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[Erminia Scharnberg]

Meehanis the only defendant not to have been named by the state party as Nevada delegates to the 2024 Republican National Convention next month in Milwaukee. His defense attorney, Sigal Chattah, said her client chose not to seek the position. Chattah ran as a Republican in 2022 for state attorney general and lost to Ford by just under 8% of the vote.

Nevada is one of seven presidential battleground states where slates of fake electors falsely certified that Trump had won in 2020, not Democrat Joe Biden. Others are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who pleaded guilty in Georgia last October to helping orchestrate the Trump campaign fake elector scheme in 2020, cooperated with prosecutors in the Nevada criminal investigation and was not charged.

Attorney General James also, today, announced agreements with three of the lead generators that were responsible for millions of the fake comments submitted in the net neutrality proceeding: Fluent, Inc., responsible for approximately 4.8 million fraudulent comments; Opt-Intelligence, Inc., responsible for more than 250,000 fraudulent comments; and React2Media, Inc., responsible for approximately 329,000 comments in the net neutrality proceeding (all or nearly all of which were fraudulent). Fluent and React2Media were also responsible, collectively, for millions of fake comments and messages submitted in dozens of other advocacy campaigns. The agreements with the OAG require the companies to adopt comprehensive reforms in future advocacy campaigns and pay more than $4.4 million in penalties and disgorgement.

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Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information (misinformation, including disinformation, propaganda, and hoaxes) presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.[1][2] Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term fake news was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common.[3][4] Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information presented as news. It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text.[1] Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.

The prevalence of fake news has increased with the recent rise of social media, especially the Facebook News Feed, and this misinformation is gradually seeping into the mainstream media. Several factors have been implicated in the spread of fake news, such as political polarization, post-truth politics, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and social media algorithms.[1][5][6][7][8]

Fake news can reduce the impact of real news by competing with it. For example, a BuzzFeed News analysis found that the top fake news stories about the 2016 U.S. presidential election received more engagement on Facebook than top stories from major media outlets.[9] It also particularly has the potential to undermine trust in serious media coverage. The term has at times been used to cast doubt upon credible news, and former U.S. president Donald Trump has been credited with popularizing the term by using it to describe any negative press coverage of himself. It has been increasingly criticized, due in part to Trump's misuse, with the British government deciding to avoid the term, as it is "poorly-defined" and "conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference".[10]

Multiple strategies for fighting fake news are actively researched, for various types of fake news. Politicians in certain autocratic and democratic countries have demanded effective self-regulation and legally-enforced regulation in varying forms, of social media and web search engines.

On an individual scale, the ability to actively confront false narratives, as well as taking care when sharing information can reduce the prevalence of falsified information. However, it has been noted that this is vulnerable to the effects of confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases that can seriously distort reasoning, particularly in dysfunctional and polarised societies. Inoculation theory has been proposed as a method to render individuals resistant to undesirable narratives. Because new misinformation emerges frequently, researchers have stated that one solution to address this is to inoculate the population against accepting fake news in general (a process termed prebunking), instead of continually debunking the same repeated lies.[11]

Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news.[6][12] The term as it developed in 2017 is a neologism (a new or re-purposed expression that is entering the language, driven by culture or technology changes).[13] Fake news is now used by many people as a catch-all, referring to any lies and misrepresentations, from a news distributor or not; further, a few people use the term to condemn creditable news sources they do not like, without otherwise arguing details.

Fake news stories in the old sense, plus misleading headlines, are presented among other stories by news aggregators or political sites, for financial or political gain. There are also fake news websites which run only stories that have no basis in fact but are presented as being factually accurate.[14] Some satirical sites openly label themselves as fake news or satire, or they may reveal that they are fake only on closer inspection for clues.

The National Endowment for Democracy defines fake news as "[M]isleading content found on the internet, especially on social media [...] Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites and Facebook pages gaming the platform for advertising revenue" and distinguishes it from disinformation: "[F]ake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a larger agenda."[16]

Media scholar Nolan Higdon has defined fake news as "false or misleading content presented as news and communicated in formats spanning spoken, written, printed, electronic, and digital communication". Higdon has also argued that the definition of fake news has been applied too narrowly to select mediums and political ideologies.[17]

While most definitions focus strictly on content accuracy and format, current research indicates that the rhetorical structure of the content might play a significant role in the perception of fake news.[18]

Michael Radutzky, a producer of CBS 60 Minutes, said his show considers fake news to be "stories that are probably false, have enormous traction [popular appeal] in the culture, and are consumed by millions of people." These stories are not only found in politics, but also in areas like vaccination, stock values and nutrition.[19] He did not include news that is "invoked by politicians against the media for stories that they don't like or for comments that they don't like" as fake news. Guy Campanile, also a 60 Minutes producer said, "What we are talking about are stories that are fabricated out of thin air. By most measures, deliberately, and by any definition, that's a lie."[20]

The intent and purpose of fake news is important. In some cases, fake news may be news satire, which uses exaggeration and introduces non-factual elements that are intended to amuse or make a point, rather than to deceive. Propaganda can also be fake news.[1][21]

In the context of the United States of America and its election processes in the 2010s, fake news generated considerable controversy and argument, with some commentators defining concern over it as moral panic or mass hysteria and others worried about damage done to public trust.[22][23][24] It particularly has the potential to undermine trust in serious media coverage generally.[25] The term has also been used to cast doubt upon credible mainstream media.[26][27]

In 2016, PolitiFact selected fake news as their Lie of the Year. No single lie stood out, so the generic term was chosen. Also in 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected post-truth as its word of the year and defined it as the state of affairs when "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."[29]

The term fake news gained importance with the electoral context in Western Europe and North America. It is determined by fraudulent content in news format and its velocity.[30] According to Bounegru, Gray, Venturini and Mauri, a lie becomes fake news when it "is picked up by dozens of other blogs, retransmitted by hundreds of websites, cross-posted over thousands of social media accounts and read by hundreds of thousands".[31]

The nature of trust depends on the assumptions that non-institutional forms of communication are freer from power and more able to report information that mainstream media are perceived as unable or unwilling to reveal. Declines in confidence in much traditional media[33] and expert knowledge[34] have created fertile grounds for alternative, and often obscure sources of information to appear as authoritative and credible. This ultimately leaves users confused about basic facts.[35]

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