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Rylan Florence and Alex Sawyer

Dr. Lauren Holt

AP Literature and Composition

22 April 2022

Fake News: Lies and Propaganda Disguised As News

Since the beginning of time, mankind has always found a way to communicate with one

another. Whether it was about their personal lives, which river was safe to drink from, or the

latest election results, we have always needed a way to communicate with large portions of the

population. As time went on, we formulated spoken languages which allowed us to easily and

efficiently communicate with a group of people. Then we developed written languages which not

only served the same essential purposes but also allowed communications between people to be

stored and saved for generations to come. With the onset of written languages that no longer

needed the orator to be physically present to deliver the information case the need to be able to

distribute that information to a wider, potentially international audience. Thus, over the last five

millennia, we’ve sought ways to expand the audience that our ideas, language, and culture have.

From the invention of the printing press to the proliferation of information seen with the rise in

technology such as radio, television, and social media outlets, news and information are more

accessible than ever. However, with that accessibility comes the accessibility of untrue,

misleading, and deceptive information through the paralleled proliferation of technology and

“fake news”. The recent introduction of modern technology into news coverage and

communication has led to the proliferation of misinformation, although the existence of “fake

news” has been around for centuries, especially as new ways to format and distribute news have

been introduced.
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Humankind’s communications, at least that can still be traced, began with a system of

disorganized signs and signals with no mutually agreed-upon meaning. Approximately three

million years into our evolution, so around 30,000 BCE, communications began to take on a

more organized, uniform, and communal meaning in the form of cave paintings. These artistic

interpretations allowed nomadic tribes to inform other groups and even members of the same

tribe of essential information such as what animals were safe to eat, what water one could drink,

and what stories they had to tell. Aside from this, tribes also exhibited oral storytelling methods

to convey important or even entertaining information to a select group of people before the era of

written language. Drums and smoke signals were also used upon occasion, but the noise and

flashy displays often came with the fear of attracting dangerous entities. Even these primitive

cave paintings and stories could be deceptive and convey information not conducive to the truth.

Tribes could, in poor faith, depict untrue information in order to fool other, rival tribes into

essentially poisoning themselves. However, this theory is essentially impossible to prove because

primitive cave paintings are incredibly difficult to decipher as is. Plus, it’s impossible to know

what the conditions were like at that time, whether the water or food advertised millennia ago

would actually be safe. However, the theory remains both possible and probable given the “us

versus them” and survivalist mentalities psychologists have hypothesized existed at the time.

Approximately 25,000 years later, historians begin to see the onset of a new form of

language: written communications. Mesopotamian societies developed forms of written/artistic

language used in sign tokens as an early form of money. In 3,300 BCE, Ancient Egyptian society

developed and perfected its unique alphabet of hieroglyphics. Egyptian hieroglyphics appear to

be the oldest, most developed form of written language, second only to the Sumerian script,

otherwise known as cuneiform, which was developed around one to two hundred years earlier.
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However, hieroglyphics were available to a much larger civilization and thus were the first

instance of written mass communications. In general, these drawings depicted religious and

spiritual rituals. Mesoptamiac and Egyptian ancient writings appear to have developed within a

century or so of one another seemingly independently. With most of these writings being

accessible only by well-educated and highly-ranked officials such as government officials,

clerics, and priests, they didn’t necessarily serve as a form of mass communication, however,

their teachings and knowledge are still readily available today in a sense serving as a time

capsule for their society at the time, hoping to teach future generations about their thoughts and

ideas. Both of these forms of written communication being primarily religious or facicious, it is

impossible to say whether there was any spread of fake news in early forms of writing. Very little

of the material discussed or covered in both cuneiform and heiroglyphics speak of spiritual or

moralistic stories. However, it’s also impossible to say whether there could have been a spread of

misinformation in oral stories, rumors, or gossip, as there is no discernable record of any of those

conversations.

Written language evolved from picture writing systems (mnemonic, pictographic, and

then ideographic) to a transitional quasi-pictographic language meant to depict concepts rather

than icons and finally to a phonetic system like we have today divided into verbal, syllabalic, and

alphabetic systems. Several other societies developed similar scripts to the Mesopotamian and

Egyptian, however this all occurred centuries if not millenia after such as the Elamite script, the

Indus script, and Anatollian hieroglyphics. However, written alphabets began to emerge as a

more efficient and widely applicable form of language. Alphabetic languages began seemingly

with the early Semetic alphabets and spread throughout the ancient world throughout the first

and second millenia BCE. Over the next thousand years, alphabets grew in popularity and
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practice. Much of early alphabetic writing is indecipherable, however, it morphed over those

thousand years to become something infinitely more accessible and practical for the long and

short term creation and distribution of information.

60 BCE saw the first publication of the Acta Diurna or Day’s Acts literally but The Daily

Gazzette poetically, essentially the forerunner of the modern-day newspaper. The Acta Diurna

was a daily governmental gazette published by the Roman government. It primarily contained

legal and official matters such as the emperor’s decrees, goings on of the Roman senate, but also

private matters such as birth, death, and marriage notices. The Acta were published daily and

hung in a public forum so that citizens could widely see it. The goal of the Acta was to keep the

public informed on the happenings in their government. The truth, however, is that the

government could manipulat the Acta however they saw fit and thus the origin of “fake news”, as

we term it now, begins here.

Fake news widely refers to the spread of information that is untrue. However, that

misguiding can take several forms. One thinker on the subject, Claire Wardle, identified seven

primary types of fake news. The first is satire or parody. Essientailly, when someone spreads

information that is deliberately not true but they have no ill-meaning, only the potential to fool

gullible readers. The second is misleading context, when a piece of information is nestled in a

technically-true way that frames it differently than is real. Similarly, there’s false context when a

true fact is presented with fabricated context, making it seem entirely different even though the

statistic may be true on its own. Fourth, there’s imposter content or content that is false but said

to be cited from a genuine and reputable source. There’s also manipulated content or contect that

genuine at first but later maniupated, similar to a doctored photo. Sixth, there’s a false connection

between the headlines, visuals, or captions and the actual content being introduced. And finally
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there’s fabricated content which is entirely false and designed to deceive the public for an

alternative agenda.

With these categories and definitions in place, we can begin looking at the origin of “fake

news”. The idea of false or misleading news seems to have identifiably involved in widespread

media in the 13th century BCE was when Rameses the Great spread misinformation about the

result of the Battle of Kadesh which, in reality ended in a stalemate. Despite this fact, he

sponsored lies and propaganda that depicted him as the heroic victor of the battle. And in the first

century BCE, Augustus created the first known instance of political fake news by spreading

misinformation about his opponant Mark Antony, describing him as a womanizer, drunk, and a

pupped tof the Eguyptian queen, Cleopatra VII. He fabricated a will proporting to be Antony’s

which stated that he wished to be buried in the mausoleum of the Ptolemaic pharohs. Similar

stories of ancient fake news being spread for personal, monetary, or political gain. Even in the

times of Ante Diurna, cuneiform, and primative cave paintings, there was still the existence of

fake news, misinformations, and lies. However, as the methods of technological distributions

evolved, so did the audience of the information, including that which is not exactly true.