US election 2016: malice and misinformation as fake news spreads like wildfire online

"Consider the source" has always been a sensible mantra for judging how much store to put into a particular report or piece of information. But on the internet, where sources are often amorphous and we face a barrage of hundreds of snippets of information at a time, that wisdom often flies out the window.

With US election fever hitting its climax as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump slug it out, the web is filling with dubious information, from concerted efforts to influence voters to straight-up trolling, to old-fashioned clickbait.

On Twitter, false information comes from fake accounts made to look like those of famous pundits, politicians or news sources. By sending out sensational or emotive messages the account-holder knows will show up in searches, these can rack up hundreds of retweets.

Of course, even if the post is from the person you think it's from, it isn't necessarily accurate.

That's a real Trump tweet, but CNN was reporting issues across the county, not the country.

Deeper in the bowels of the internet, groups gather on message boards such as 4chan to create false information specifically for the purpose of confusing or deceiving voters.

After disseminating fake posters that told Clinton voters they could send their ballots via text message instead of going to the polls (a campaign so successful that Twitter had to officially remind people that this was not true), groups on 4chan are preparing to hijack popular hashtags with fake Clinton campaign posters aiming to "shut down the black vote" with confusing messages.

Many more pieces of misinformation are less targeted, simply showing up on your feed as a headline after being digested and regurgitated by the web machine. Strangely, this can often make them more powerful. 

Popular "viral" US election posts have asserted that:

• Jay Z rapped the phrase "middle finger to the Lord" at a Clinton rally (false, someone saw an incorrect caption and freaked out).
• Ivanka Trump held a press conference a day before the election to disavow her father (false, came from fake news site).
• Clinton was preparing EMPs to disable all of America's electronics (false, ridiculous, stolen from satire site and posted as news story on clickbait site).
• FBI director James Comey displayed a Trump/Pence sign outside his home (photo looks real, but anyone can take a sign to a house).
• Van loads of immigrants were being ferried from booth to booth to vote illegally for Clinton (false, fake news site).
• Eric Trump posted a picture online of the ballot he cast for his father, possibly breaking the law (oh wait, that one is real).

The recurring theme is that fake news posts speak to a pre-existing bias or belief in their audience that real news can never match. For example posts about Clinton's emails or "illegal immigrants" flooding polling booths are among the most popular.

The issue is well documented: the echo chambers we create for ourselves by choosing the online sources that feed us information are a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and lies. Regardless of truth (or even basic believability), a piece of information that aligns with enough people's biases will rise to become incredibly widespread.

"Pretty much everything conspires against truth [online]," wrote Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times in a recent article on fake online news. In the face of an overwhelming amount of information to choose from, "we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually do what feels easiest - we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not."

Manjoo has continued to rail against fake news, most recently calling out conservative news aggregator Matt Drudge for his lack of rigour. But how many of Drudge's audience do you think are likely to follow Manjoo?

It's the same for information we don't necessarily already believe, but that we might wish was true because we find it funny or enjoyable. We've all seen Facebook posts, shared by family members, consisting of an image and text that could have been composed by literally anyone but is taken as gospel because it speaks to them. It's certainly been no different during the US election.

One very popular meme circulating on social media consists of a picture of notorious gangster Al Capone with the quote, "Elect a woman president? Hah! That will happen when the Cubs win the World Series".

Notes fact-checking website Snopes: "Not only is there no record of Al Capone's ever having uttered such a thing, but it makes little historical sense that he would have". Though the Cubs had become the butt of many baseball jokes before their historic drought-breaking win this year, the team won two World Series in Capone's lifetime.

A similar (but more mean-spirited) variety of meme pairs a picture of the recently-deceased former US attorney-general Janet Reno with the quote "Donald Trump will never be President in my lifetime". She said no such thing, according to Buzzfeed News, but the idea that she did say it and then died immediately before Trump's election is apparently so attractive to some that they're willing to accept it with no further scrutiny.

Some misinformation is not the result of any malice at all, but just plain mistakes. Unfortunately in these cases the false fact is usually much more interesting than the later correction and so it becomes internet fact anyway.

This morning, a rumour was going around that somebody had hacked Donald Trump's campaign site and left a poop emoji in the header. An image of the alleged hack had been doing the rounds and was even the basis for a post at Slate.

However, it soon became apparent it was not the result of a hack but just bad website design. Users could insert any text at the end of the URL on one of the site's pages and the text would appear as the header. Slate corrected its article, and in a matter of minutes (during which, presumably, people made Trump's website say all manner of nasty things), the flaw was fixed.