The Impact of Fake News on the African-American Community

Abstract

An issue of increasing importance in the past few years has been what is generally referred to as “fake news”. Although there is considerable evidence of such deceptive communication over many centuries, the sheer difference in deception techniques of such communication in an electronic environment has allowed the perpetrators the ability to disguise it in many forms that could not be seen in communication vehicles as print or electronic media such as radio or television. Techniques developed in the context of storable electronic information have allowed fake news items to take on a wider variety of disguises. In addition, with the access to electronic information being available in recent years to a large percentage of the world’s population, the effect of such misleading information has had a much wider sphere of impact. As a consequence, many actors have developed sophisticated tools to convince even very diligent readers of the legitimacy of the false information purveyed. Many examples of this arose in the 2016 United States Presidential election. In particular, many items, supposedly from the Russian government, were aimed at reducing the African-American participation in that election. Our research attempted to assess the effectiveness of those attacks.