Fake News - what it is, what it isn't....

[Boss]

Hey moron... what was my fucking point of mentioning MySpace? It had nothing to do with who owned it. Like a typical birdbrained liberal idiot, you can't stay focused... maybe they need to up your dosages of Adderall?

I was making the point that little fascist social media sites who think they can manipulate information could find themselves in the same boat as MySpace, without a fucking customer base because something better came along.

MySpace, inane as it was, was eclipsed not by something "better" but by something even more inane: Nosebook. A blatant direct appeal to voyeurism (which Zuckerberg has a history of), narcissism and meaningless gossip. MySpace didn't push such features; it actually had practicality. If you're so naïve that you think a mob customer base equates to quality, you have a good gourmet mean waiting at Burger Thing.

What happened there is encapsulated, as are so many other things, in the old adage "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public".

Actually, this illustrates perfectly why you snowflakes think the big bad government needs to provide you a babysitter to tell you when something is fake or real...

Once again you're a bald-faced liar. I've never made such a point. Not in this thread, not in any thread, any time, anywhere.

Go ahead --- prove me wrong, lying hack.


(/offtopic)

Well, Pogo... you fail at making ANY point because you're an ADHD basket case. However, that IS the point of Progressive liberals. This all goes back to the Fairness Doctrine. And of course they don't come right out and tell people they want to control the information.. "If you like your health care, you can keep your health care!" ...THAT is what Progressives say! THAT is how they do it! Just like you, they pretend that's "crazy talk" and the other side is being hysterical. But we'll all wake up one day with a government panel who determines what information is "real" and what information is "fake" and thus, prohibited.

It always begins innocently enough, oh... we have to do something about all these fake news stories popping up and influencing elections... (most of which, we find, are perpetrated by the progressives themselves). They will start with the obvious "Hillary is Secretly an Alien" type stories and sources. Then next, it's the fringe elements... the Alex Jones/ Info Wars types... then it's Brietbart... Steven Crowder... Ben Shapiro... Milo... Finally, it's Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. And then, FREE SPEECH is gone!

So... NO! We are NOT going down this rabbit hole with you! We will have to find some way, like we always have, to deal with "fake news" that doesn't involve censorship. Like maybe, oh-- I don't know-- PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY? I know that seems to be a difficult thing for snowflakes like you to grasp... but that's the reality here. You're gonna keep your hands off our Constitutional rights.

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

That's where you're wrong. I have no burden to prove a damn thing to you. I told you what I understand to be true. I'm not your fucking glorified paralegal. If you're ignorant on a matter, then it's your burden, not mine.

If you can't prove your point, Lord Little Font-Leroy ------------------ you ain't got one.

I don't have anything to "prove". This is a fireside forum, not a college paper. I've said nothing incorrect and you can't say anything to the contrary. Now stop acting up, child.

You made an assertion. And you can't demonstrate that assertion. Therefore your assertion does not exist.
Simple as that. You lied, and got caught.

You're an idiot.

Whelp ---- I've never made an assertion I can't prove so .................. guess not.

Still an idiot.

 

[MisterBeale]

In the spirit of the liberal mainstream media, let me present an example of how they FAKE the news everyday.... this is a right-wing version of what they do:

Michelle Obama Confesses to Oprah Her Husband's Presidency Was a Total Failure

In a remarkably candid and open interview with Oprah Winfrey, First Lady Michelle Obama said today, "We are now getting to see what hopelessness feels like." Her husband campaigned in 2008 on the message of "Hope and Change" and his wife's admission that her husband had failed at providing the hope he promised was a scathing indictment of his policies.

"Barack used it as a campaign slogan to garner votes," the First Lady said. "But what else do we really have if we don't have hope?" As of this report, the President has been unavailable for comment as he is golfing in Hawaii.

I uh, don't think you quite grasp the concept here.

Twisting a mundane story around to imply something it doesn't say isn't "fake news". It's still using a real event that really happened.

Fake news is posting that three million Amish are marching to the ballot box to vote for Rump. Fake news is making up a story that some CIA guy was killed by Hillary Clinton. Fake news is digging up an old and thoroughly debunked myth about "Bill Clinton's illegitimate son" and reviving it. Stuff that not only never happened but isn't remotely related to anything that ever happened.

