Donald Trump kicked off the new year like any president would: by rage-tweeting about the news media. "I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR," the president tweeted on the second day of 2018. "Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!" He would then delay the awards, which stand to run afoul of both White House rules and the First Amendment, by one week due to the fact that "the interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!" And though we are now well into January, it remains unclear what form the awards ceremony, which is scheduled for Wednesday, will take, or whether it will happen at all. (Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders referred to the awards ceremony as a "potential event" during Tuesday's press briefing).
Should the ceremony take place, it would represent a culmination of Trump's continuous attacks on certain outlets as "fake." And though the president's attacks are clearly designed to sow doubt in reports that hold him accountable, the growing prominence of conspiracy theories reflects a mounting distrust of authority, while the speed with which they spread highlights tech platforms' alarming ability to amplify them. But in the spirit of the current administration, which seems dead set on trivializing the problem, the Hive has compiled the top six biggest fake-news stories of 2017.
Melania Trump's body double
In October, a theory about First Lady Melania Trump briefly gripped the Internet. Though it began as a joke, it quickly morphed into a full-fledged conspiracy: the First Lady employed a look-alike who regularly filled in for her during certain public appearances. Internet sleuths pointed to the president's slipups regarding his wife's whereabouts ("My wife, Melania, who happens to be right here," he says in one widely circulated clip); her sometimes-altered-looking appearance; and a similar-looking Secret Service agent as apparent proof that the president's wife was actually an impostor. Snopes.com quickly flagged this as false.
The Roy Moore setup
In the wake of a bombshell Washington Post report alleging that Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore had pursued sexual contact with minors, Moore supporters leapt to his defense. One Web site circulated the (false) news that a Moore accuser had been arrested for lying, and right-wing blog the Gateway Pundit wrote about a tweet that claimed The Washington Post had paid women to fabricate stories about Moore. Before the election, Alabama voters received a robocall from someone who claimed to be "Bernie Bernstein," a Post reporter who sought to offer money for "damaging remarks" about Moore, and the Post itself reported on an attempted sting operation by Project Veritas, the right-wing gotcha-journalism outfit run by James O'Keefe, which had tried to plant false accusations about Moore with a Post reporter. Moore lost the December special Senate race, but barely.
The Seth Rich conspiracy
When Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered in July 2016, his death quickly became a fulcrum for misinformation. WikiLeaks offered $20,000 in cash for information about Rich's untimely death, and WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange suggested on a Dutch radio show that Rich may have played a role in the D.N.C. hack that was later tied to Russian operatives. Roger Stone suggested that Rich had been killed by the Clintons to cover up the evidence. (In reality, Washington, D.C. police say Rich was likely the victim of a botched robbery). A Fox News story in May 2017 added fuel to the conspiracy fire, but the story quickly fell apart as Rich's family begged Sean Hannity to stop spreading "baseless accusations."
Trump's voter-fraud fever dream
Though the most recent presidential election began and ended on November 8, 2016, the news cycle surrounding it churns on, helped along by Trump's Twitter feed. In late January of last year, an article from YourNewsWire—a Los Angeles-based Web site that runs aggregated political news mixed in with completely fabricated stories, and has claimed, among other things, that Justin Biebertold a Bible study group that the music industry is run by pedophiles—wrote that 25 million fraudulent votes had been cast for Hilary Clinton. "A study published by NPR reveals that over 25 million Hillary Clinton votes were completely fraudulent, meaning that the Democratic candidate actually lost the popular vote by a huge margin," the story read. Of course, this is completely false; the NPR study in question wasn't conducted by NPR at all. It was a 2012 article published by NPR about a Pew Research Center report issued the same year, which noted that "approximately 24 million voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate." NPR noted that "there's little evidence that this has led to widespread voter fraud."
The theory gained so much traction that the president established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate the matter, but after issuing a series of untoward requests, the committee was dissolved this month after it found no evidence of voter fraud.
Trump's inauguration crowd size
Before he relinquished the unenviable job of White House press secretary, Sean Spicer was tasked with convincing reporters that Trump's inauguration had drawn "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe." After a comparison of Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration crowd size and Trump's went viral, an analysis of both crowds showed that Trump's was about one-third the size of Obama's.
Following his resignation, Spicer walked back the first assertion he'd made on the job, saying in an interview that he had "screwed up" a number of times as press secretary.
Viral terrorist attacks
In almost the same instant that news broke of a shooting in Las Vegas that left at least 59 dead and hundreds wounded, false information began to circulate about its circumstances. Some social-media posts included a picture of comedian Sam Hyde falsely claiming he was the gunman; other rumors suggested that multiple shooters had been involved. After the terror attack in Manchester, England, at an Ariana Grande concert in May, viral photos claiming to show missing children were widely circulated on Facebook and Twitter, despite the fact that many pictured were in different continents at the time of the attack.
A number of these stories received boosts from Facebook's own algorithms; the YourNewsWire story about fraudulent Clinton votes was among Facebook's most-shared viral news stories of 2017, according to analysis by BuzzFeed News. In 2017 as a whole, Facebook saw a marked uptick in users' engagement with fake-news stories. In an attempt to minimize the impact of such stories, Facebook last week introduced changes to its News Feed that will promote posts from friends and family, and de-emphasize posts from publishers (or any official page).
But the effort to combat fake news faces an obstacle still more daunting than social-media algorithms: Americans themselves can't even agree on what the phrase means. Though it originally referred to a falsified news story, it's come to mean any hyper-partisan news story, or even a story with which the reader disagrees, regardless of how factual it is.
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