Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors The sharp increase in popularity of social media networks (primarily Facebook) has created a predatory secondary market among online publishers seeking to profitably exploit the large reach of those networks and their huge customer bases by spreading fake news and outlandish rumors. Competition for social media’s large supply of willing eyeballs is fierce, and a number of frequent offenders regularly fabricate salacious and attention-grabbing tales simply to drive traffic (and revenue) to their sites. Facebook has worked at limiting the reach of hoax-purveying sites in their customers’ news feeds, inhibiting (but not eradicating) the spread of fake news stories. Hoaxes and fake news are often little more than annoyances to unsuspecting readers; but sometimes circulating stories negatively affect businesses or localities by spreading false, disruptive claims that are widely believed. National Report World News Daily Report Huzlers Empire News Stuppid News Examiner Newswatch28 (now Newswatch33)
How to avoid getting conned by fake news sites - CNET You don't need Socrates to tell you that some websites spin crazy, made-up yarns just so you'll click a link. False information and fake news have been a problem on the internet almost since the beginning. The situation is so bad, one website, Snopes.com, is dedicated to debunking crazy internet tales and rumors that pop up like digital cockroaches. The issue rose to prominence again with the election of Donald Trump, which critics say was aided by fake news reports that were rampant across social media, especially Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called that notion "pretty crazy" but says his company is working to clamp down on bogus articles. In the fervor over whether Facebook should do something to separate fiction from fact, you may have wondered how you could figure out whether an article is worth clicking on. What is 'fake news?' First of all, let's be clear: We're not talking about websites with paid journalists who fact-check their reporting and build their brands on accuracy.
We Have a Bad News Problem, Not a Fake News Problem In the days since the 8 November 2016 presidential election, news outlets have been rushing to cover a phenomenon we here at snopes.com have been dealing with for many years, one that is only now finally becoming widely recognized, addressed, or understood: the plague of bad news on the Internet. Unfortunately, that phenomenon is commonly being referred to as a "fake news problem," a term that itself may be nearly as misleading as the issue it seeks to address. Certainly, the online world is full of fake news — fabricated stories set loose via social media with clickbait headlines and tantalizing images, intended for no purpose other than to fool readers and generate advertising revenues for their publishers. But just as the term "urban legend" (which has a specific folkloric meaning) was long ago co-opted to broadly refer to any narrative that is false or questionable, so the term "fake news" is now being used so broadly as to blur important distinctions.
Will Cutting Off Ads From Google & Facebook Really Stop Fake News? I've already argued that the rush to point fingers at Facebook for allowing lots of fake news to get passed around is greatly overhyped by people searching for explanations for last week's election results. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't be looking to do something about fake news on various platforms. On Monday, Google also faced some controversy over fake news, when its top result for people searching for "final election results" pointed to a fake news site with made up numbers. In response, a few hours later, Google announced that it was going to start banning fake news sites from using Google's AdSense ad product. A few hours after that, Facebook announced a similar pledge to stop allowing those sites to make money from Facebook. This leads to a few different thoughts: lessening the power of totally fake news sites is certainly a good idea. The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. Of course, this raises lots of other questions.
Let Them Eat Facts: Why Fact Checking Is Mostly Useless In Convincing Voters Last week I wrote a bit about the ridiculous and misguided backlash against Facebook over the election results. The basis of the claim was that there were a bunch of fake or extremely misleading stories shared on the site by Trump supporters, and some felt that helped swing the election (and, yes, there were also fake stories shared by Clinton supporters -- but apparently sharing fake news was nearly twice as common among Trump supporters than Clinton supporters). I still think this analysis blaming Facebook is wrong. In response to that last post, someone complained that I was arguing that "facts don't matter" and worried that this would just lead to more and more lies and fake news from all sides. But here's the problem: the general business of fact checking seems to merely serve to, again, reinforce and retrench opinions, rather than change them. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously stated "You're entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."
