Article content continued

The item was part of a burgeoning phenomenon in U.S. politics: partly or mostly made-up “news” items casting one presidential candidate or the other in a negative light, and — thanks to the immense power of Facebook and other social media — seen by millions of Americans.

If cable-news channels such as Fox News and MSNBC revived an era of overtly partisan political coverage, producers of so-called fake news have taken the trend to a new and distorted level, largely dispensing with facts in their zeal to generate money-making clicks and/or promote one political side.

Now it’s on all sides and it’s just incredible how it has metastasized

“It’s really disconcerting the scale that misinformation can achieve relatively quickly and with relatively little effort,” says Craig Silverman, Canadian chief of the Buzzfeed website. “It’s driving divisions between people … It has made it very difficult for the public square to have some reasonable debate.”

Silverman spearheaded a study recently of “hyper-partisan” Facebook pages, finding that during a two-week period, 38 per cent of news material on three right-wing pages and 19 per cent on left-leaning ones were partly or mostly false.

Just as troubling, Buzzfeed concluded the fabricated posts were shared by readers far more than the legitimate ones, or than stories on mainstream news sites.

And while such material resided largely on the fringes of political debate in the past, it is now seeping into the mainstream.

This week, Sean Hannity, the influential Fox News commentator and Trump backer, aired a story suggesting Michelle Obama had erased all her pro-Clinton tweets in the wake of the renewed FBI email probe. It was a fake, easily disproved simply by examining Obama’s Twitter feed. Hannity later apologized.