Fake news spreads fast; defending against it is an individual effort.

We had some fun at the Weekly on April Fool’s Day, posting a series of fictitious articles on our website that had Alvarado Street Brewery ditching beer for wine coolers and Pacific Grove welcoming a pickleball-focused resort, among other stories.

Using satire or parody is a relatively harmless form of fake news. The jokes won’t always land (see Letters to the Editor, opposite page), but still, entire publications – The Onion, The Journal of Irreproducible Results – are built on it. But as we all know, much more harmful misinformation exists, designed to exploit fears, confirm bigotry or false beliefs, support or slander political leaders and parties, stoke hatred and tear apart the societal seams that bring people together. This makes celebrating April Fool’s Day a tricky proposition.

People with a cause have always been willing to distort the facts. Indeed, the phrase “fake news” dates back to the 1890s and the height of “yellow journalism,” but the practice is much older. Sam Adams – cousin of John Adams – penned many a broadside. According to Eric Burns, historian and author of Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism, Adams’ form of fake news “might well have been the best fiction written in the English language for the entire period between Laurance Sterne and Charles Dickens.”

Whether that’s high or low praise, it was brutally effective at the time. A favorite target of fake news was Massachusetts’ Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Spurred on by the revolutionary press, a mob torched Hutchinson’s house in 1765. A Smithsonian article compared the cause and effect of fabricated stories back then to 2016 when ridiculous posts alleged that a D.C. area pizza restaurant was a front for a child trafficking ring operated by Hillary Clinton.

This is a notion any sensible person would dismiss. By the 2016 election, however, so much misinformation had been hurled around social media, and so much distrust sown about legitimate media outlets, that those who wished to cast the other side as pure evil bit on the lurid tale. It all culminated when a North Carolina man steeped in fake news that he now believed armed himself and rushed to their rescue, his AR-15 blazing.

The Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara presents an informative overview of how fake news as applied then differs from now – as well as why so many people are swayed by obvious distortion. The combination of ideological interests and technology have made foreign agents or others adept at information manipulation the jockeys of fake news volume. They give certain pundits with no ethical limits the fodder they require.

How fake news is disseminated today is in part to blame for how readily some people receive it. Social media is “source agnostic,” the CITS document notes. “That is, they collect and present news stories from a wide variety of outlets, regardless of the quality, reliability or political leaning of the original source.” In addition, fake news plucked from an unreliable site can be easily shared. Unfortunately, fake news can seep into mainstream outlets. Recently it was revealed that Facebook had planted false and damning stories about its fast-growing rival TikTok. Some news organizations took the bait.

Several years ago I shared drinks with a Fox News reporter who was based in Tel Aviv, but vacationing in Prague, where I worked at the time. He related how Palestinians were perplexed a reporter could work for a network they recognized as distorting the news. “I tell them ‘my reporting is accurate,’” he told me. “I can’t help what they do with it in the studio.”

It was a disturbing cop-out. But it is also illuminating of the pitfalls that come with an independent media. Free communication allows the unethical or ill-informed equal opportunity to inject their thoughts. It is incumbent upon us to know – to be honest with ourselves – which outlets are likely to distort information and which tales are designed to play upon our biases. We are stuck with fake news. Our only defense is to rely on credible sources, even when politicians stung by accurate reporting, or people exposed to ideas they would wish to avoid, lash back and accuse the truth of being false.

DAVE FARIES is the Weekly’s features editor. Reach him at dfaries@mcweekly.com