing Clinton turned out to be significantly more popular than factual reports and articles.

Media both were heavily promoted characters. But they carried different pictures. US site BuzzFeed investigated the effect on Facebook's most popular stories associated with the presidential elections in the United States. Over the past three months of the presidential campaign, the top 20 most popular fake news on Facebook have collected more user reactions than the top 20 of these reports. Fake stories were more popular than articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and other media.

According to BuzzFeed , over the course of three months, the 20 most popular notes from sites with fake news and party blogs collected 8.7 million reactions (they were commented on, liked, shared). At the same time, the 20 most popular stories from leading American media collected 7.4 million reactions. Facebook in the United States every month uses more than 200 million people out of 320 million people in the country, writes the New York Times . At the same time, 44% of Americans read or watch news on Facebook, a study in 2016 showed .

Two of the most popular fake news claimed that Clinton was selling weapons to the Islamic State, the third that the Pope supported Trump's candidacy for president of the United States. The site where ten of the twenty most popular fake news appeared is called Ending the Fed ("End of the Federal Reserve"). It was registered only in March of this year. Facebook users in the United States have long complained about the sheer amount of fake social media news and their potential impact on voters. (Beckett, 2017).

The founder of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg, rejected all the charges. "Of all the Facebook content, more than 99% of what people see is genuine. Only a small amount is fake news and lies," he wrote . In one of the comments, he explained that the number of fakes in the user's news feed depends on what pages he reads and what kind of people he is friends with. (Taylor, 2017). Nevertheless, the company Facebook announced that soon users will have the opportunity to complain about fake news to the leadership of the social network. Publications considered fake will be flagged. The company is also considering collaborating with organizations that check for fake news.

Information about how often Twitter users faced fake news, no. But researchers at Oxford University proved that there were five times as many chatbots supporting Trump on Twitter as chatbots that supported Clinton. Chatbot is a computer program that allows you to send messages on Twitter. She reacts to certain words and hashtags (specially designed keywords on Twitter) and "automatically enters into a conversation" with real users of the social network.

The hundred largest chatbots of which the researchers studied published about 450 thousand tweets in nine days of research. According to the scientific work, the most active chatbots generated about 18% of all the presidential election traffic on Twitter. But company executives have denied the impact of chatbots on US voting. (Bort, 2018).

One of the authors of the study, Philip Howard, explained to the New York Times that the purpose of chatbots is to confuse people or pollute the discussion. Researchers examined tweets in certain hashtag s and the first nine days of November (presidential elections took place on November 8). Among the authors of these tweets, they found chatbot users who posted at least 50 posts per day. (Taylor, 2017).

Concludingly, propaganda offers a quick and proven way of influencing our brains, for this very reason it is often rejected by the mass consciousness, which feels a trick from the past. Propaganda not only replicates political, it creates emotions, transforming them from individual to collective. And in relation to what can collective happiness arise.

References

Beckett, C. (2017). ‘Fake news’: the best thing that’s happened to journalism. POLIS:

Journalism and Society at the LSE.

Bort, R. (2018, July 30). Trump's 'Fake News' Propaganda Campaign Is Metastasizing. Retrieved

from https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-fake-news-704624/.

Taylor Vidmar.(2017) Real vs. Fake News on Facebook. Retrieved from

https://www.adolescent.net/a/real-vs-fake-news-on-facebook.