Fake news in the United States

[3]On December 6, 1809, U.S. Representative George W. Campbell of Tennessee, in a speech on the House floor, said that: Your publick [sic] prints teemed with falsehoods, and misstatements on this subject; insurrections were announced in some quarters of the union as likely to take place, and dreadful stress stated to prevail every where.

[4]The Argus of Western America, Frankfort, Kentucky, related on November 10, 1830, that: The practice of giving false news for electioneering purposes, in this country, originated with the "National" Intelligencer.

Its servile co-workers abroad, of the [Henry] Clay school of politics, have adopted it, and the confident tone in which they now utter falsehoods, proves that the opposition rest their hopes of success upon the gullibility of their readers.

][5] After the 1840 election, the New York Commercial Advertiser opined that The Van Buren leaders of this city have much to answer for, in regard to the false news of success which they dispatched to the South on Friday.

The Heraldo chastised "Anglo-American" newspapers as being "famous, throughout the world, for the false news and dates which they delight to propagate, adorned with a thousand details, intended to give them an appearance of truth.

"[7] An 1861 editorial in the Memphis Daily Avalanche of Tennessee recommended legislating "a penal offense to send false news over the telegraph line."

"[8] Under a headline reading "Government Connivance at the Transmission of False News Reports," the Burlington (Vermont) Sentinel complained on May 22, 1863, that "disgraceful falsehoods" had been "telegraphed throughout the country regarding the state of affairs in the army and its movements" and that the reason for them "is pretty correctly hinted at by the N.Y. Evening Post, which claimed that cabinet stock speculations were at the bottom of this false information.

"[9] The Independent of New York City stated:[9] It is difficult to dismiss the suspicion that some pretty high parties have been attempted to operate in the gold market.

]The Springfield Republican was quoted as saying: "While the most ridiculous stories about the capture of Richmond were flying through the northern towns, no newspaper correspondent here was allowed the privilege of denying the false rumors."

[9] The New York Tribune was charged by The (Philadelphia) Times on November 26, 1879, with printing and editorially endorsing "false news" that brought about "the financial crisis of last week, which took several millions of dollars out of the pockets of men of moderate means to place this vast sum in the strong boxes of Mr. [Jay] Gould and his fellow conspirators on Wall Street."

The law forbade anybody from circulating "false intelligence, with the intent of depreciating or advancing the market price" of stocks, bonds, merchandise or commodity.

His enormous profits on his last speculation, through the dissemination of false news, would enable him to pay the fine without pain to his pocket, but the imprisonment would give him some discomfort and the country some satisfaction.

The New-York Times urged that the State legislature should "so amend the law as to bring within its provisions the most mischievous and flagitious of all the varieties of the offense of willfully publishing false news.

One editorialist wrote in 1896 that: The American newspapers are fairly beating their own record at the present time in their success in getting up sensations and setting afloat fake news.

"[15] The Coffeyville (Kansas) Gaslight said: "The story was very cleverly concocted stating that the minister, on his deathbed, had made a full confession of the crime and that Durrant, who was convicted on purely circumstantial evidence, had been fully vindicated.

There is a vicious and industrious Filipino junta at Hong Kong with a malicious Englishman at the head of it which manufactures the sensational news regarding American atrocities in Luzon and sends them out for the benefit of anti-expansionists and Democratic organs in this country [the United States].

[21] The New York Daily News published an editorial apologizing for an article from "a New England correspondent" that appeared in the newspaper on April 25, 1936, stating that "$20,000 in Lindbergh ransom bills had recently turned up in Albany and various Massachusetts towns."

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, fake news was particularly prevalent and spread rapidly over social media by "bots", according to researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute.

[30] Governmental bodies in the U.S. and Europe started looking at contingencies and regulations to combat fake news specially when as part of a coordinated intelligence campaign by hostile foreign governments.

[31][32] Online tech giants Facebook and Google started putting in place means to combat fake news in 2016 as a result of the phenomenon becoming globally known.

[37][38][39][40] In December 2016, an armed North Carolina man, Edgar Maddison Welch, traveled to Washington, D.C., and opened fire at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, driven by a fake online news story known as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which accused the pizzeria of hosting a pedophile ring run by Democratic Party leaders.

[46] After Republican Colorado state senator Ray Scott used the term in 2017 as a reference to a column in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the newspaper's publisher threatened a defamation lawsuit.

Metric Media was reportedly planning on creating more sites across the nation in what critics dubbed a disinformation campaign that might have been attempting to influence the 2020 elections.

[46] According to BuzzFeed, during the last three months of the presidential campaign, of the top twenty fake election-related articles on Facebook, seventeen were anti-Clinton or pro-Trump.

"[58] Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow estimated that the average US adult read and remembered between one and several fake news articles during the 2016 US presidential election period.

In January of 2024, the World Economic Forum highlighted disinformation as a top global threat over the next few years, citing concerns around AI and the disruption of elections, including in the United States.