False information has always been in the media outlook. In 1938, the theater company Mercury, directed by the actor Orson Welles, presented an adaptation to a radio soap opera of The War of the Worlds, originally by H.G. Wells, published in 1895.
The performance and sound effects were so real that the audience was persuaded, at least for a moment, that it was a Martians invasion. Welles and his team achieved their goal: to make their audience believe a false situation. Although his main intention was not to create panic, this situation became a "fake news" because the purpose wasn't clear, meaning that nothing indicated it was something fictitious.
The next day, the headlines of North American press showed the panic and the hysteria that it provoked among the inhabitants of the area. During the following months, some psychologists teams investigated the irrational behaviors that caused a false situation. That was the first "media hoax".
Today, the Internet has allowed unlimited access to information and gave millions of people a platform to communicate and say whatever they want. The situation worsened with the media arrival, which multiplied so much the reach of these "creators", that little by little, media has been losing control of information. Additionally, facing internet, media has turned to it to try to inform with the same speed, causing the abandonment of the old reporting methods and data verification. We are facing a vicious circle.
Welcome to the "fake news" and post-truth era.
The term "fake news" is related to the past US elections, in which internet pages flooded social media with notes discrediting Hillary Clinton and/or speaking well of Donald Trump. Subsequently, the US president has used it to disqualify all media that do not communicate the official version of the White House and/or are critical of the government.
In 2016, the word of the year for the Oxford dictionary was "post-truth". For the publication, post-truth occurs when "objective facts have less influence in defining public opinion than those that appeal to emotion and personal beliefs".
There are many post-truth and "fake news" examples, what is relevant today is that people believe and spread them without hesitation, which creates a vicious circle in which even the most prestigious media have fall over and that social media have used like never before in the history of mankind. The reason why "fake news" is so powerful is their speed and their low production cost.
Do "fake news" really affect brands?
From my experience, I could not assure that "fake news" directly affect brands, no even in a public relations context in which the reputation is won based on who give a positive feedback about you.
However, for a publicist, it is imperative to identify sources and confirm them before showing results. "Fake news" commonly are in the digital domain and it is extremely complicated that a crisis starts from there, precisely because unreliable information can be.
Beware about it: we are in the elections year. In a period like this, the conversation is different: according to the anthropologist Roger Batra, post-truth is a phenomenon based on spreading lies on the internet via social media in order to modify perceptions of reality. It is a pathology for which there is no immediate cure. It happened 6 years ago when pollsters assured that Enrique Peña Nieto was the winner because of an overwhelming difference and in the end the end margins were much lower.