I really wish they would both get DNA tests, inquiring minds want to know. . . .

 

[Pogo]

Well, Pogo... you fail at making ANY point because you're an ADHD basket case. However, that IS the point of Progressive liberals. This all goes back to the Fairness Doctrine. And of course they don't come right out and tell people they want to control the information.. "If you like your health care, you can keep your health care!" ...THAT is what Progressives say! THAT is how they do it! Just like you, they pretend that's "crazy talk" and the other side is being hysterical. But we'll all wake up one day with a government panel who determines what information is "real" and what information is "fake" and thus, prohibited.

Hm ---- my guess for this one is some really bad LSD mixed with a steroid.

Bring on the Fairness Doctrine. Oh Please bring it. Excuse me, gotta get my bib on. I tend to drool at this level of low hanging fruit. So please ---- connect that dot. I can't wait.

"Progressives" by the way left the building about a century ago. I don't know why you lunatics keep trying to flog that horse. I really don't.

Once again ------ third time on this page --- you have no link. No evidence. No quote. Zero. Nothing. Bupkis. Sweet Fanny Adams. Fuck-all. You pulled a claim out of your ass and got nailed on it and all you have is speculation fallacies and references to social movements and FCC doctrines about which you know Nothing. Zero. Bupkis. Etc etc etc.

Fuck off, troll.

It always begins innocently enough, oh... we have to do something about all these fake news stories popping up and influencing elections... (most of which, we find, are perpetrated by the progressives themselves). They will start with the obvious "Hillary is Secretly an Alien" type stories and sources. Then next, it's the fringe elements... the Alex Jones/ Info Wars types... then it's Brietbart... Steven Crowder... Ben Shapiro... Milo... Finally, it's Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. And then, FREE SPEECH is gone!

You can't even invent a good paranoia rant.
Here, I can help. This isn't a speculation fallacy or an unhinged tinfoil theory --- this really happened:

​

So... NO! We are NOT going down this rabbit hole with you! We will have to find some way, like we always have, to deal with "fake news" that doesn't involve censorship. Like maybe, oh-- I don't know-- PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY? I know that seems to be a difficult thing for snowflakes like you to grasp... but that's the reality here. You're gonna keep your hands off our Constitutional rights.

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

Hey moron... what was my fucking point of mentioning MySpace? It had nothing to do with who owned it. Like a typical birdbrained liberal idiot, you can't stay focused... maybe they need to up your dosages of Adderall?

I was making the point that little fascist social media sites who think they can manipulate information could find themselves in the same boat as MySpace, without a fucking customer base because something better came along.

MySpace, inane as it was, was eclipsed not by something "better" but by something even more inane: Nosebook. A blatant direct appeal to voyeurism (which Zuckerberg has a history of), narcissism and meaningless gossip. MySpace didn't push such features; it actually had practicality. If you're so naïve that you think a mob customer base equates to quality, you have a good gourmet mean waiting at Burger Thing.

What happened there is encapsulated, as are so many other things, in the old adage "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public".

Actually, this illustrates perfectly why you snowflakes think the big bad government needs to provide you a babysitter to tell you when something is fake or real...

Once again you're a bald-faced liar. I've never made such a point. Not in this thread, not in any thread, any time, anywhere.

Go ahead --- prove me wrong, lying hack.


(/offtopic)

Well, Pogo... you fail at making ANY point because you're an ADHD basket case. However, that IS the point of Progressive liberals. This all goes back to the Fairness Doctrine. And of course they don't come right out and tell people they want to control the information.. "If you like your health care, you can keep your health care!" ...THAT is what Progressives say! THAT is how they do it! Just like you, they pretend that's "crazy talk" and the other side is being hysterical. But we'll all wake up one day with a government panel who determines what information is "real" and what information is "fake" and thus, prohibited.

It always begins innocently enough, oh... we have to do something about all these fake news stories popping up and influencing elections... (most of which, we find, are perpetrated by the progressives themselves). They will start with the obvious "Hillary is Secretly an Alien" type stories and sources. Then next, it's the fringe elements... the Alex Jones/ Info Wars types... then it's Brietbart... Steven Crowder... Ben Shapiro... Milo... Finally, it's Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. And then, FREE SPEECH is gone!

