On Nov. 25, an opinion piece published in The Washington Post — written by a Binghamton University professor — discussed the role of fake news in the recent election and the way in which falsehoods have helped shape the history of the United States.
Robert Parkinson, an assistant professor of history at BU, has published pieces in other national papers and many of the examples in his Washington Post piece came from his book, “The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution,” published by the University of North Carolina Press in June.

In the article, Parkinson mentioned purposeful falsehoods put forth by revolutionaries in Boston designed to undermine English authority, but most of his piece focused on the non-governmental work of Benjamin Franklin while he was living in Paris acting as the U.S. ambassador to France.

According to the article, Franklin created an entirely false version of a real newspaper that included a gruesome article about the U.S. frontier. It contained a falsified quote from a real naval hero, Commander John Paul Jones, that put forth the idea that the English crown was encouraging Native Americans to collect the scalps of colonists living on the frontier. Franklin hoped to use the reactions to this imagined brutality to continue the growth of anti-Royalist sentiments.

This same article was dredged up 30 years later during the War of 1812 to explain the history of the United States and Native American relations after a group of British soldiers and Native Americans killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers.
For Parkinson, the importance of the fake news is not that it influenced the revolution itself, but rather the challenges that come from purposefully false information remaining as fact years later.

Modern fake news tends to take the form of a traditional news article. Creators will design their websites to look similarly to those of legitimate news sites. On these websites, they will post articles that have all of the trappings of a real news article — quotes, attributions and photographs — but are completely false.

Today, fake news is put out by a slew of websites, with many depending on page clicks as a means to create advertisement revenue. Parkinson mentioned Paul Horner in his piece, a prodigious fake news creator responsible for many viral articles, whose work includes a piece about President Barack Obama signing an executive order banning the national anthem at sporting events nationwide.

“The idea of a fact as something that sits apart, that is provable — that has this notion of unvarnished truth — that was created in the 17th century,” Parkinson said. “That’s created as a result of the scientific revolution, which means it can also go away. And once this stuff is out there and it’s part of this digital archive or internet archive … the problem is having to pick your way through what is real and what is fake, because it looks all the same.”