Why fake news stories thrive online
The entire structure of Facebook is not set up as a news-sharing platform, but as a headline and image-rating platform.
Tracing a fake Breitbart story from inception to its all-but-guaranteed Facebook virality.
↩︎ Vice News, posted Nov. 24, 2016
The slippery slope of fake news is paved with share buttons
Particularly, the mobile share button, which Facebook added in 2012 as it sought to compete with Twitter as a source of news. That and other Twitter-imitation moves like Trending and hashtags created a hybrid platform that achieved massive publishing success while problematically retaining the editorial freedom afforded by “original sharing,” that was Facebook’s original meat-and-potatoes.
↩︎ posted Nov. 23, 2016
When people purposely skip over things that they don’t agree with
A librarian who studies information literacy says we may be miscasting the issue: the problem isn’t always that people can’t tell when news is fake, it’s often that they don’t care.
↩︎ posted Nov. 21, 2016
Minor fake news panic: Jesse Singal, in a Twitter thread, suggests Trump is throwing false information to the press on purpose to gauge his ability to get away with lies.
↩︎ posted Nov. 18, 2016
I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything—they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
Horner is an “OG” of hoaxing—he’s twice convinced media he is Banksy—but he always expected fact-checkers to pull the rug out from Trump. Now AdSense might pull the rug out on him.
↩︎ Washington Post, posted Nov. 17, 2016
Fake news hasn’t killed us yet: A brief history
In the 1800s, people believed newspaper stories about trips to the moon and monkeys picking cotton. Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken printed stories made from whole cloth. More recently, Joseph Mitchell and David Foster Wallace embellished wholeheartedly. Our best hope is that it’s in Facebook’s interest not to let this get out of hand. (But then again: Isn’t it already?)
↩︎ posted Nov. 17, 2016
Sure, those Macedonian news stories aren’t great, but their effect such as it is comes from confirming what people already believe. Contrast that to Miller’s stories in the New York Times: because the New York Times was a trusted gatekeeper, many people fundamentally changed their opinions, resulting in a disaster.
Top-down solutions to Facebook’s fake news problem only work if the person wielding that power agrees with you.
↩︎ Stratechery, posted Nov. 17, 2016
8.7 versus 7.3 million shares, reactions, and comments
The 20 top hoax news stories on Facebook garnered 1.4 million more engagements than the top 20 pieces of journalism.
↩︎ posted Nov. 17, 2016
The update you wish they’d installed
Yesterday we found out that Facebook really has been worried about fake news all along—but they’re even more worried about appearing to be anti-conservative. They have the tools to shut down fake news, but backlash against Trending News’ alleged bias led the company to shelve an algorithm update that would downrank fake news.
↩︎ posted Nov. 15, 2016
For Mark Zuckerberg to say that less than 1% of news on Facebook is a hoax is a little like saying that less than 1% of your brain is malignant cancer. It’s not the 1% but the malignancy. It sounds like things are 99% okay, but it’s actually a very bad diagnosis.
Paul Ford, wise as ever, on Facebook’s news problem.
↩︎ Track Changes, posted Nov. 15, 2016
And then the real news got taken down
A Slate journalist covering LGBT issues posted the death threats that people were sending him on Facebook. The threats were real, but the company said posting them violated community standards.
↩︎ posted Nov. 15, 2016
Fake news: It’s not just a Facebook problem
The top Google result for “final election results” is a random, very fake blog that claims Trump won the popular vote. (He did not.)
↩︎ posted Nov. 15, 2016
When Mic shared a story about convicted rapist Brock Turner on its own Facebook page, it gathered about 7,700 reactions and was shared 4,400 times. When Takei shared that same story the next day, it got nearly three times as many reactions—over 22,000—and drove over 5,000 shares.
Facebook cut down on publishers’ “reach,” so they had to rely on celebrities to relay the news. It’s a strategy with mixed results.
↩︎ Digiday, posted Nov. 15, 2016
Sometimes the news is real, but the accounts are fake
The day before the election, 20% of all political tweets were made by bots. We need to engage deeply and quickly with the reality of algorithmic democracy.
↩︎ posted Nov. 15, 2016
Vladimir Putin just endorsed you on LinkedIn
If the election weren’t such a shitshow we’d probably be a lot more alarmed about the fact that Russia just shut down LinkedIn for failing to store data on Russian servers.
Analysts see it as a shot across the bow aimed at sending a message to larger tech companies. Needless to say, Russian servers could be more easily used by the state to keep tabs on dissidents—and, presumably, the flip side is true for the United States and our ever-vigilant NSA.
↩︎ posted Nov. 15, 2016