So... NO! We are NOT going down this rabbit hole with you! We will have to find some way, like we always have, to deal with "fake news" that doesn't involve censorship. Like maybe, oh-- I don't know-- PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY? I know that seems to be a difficult thing for snowflakes like you to grasp... but that's the reality here. You're gonna keep your hands off our Constitutional rights.

The essence of what you say is correct. Except, it doesn't ever begin innocently enough. These people pushing the fake news narrative don't have good motives. They're flat out lying fascists. They're the same people who subverted health care in the name of it's everyone's right and we'll take care of you. They're thieves in the night.

 

[MisterBeale]

Hey moron... what was my fucking point of mentioning MySpace? It had nothing to do with who owned it. Like a typical birdbrained liberal idiot, you can't stay focused... maybe they need to up your dosages of Adderall?

I was making the point that little fascist social media sites who think they can manipulate information could find themselves in the same boat as MySpace, without a fucking customer base because something better came along.

MySpace, inane as it was, was eclipsed not by something "better" but by something even more inane: Nosebook. A blatant direct appeal to voyeurism (which Zuckerberg has a history of), narcissism and meaningless gossip. MySpace didn't push such features; it actually had practicality. If you're so naïve that you think a mob customer base equates to quality, you have a good gourmet mean waiting at Burger Thing.

What happened there is encapsulated, as are so many other things, in the old adage "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public".

Actually, this illustrates perfectly why you snowflakes think the big bad government needs to provide you a babysitter to tell you when something is fake or real...

Once again you're a bald-faced liar. I've never made such a point. Not in this thread, not in any thread, any time, anywhere.

Go ahead --- prove me wrong, lying hack.


(/offtopic)

Well, Pogo... you fail at making ANY point because you're an ADHD basket case. However, that IS the point of Progressive liberals. This all goes back to the Fairness Doctrine. And of course they don't come right out and tell people they want to control the information.. "If you like your health care, you can keep your health care!" ...THAT is what Progressives say! THAT is how they do it! Just like you, they pretend that's "crazy talk" and the other side is being hysterical. But we'll all wake up one day with a government panel who determines what information is "real" and what information is "fake" and thus, prohibited.

It always begins innocently enough, oh... we have to do something about all these fake news stories popping up and influencing elections... (most of which, we find, are perpetrated by the progressives themselves). They will start with the obvious "Hillary is Secretly an Alien" type stories and sources. Then next, it's the fringe elements... the Alex Jones/ Info Wars types... then it's Brietbart... Steven Crowder... Ben Shapiro... Milo... Finally, it's Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. And then, FREE SPEECH is gone!

So... NO! We are NOT going down this rabbit hole with you! We will have to find some way, like we always have, to deal with "fake news" that doesn't involve censorship. Like maybe, oh-- I don't know-- PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY? I know that seems to be a difficult thing for snowflakes like you to grasp... but that's the reality here. You're gonna keep your hands off our Constitutional rights.

It won't exactly work that way, because we have a first amendment.

I think how it will work is more like the FDA and health supplement industry now work.

Basically, the government is in the process of making a new agency, composed of establishment elites, journalists composed of foundational connected to the major journalism schools, i.e. Columbia, Annenberg, USC, and the CFR, and they will put their seal of approval on what they consider to be "The gold standard of news," IOW, real news, or news citizens that have went through State Universities or compulsory government schools are supposed to operate their lives with and use.

Once this is done, other news will naturally be allowed, both in print and on the internet, but a certain type of person will no longer take it seriously at all. The result of this, as the elites and establishment businesses, those who control the economy are hoping, will dry up advertising revenue for all other web traffic.

I'm not sure it will make much of a difference though.

Most of the alternative sites I visit are crowd source funded, or they use alternative product advertisers, those who find it hard to market their products to folks that are traditional consumers that are addicted to MSM as it is.


So, we shall see. I have a feeling even when they do make this new level of bureaucracy, those who don't trust the media or government now, will just ignore it anyway.

