When the term “fake news” burst onto the scene during the presidential election, most of the examples the media referred to came from right-wing sites and networks, alleging all kinds of horrible things done by Hillary Clinton and/or the left — murders, child sex-abuse rings operating underneath pizza parlors, etc.
If Donald Trump was mentioned in these fake stories, it was usually in a complimentary way, like the one about Pope Francis endorsing his campaign, or one that said he sent his private plane to pick up 200 starving Marines.
But liberal sites and networks are no strangers to fabricated news, for the simple reason that the desire to believe something which caters to our existing prejudices isn’t restricted by political ideology. And according to an editor who works for the fact-checking site Snopes, liberal versions of fake news are growing in popularity.
In the latest example, former ** and senior Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal wrote an essay in the highly-regarded London Review of Books, in which he described how Donald Trump’s father Fred had commissioned a couple of racist TV ads during his run for mayor of New York in **.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Blumenthal talked about how the first ad portrayed a black drug addict terrorizing a neighborhood, and the second **. But as both the Washington Post and Politico have pointed out, the videos are fakes, created by a husband-and-wife team of videographers as an exercise in social commentary. Also, Trump’s father never ran for mayor.
The Clinton adviser isn’t the only one to fall for this kind of fake related to Trump’s father. In **, an image was circulated on social media that allegedly showed the senior Trump (who was also a New York real estate developer) wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood at a KKK rally. That picture is also a fake.
Why were people so quick to believe the photo? Because Fred Trump was once arrested at a KKK rally, and is also said to have held racist views, so the photo seemed to confirm something that was already widely believed by critics of Trump. The same goes for Blumenthal and the videos — they appeared to confirm something that many people already believed was true.
Many of the other “fake news” stories believed and shared by critics of Trump fall into a similar pattern. One that got a lot of play on social media was a New York Times story that claimed ** didn’t really understand the office he was about to take.
The Times’ story alleged that ** didn’t know the Department of Energy also had responsibility for nuclear weapons, and that this news came as a surprise to him. But the only quoted source in the story later said his comments were taken out of context, and a statement was later produced that was signed by ** and referred to the department’s nuclear responsibilities.
The New York Times has said that it stands by its reporting on that story, and that it had other sources besides the one named in the piece. But even if it was inaccurate, many people clearly wanted to believe it, because it fit their existing preconceptions about how unfit for office many of Trump’s nominees are.
More recently, a story was widely shared on Facebook and other social networks that claimed police officers had burned a camp of indigenous activists protesting the Dakota Access pipeline. The story included a photo that appeared to show hundreds of tipis burning. The story was completely untrue, however, and the picture was from an HBO film from 2007.
The immigration order that President Trump signed blocking travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries also caused a rash of fake stories, including one that showed a 5-year-old in handcuffs at an airport. But the picture was from 2015.
A number of stories shared both during the campaign and after purported to show evidence of racist attacks or abuse as a result of Trump’s candidacy, including a student who had her hijab torn off on the subway, and a man who said he was thrown off an airplane after speaking with his mother in Arabic. But both stories turned out to be fakes.
Another story that was widely shared involved a Jewish family that said they had to leave their home and go into hiding after their son asked to be excused from performing in a Christmas nativity play, and they were subjected to abuse. As it turned out, the family had gone on a vacation trip that was previously scheduled.
As Snopes editor Brooke Binkowski noted in her interview with The Atlantic, if a story triggers a strong emotion in you, like rage, “then you probably need to check it against something else,” because it may have been deliberately created to have that effect. And that’s advice that applies to readers and social-media users across the political spectrum.