Welcome to Ideas that Set the Agenda

Welcome to Ideas that Set the Agenda, brought to you by St Luke's London . We believe that if you can change the conversation, you can change the world. So we’ve been collecting ideas that have done just that. Some of them are from the world of brands, but often, these are ideas from culture, politics, science or business. One way or another, they’ve left their mark.

2024 is the year of elections, with a record 49% of the world’s population heading to the polls. To prepare us, Zoe Smith unpacks an idea that feels particularly timely….

Fake news

What's the idea?

'Fake News' refers to any kind of misinformation which has been intentionally created and distributed by an individual or group to deceive the public by presenting it as real news.

What makes it powerful?

'Fake News' is powerful because it challenges our long-held assumption that the news (and how it shares information) is accurate and verifiable. If we believe that everyone is offering us different versions of the truth to better their own agenda—even the media, which is meant to be objective—then we become trained to view the truth as relative rather than objective.

The suspicion of the credibility of editorial news content triggered by ‘fake news’ causes us to rely on our own personal network for information. By treating truth and opinion as one and the same, we find ourselves only tapping into the perspectives we relate to and agree with. This prevents us from taking all the objective information available to us from real news to come to our own conclusions and leaves us more vulnerable to genuine misinformation. As Garry Kasparov writes: ‘If you can convince people that real news is fake, it becomes much easier to convince them that your 'fake news' is real’.

How did it start?

Although politically motivated disinformation has been around for centuries, the specific phrase ‘Fake News’ erupted into public consciousness following Trump’s extensive use of it throughout the 2016 American presidential election against Hillary Clinton. During the election, both candidates found themselves subject to hundreds of 'fake news' articles planted by supporters of their opposition, which resulted in a nationwide distrust of public media. The hashtag #fakenews saw considerable attention throughout this period on social media and has since been used by people to undermine articles or news which disagree with their personal views and opinions.

How did it change the world?

The influence 'fake news' had on the outcome of Trump’s presidential victory in 2016 was hotly contested and continues to be scrutinised to this day. In a testimony from Mark Zuckerberg, he revealed that around 126 million Americans (? of the US population) received Russian-backed 'fake news' stories which supported Trump on Facebook (now Meta ). What’s more, according to NPR, the most popular 20 'fake news' stories received more interactions than the top 20 most popular real news stories. The role of 'fake news' in the Brexit referendum in 2016 also saw its results subject to similar scrutiny, and in light of the surge in disinformation, 2016 saw the term ‘post-truth’ declared word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries.

What's next?

Social media platforms have since been placed under pressure to police and suppress misinformation. Twitter has introduced tags which flag potential sources of misinformation on news posts, and Facebook has been working towards combating misinformation through a variety of different initiatives. And yet, 'fake news' is only becoming more sophisticated. The rise of deep-fakes – an AI image or video used to create convincing hoaxes–? coupled with the launch of the new OpenAI programme Sora which can engineer photorealistic videos from a prompt, makes differentiating fact from fiction increasingly more difficult. In her 2024 Emerging Tech Talk at SXSW , Amy Webb even went as far as to predict the emergence of ‘deepfake events’, whereby multiple AI agents could create all the assets, videos, accounts, tweets, and articles and release them in real-time to make it seem as if an event had happened.?

The presence of 'fake news' has only continued to grow, contributing to an increasing distrust of public media.? Its ubiquity on social media has since pushed us into a ‘post-truth’ era. More and more people are relying on social media to stay informed, and the unlimited access to information, both verified and unverified, has meant we are becoming increasingly at risk of warping the truth to fit our own personal ends rather than looking at what is actually happening in the world. Going forward, the truth is set to take a new shape, but what shape exactly that is, and for what agenda, remains unclear.?

That’s all for this week. Have you done your spring clean yet? If not, look out for our next newsletter on Marie Kondo and ‘Sparking Joy’.