Research shows mainstream media helps fund fake news
Republished from Iffy.news.
Major news outlets are key contributors to clickbait’s booming business. Their direct links to fake-news stories boost ad revenue and SEO for misinformation. This post provides supporting data, ways to responsibly cite disreputable sources, and a plea for publications to adopt a link policy.
Most links on the internet act as “votes” for search engines. And one likely result of serious, respected publications linking to — and therefore “voting” for — fake news is that Google’s algorithm ended up ranking the false story higher.
—That debunk of a viral fake news story might help the hoaxers, First Draft (2016)
First Draft’s 2016 warning still plagues publishers today. The lax linking habits of many fact-based news sites inadvertently help fake news profit and propagate.
Links can transport readers to any webpage on the planet. But there are places you shouldn’t patronize and sites you shouldn’t send visitors. Yet that’s exactly what major publishers do when they link directly to mis/disinfo.
The damage done
If other prominent websites link to the page (what is known as PageRank), that has proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted.
—How search works: Search algorithms: Quality of content, Google
Links from high-quality factual news to low-quality fake news cause damage in two ways:
- More revenue for fake-news sites. More traffic means more page-views means more ad income (and, as traffic increases, higher ad rates), siphoning ad dollars from legitimate publishers to junk news — at least $250M annually.
- Better SEO for fake-news articles. In Google’s search algorithms, “PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.” And links to fake-news hurt the linker: “Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods,” says Google Search Quality engineer Matt Cutts.
The link economy
In media, we are moving from a content economy to a link economy.… Links are the new currency of media. Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money.
—The link economy v. the content economy, Jeff Jarvis: Buzz Machine (2008)
Major news sites majorly support the clickbait business model. (Perhaps dubious publishers even try to get their claims debunked.)
For example, The Washington Post called The Gateway Pundit a “bonkers website,” whose “conspiracy theory-spewing” election-fraud tirades were “laughably stupid — but also obviously stupid.” Yet dozens of WaPo articles link readers directly to those stupid, bonkers claims.
The New York Times called Gateway “notorious for regularly crossing the line from wild hyperpartisan spin into outright falsehoods.” But that same article linked thrice to those falsehoods. To search engine algorithms, the Grey Lady is vouching for Gateway.
This damage isn’t theoretical. It’s real. WaPo and NYT links to Gateway’s site account for half of the top-followed links, which are a Moz estimate of a link’s impact on search results (see data tables below). NYT links alone total half the top 10. Links from The Guardian, Vox, and CNN are also among the top-followed.
On the hyperpartisan left, a dozen respected news outlets link to Occupy Democrats, as if it were legitimate news. It is not: Media Bias/Fact Check calls it a Questionable Source. Our.news flags it as Problematic. Logically.ai rates its Source Credibility as Low. And Wikipedia says it “publishes false information, hyperpartisan content, and clickbait.” Yet NBC, NPR, Time, the L.A. and N.Y. Times, WaPo, HuffPo, and The Atlantic, Guardian, and Independent are all top-followed linkers, boosting ad income and search-engine results for fake news.
The Occupy-ers failed most of their PolitiFact checks. Yet PolitiFact’s link to the site is among the top-50.
A BuzzFeed survey found the “fake-news headline” that most respondents (inaccurately) “believed to be very or somewhat accurate” was an Occupy story. BuzzFeed’s survey and their debunk of that story both linked to the disinfo.
Responsible links to unreliable info
Of course, reporters should cite their sources. Here are two ways to do so without benefiting bad actors. The second, “nofollow” links, is better than bare links. But best is linking to a copy saved in a web archive.
1. The Wayback way
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is the largest, oldest (born 1996), and, perhaps, easiest to use web archive. It preserves pages (and outlinks in that page), then tracks and compares subsequent changes. Iffy’s Wayback Workshop has a slew of tools for working with Wayback URLs.
Fact-checkers also favor the Archive.today and Archive-It, another IA project. Memento Time Travel searches multiple archives for a saved URL.
To safely cite an unreliable source, don’t link directly. Instead, link to a web-archive copy:
- Find a copy of the untrustworthy source (or save the page).
- Get the web-archive’s URL for the copy.
- Use the archive URL as your link.
2. The Nofollow fix
Google introduced the nofollow attribute, (rel="nofollow") in 2005 to prevent comment spam. It’s one of three ways (with “sponsored” and “UGC”: user-generated content) to “qualify your outbound links to Google”.
Use the
nofollowvalue where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
—Evolving “nofollow”: new ways to identify the nature of links, Google
Linkless and screenshot
When debunking falsehoods, some reporters and fact-checkers don’t link to the source at all. That kind of “trust us” approach contributes to the depletion of trust in the media, now at an all-time low.
Others use a screenshot of a fake-news article, another practice I’d discourage for multiple reasons: A screenshot is out-of-context, easy to forge, and hard to verify. It “doesn’t provide the same depth of information or make the source as easy to share and monitor over time,” says Ed McCain, of the Journalism Digital News Archive. “It’s relatively easy to manipulate a screenshot with photo editing software. Compared with the Wayback Machine, a screenshot has a lot less data attached to it, to provide things like time and date captured, the website it came from, and other important contextual information.”
Top-followed links to unreliable sites
To estimate the top inbound links — those that most benefit a site’s SEO, the Moz Link Explorer combines several metrics: page authority, domain authority, spam score, and link count. The following tables are results (2021–02) for Infowars, Occupy Democrats, and The Gateway Pundit.
Notice how Infowars’ Domain Authority, which predicts the relative search-ranking potential of a site, nearly equals the DA of the Times and Post. This, in part, is due to mainstream media’s destructive habit of sending visitors and lending legitimacy to unreliable sources, via their direct links (in red).
Infowars
Occupy Democrats
The Gateway Pundit
What’s your link policy?
A proposition: Publishers should adopt a link policy — guidelines for when and how their writers should link to external sources. (In lieu of a site-wide policy, reporters should create their own link protocols.) In that spirit, here is the:
Iffy.news Link Policy 1.0
We link:
- To reliable information only.
- To cite and credit sources, building transparency and trust, and enabling independent verification.
- To augment understanding, adding related but not critical information.
We don’t link:
- To faulty or false information directly. We use a web-archive URL instead.
- To unreliable sources (such as those in the Iffy Index). However, if fact-checkers deem a story true, even if at an otherwise unreliable source, we will link directly — a sort of path to amnesty.
Iffy sought comments from BuzzFeed, NYT, WaPo, and PolitiFact. Only the latter wrote back. Editor-in-Chief Angie Holan replied, “For much of our misinformation work, we do ‘web archive’ the item and link to that. We don’t usually do it for sites that are well known or have a large size and stature, but perhaps we should.”
Editors: Josef Verbanac, Claire Golding, and the RJI team. Fishing hooks from the 1898 book The Faröe Islands by Joseph Russell Jeaffreson. For easy access to web-archive URLs, check the Wayback Workshop.
