The Motivation behind Fake News

Fake news may be a fight not over truth, but power, according to Mike Ananny, a media scholar at the University of Southern California. Fake news “is evidence of a social phenomenon at play — a struggle between [how] different people envision what kind of world that they want.”

Ideological fake news lands in the social media feeds of audiences who are already primed to believe whatever story confirms their worldview.

Brooke Borel writing for FiveThirtyEight