Real News About Fake News

We still don't know precisely how large Donald Trump Jr.'s email-confirmed desire to collude with the Russian government will loom in the history of his father's administration. Maybe it'll be a clumsy one-off illustrating a willingness to work with Russia that never paid off; maybe it will prove the tip of the cooperative iceberg.

Maybe it will be something in between: a signal of a willingness to work with a foreign adversary but in ways that played out in other spheres of the campaign. With that in mind, it's worth checking out McClatchy's Wednesday story on congressional and Justice Department investigators drilling in on "whether the Trump campaign's digital operation – overseen by [son-in-law and top White House adviser] Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia's sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016."

The Democratic National Committee hacks have been the highest-profile aspect of the Russian cyberassault of the 2016 elections, but they were only one part of a sweeping operation that also included at least probing state voting systems and officials and the weaponization of fake news. And that last one was not a trivial operation.

As Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted in a hearing on this months ago: "The Russians employed thousands of paid internet trolls and bot nets to push out disinformation and fake news at high volume focusing this material onto your Twitter and Facebook feeds and flooding our social media with misinformation. This fake news and disinformation was then hyped by the American media echo chamber and our own social media networks to reach and potentially influence millions of Americans."

Despite President Donald Trump's misuse of the term, "fake news" is a real thing, as I've written before. In fact, his ongoing attempts to conflate fake news with real stories that either he doesn't like or legitimately have reporting problems only empowers future Russian attempts to use actual fake news, which is composed of falsehoods deliberately designed to deceive.

And the flood of fake news wasn't evenly distributed. According to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January, "of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared eight million times." More: "The average American saw, and remembered, 0.92 pro-Trump fake news stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories, with just over half of those who recalled seeing fake news stories believing them."

An October Buzzfeed analysis of a half-dozen major conservative and progressive Facebook pages found that the right-wing groups were publishing false or misleading information 38 percent of the time while the left-wing pages were doing it at a rate of 20 percent of the time. And post-election Buzzfeed published an analysis of the "20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs" on Facebook – stories with headlines like "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President" (he did not) and "WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS" (she did not). These sort of stories outperformed the top 20 real news stories from traditional media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The fake stories got 8.7 million engagements – which is to say shares, reactions and comments – as compared to shy of 7.4 million engagements for the real news stories. And of the top 20 fake news stories, 17 favored Trump.

Just as it wasn't evenly ideologically distributed, the fake news was not geographically spread out. So the Oxford Internet Institute studied political Twitter use in Michigan in the lead-up to the election. It found that Trump-related hashtags were used twice as often as Clinton-related hashtags – and that, as the study's lead author, Philip N. Howard later wrote on The Huffington Post, "the amount of professionally researched political news and information was consistently smaller than the amount of junk news," which is to say fake or misleading news. He went on: "Not only did such junk news 'outperform' real news, but the proportion of professional news content being shared hit its lowest point the day before the election."

One question facing investigators, per the McClatchy story, is whether the Russians got domestic guidance in targeting their fake news blasts. "One source familiar with Justice's criminal probe said investigators doubt Russian operatives controlling the so-called robotic cyber commands that fetched and distributed fake news stories could have independently 'known where to specifically target … to which high-impact states and districts in those states,'" McClatchy's Peter Stone and Greg Gordon write. It's a legitimate and important question, though not a slam dunk. The political journalism industry has reached such a state of sweep and granularity that it would not be implausible for foreign hackers closely following the election to know which states, and perhaps even precincts, Trump had to sweep in order to achieve victory.

The fact that Kushner is at this potential nexus only raises the stakes and makes it more intriguing. So yes, the Trump Jr. affair is fascinating and worth attention, but also keep an eye on the side of the story covering the weaponization of fake news.