Fake news and Social Media

4.2 The motivation behind fake news 
After presenting an overview of the term of fake news, it is important to discuss the
motivations behind the production and circulation of fake news on social media.
According to Allcott and Gentzkow (2017), there appear to be two main motivations
for providing fake news. The first is pecuniary: news articles and posts that become
viral on social media can draw significant advertising revenue when users click on
the original website. Based on this conclusion, it comes as no surprise that pecuniary
appears to have been the main motivation for most of the producers whose identities
have been revealed (Subramanian, 2017). For example, the teenagers in Veles
produced stories favoring both Trump and Clinton that earned them tens of
thousands of dollars, while Paul Horner produced pro-Trump stories for profit,
despite claiming to be personally opposed to Trump (Dewey, 2016). These examples
reveal the fact that making a profit is a strong motivation among the producers of
fake news circulated online, who prefer to generate and share misleading articles in
order to collect more clicks by potential users and earn money through the
advertising. The second motivation, as Allcott and Gentzkow describe (2017) in their
study about the spread of fake news during the US presidential elections, is
ideological. In fact, some fake news providers seek to advance specific political
points of views and distribute their propaganda by using misleading facts and data
within their articles. For instance, the man who ran endingthefed.com, claimed that
he started the site mainly to help Donald Trump’s campaign (Townsend, 2016),
while some other providers of right-wing fake news said they actually identify
themselves as left-wing and wanted to embarrass those on the Right by showing that
they would credulously circulate false stories (Dewey, 2016; Sydell, 2016).
Summarizing the above, two main motivations are behind the production of fake
news: financial and ideological. On one hand, outrageous and fake stories that go
viral – precisely because they are outrageous – provide content producers with clicks
that are convertible to advertising revenue. On the other hand, some other fake news
providers produce fake news to promote ideas or people that they favor, often by
discrediting others.
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