Be the First to Test NLP’s checkology™ Virtual Classroom | The News Literacy Project Skip to main content Be the First to Test NLP’s checkology™ Virtual Classroom The News Literacy Project’s checkology™ virtual classroom is here, and you can be among the first to try it! For a limited time, NLP is offering premium-level access to this exciting new e-learning environment for free to teachers who qualify for one of our mini-grants. What is the checkology™ virtual classroom? It is a dynamic library of news literacy learning experiences with rich, engaging, interactive lessons hosted by real-world professionals — from journalists to social media and First Amendment experts. The virtual classroom offers two levels of access: a premium one-to-one format, and a basic, one-to-many format. The premium level provides an innovative, modern approach to e-learning, including features such as: This fall, NLP is offering a limited number of mini-grants for teachers who want to try the premium version of the checkology™ virtual classroom.
Facebook may have built then ditched an update to fight fake news - CNET Did Facebook help get Donald Trump elected? CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that it's a "pretty crazy idea" to think his social network might have swayed the vote by letting fake news proliferate on its site. That came after numerous allegations that the fake news shared on the social network helped Trump win. Now there's a report that Facebook could have helped combat that fake news with an update to its News Feed. The thing is, Zuckerberg and his team never released it, according to a report published Monday by Gizmodo, citing two unnamed sources they say have firsthand knowledge with Facebook's plans. The software update would have been used in "downgrading and removing" fake news stories from people's Facebook feeds, according to Gizmodo. So by trying not to be politically biased, did Facebook actually end up favoring the Republican nominee? So why would Facebook even be worried that it looked biased? "They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news," one source told Gizmodo.
Bernie Sanders Could Replace President Trump With Little Known Loophole | The Huffington Post 6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new, depressing study says Now, as if it needed further proof, the satirical headline’s been validated once again: According to a new study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it. Worse, the study finds that these sort of blind peer-to-peer shares are really important in determining what news gets circulated and what just fades off the public radar. So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas. Story continues below advertisement “People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. And that map showed, pretty clearly, that “viral” news is widely shared — but not necessarily, you know, read. This was, incidentally, the Science Post’s inspiration for its recent “lorem ipsum” gag on the subject.
There’s a Psychological Reason for the Appeal of Fake News A more plausible explanation is our relative inattention to the credibility of the news source. I’ve been studying the psychology of online news consumption for over two decades, and one striking finding across several experiments is that online news readers don’t seem to really care about the importance of journalistic sourcing – what we in academia refer to as “professional gatekeeping.” This laissez-faire attitude, together with the difficulty of discerning online news sources, is at the root of why so many believe fake news. Do people even consider news editors credible? Since the earliest days of the internet, fake news has circulated online. In the 1980s there were online discussion communities called Usenet newsgroups where hoaxes would be shared among cliques of conspiracy theorists and sensation-mongers. Sometimes these conspiracies would spill out into the mainstream. Back in the 1990s, as part of my dissertation, I conducted the first-ever experiment on online news sources.
Combating Fake News And Teaching Digital Literacy If the most recent U.S. Election has taught us anything it's that we live in an era of fake news and sites. With accusations flying of manipulation of stories, the media and voters, it’s truly hard to know if what we read on blogs, social media and other sites is actually the truth or a tale spun to generate clicks. To further compound the problem a recent study from Stanford shows that the vast majority of students can’t determine it what they read on websites is true or baloney. With many schools and districts rolling out 1:1 initiatives and a push to digitize learning, helping students understand where their information comes from, and if it is reliable and accurate are critical skills, not just for learning for but life as well. When I was teaching digital literacy to students in my 8th grade science classroom we would examine current event articles for reliability and truthfulness. Where was the information published? Real News vs.
Why I Get All My News From a Man Trapped At the Bottom of a Well - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency If Americans can agree on one thing in these divisive times, it’s the unreliability of the mainstream media. Whether it’s alarmingly erroneous polling predictions or unapologetic partisan bias, we live in an age where no media outlet can be trusted — which is why for my political news, opinion, and analysis, I turn to a man trapped at the bottom of a well. I understand that you may have some questions, but allow me first to say that I admittedly don’t know much about my sole political correspondent, other than that he most certainly has been confined within the cavernous depths of a damp pit for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how he arrived in this predicament, or what he eats, or even how he keeps his presumably filthy finger on the pulse of our nation’s political climate, but his logic is irrefutable and his arguments are as rock-solid as the stones that form his subterranean prison. My advice to Americans?