The earliest recorded examples of Fake News go back to the ancient Egyptians in the 13th century (probably something about how they didn’t know who built the pyramids either). The recent interest in Fake News was sparked by the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. Prior to the election there were relatively few articles about Fake News, afterwards, as evidenced by the number of Google searches and social engagement, there was an explosion in articles and in public interest in Fake News.

In this post, we take a look at the articles discussing Fake News, examine whether we could have predicted there would be such overwhelming interest, and set out some key takeaways to consider when looking at content trends.

Background

Immediately after the 2016 US presidential election, Buzzfeed researchers discovered that the top 20 Fake News stories about the election received more social engagement on Facebook than the top 20 news stories from 19 major media outlets.

Fake News quickly became a mainstream term, and a major topic of debate.

The term ‘Fake News’ is used on both sides of the political debate. On the one hand it is used by those who claim Fake News articles helped contribute to Donald Trump’s election victory. Equally it is used by Donald Trump himself, and his supporters, who refer to the ‘Fake News’ mainstream media.

In this post we should make clear we are not looking at examples of Fake News. Instead we are looking at articles about Fake News, such as the growth in Fake News stories or how to identify Fake News or the impact of articles about Fake News.

The Number of Articles Published About Fake News

Using BuzzSumo data we have charted the number of articles published about Fake News for the period January 2015 to May 2018.

From the chart below we can see there were relatively few articles about Fake News being published prior to 8 November 2016 when the US presidential election took place.