No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Stories that claimed the pope had endorsed Trump, or that Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State, were juiced by Facebook’s algorithms and promoted to millions of Facebook users. In the three months prior to the election, the top stories with false information reached more people on Facebook than the top stories from legitimate news outlets. Some of them came from makeshift websites designed to look real, with names like The Political Insider and Denver Guardian. On Facebook, the subterfuge worked. All links were presented in identical fonts on the news feed, awarding a scrappy conspiracy theorist the same credibility as a fact-checked report from ABC News. One such site even had the web address ABCnews.com.co, even though it was not affiliated with the network. The most shareable content on Facebook was what made people emotional, especially if it triggered fear, shock, or joy. News organizations had been designing more clickable headlines ever since the social network became key to their distribution. But those news organizations were getting beaten by these new players, who had come up with an easier, more lucrative way to go viral—by making up stories that played on Americans’ hopes and fears, and therefore winning via the Facebook algorithm. The fake news on the websites would be interspersed with stories that weren’t entirely fake, but were hyper-slanted with context or loaded language designed to reaffirm readers’ paranoia or political loyalty. People shared ...