As it is, I am more likely to pick up the National Enquirer while waiting in the check out line then I am a Newsweek or Time magazine. Seriously. I now know how this CFR propaganda shit works. So really, who gives a fuck? I'll never listen to what the government tell me what is best for me.

 

[MisterBeale]

Congress Just Quietly Passed a Bill Targeting “Russian Propaganda” Websites
Congress Just Quietly Passed a Bill Targeting "Russian Propaganda" Websites

A quick skim of the bill reveals “Title V—Matters relating to foreign countries”, whose Section 501 calls for the government to “counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.”

The section lists the following definitions of media manipulation:

• Establishment or funding of a front group.
• Covert broadcasting.
• Media manipulation.
• Disinformation and forgeries.
• Funding agents of influence.
• Incitement and offensive counterintelligence.
• Assassinations.
• Terrorist acts.

As Kurt Nimmo correctly notes, it is easy to see how this law, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, could be used to target, threaten, or eliminate so-called “fake news” websites, a list which has been used to arbitrarily define any website, or blog, that does not share the mainstream media’s proclivity to serve as the Public Relations arm of a given administration.


Curiously, the bill which was passed on November 30, was introduced on November 22, two days before the Washington Post published its Nov. 24 article citing “experts” who claim Russian propaganda helped Donald Trump get elected.

As we reported last week, in an article that has been widely blasted, the WaPo wrote that “two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.”

The newspaper cited PropOrNot, an anonymous website that posted a hit list of alternative media websites, including Zero Hedge, Drudge Report, Activist Post, Blacklisted News, the Ron Paul Report, and many others. Glenn Greenwald penned an appropriate response two days later in “Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group.”

PropOrNot has pushed a conspiratorial thesis, without any actual proof, that the listed websites have been either used directly or covertly by the Russians to spread propaganda.

 

[Coyote]

Perfect example of fake news, from a source, Gatewaypundit that is known for this: BREAKING: Seth Rich Family Detective Tells FOX 5 DC THERE IS EVIDENCE Seth was “Emailing” Wikileaks …UPDATED WITH REPORT

Family said no such thing, it's all coming from this "private investigator" that was funded by an anonymous individual to look into it. All allegation, anonymous sources, and claims of police and FBI being somehow corrupted by powerful interests (red flag lingo)....

 

[Pete7469]

Perfect example of fake news, from a source, Gatewaypundit that is known for this: BREAKING: Seth Rich Family Detective Tells FOX 5 DC THERE IS EVIDENCE Seth was “Emailing” Wikileaks …UPDATED WITH REPORT

Family said no such thing, it's all coming from this "private investigator" that was funded by an anonymous individual to look into it. All allegation, anonymous sources, and claims of police and FBI being somehow corrupted by powerful interests (red flag lingo)....

Still a more credible source than Rachel madcow.

 

[Marion Morrison]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

What's fake news is anything that starts out with "Anonymous inside sources say"

The liars need to be pimpsmacked into the 1800s, then hung because that's what would happen to them then.

I am so fed up with dishonest media it's not even funny.

Something changed during the tail end of the Clinton administration that needs to be changed back to how it was before. Clinton enabled Glenn Beck.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Perfect example of fake news, from a source, Gatewaypundit that is known for this: BREAKING: Seth Rich Family Detective Tells FOX 5 DC THERE IS EVIDENCE Seth was “Emailing” Wikileaks …UPDATED WITH REPORT

Family said no such thing, it's all coming from this "private investigator" that was funded by an anonymous individual to look into it. All allegation, anonymous sources, and claims of police and FBI being somehow corrupted by powerful interests (red flag lingo)....

That you can't read is part of why you are a fascist. The headline CLEARLY states "Seth Rich Family DETECTIVE."

As for actually fake;

{
Russia's foreign ministry spokesman has denied reports that President Trump revealed classified information to senior officials during the Russian minister's visit to the Oval Office last week.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that the revelation put a source of intelligence on the Islamic State at risk.

Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, on Facebook on Tuesday described the reports as "yet another fake."}

Russia: Washington Post story 'yet another fake'

The Little Goebbels at WaPo fail to identify any actual source for their slander and libel; but.

{
One of the only named sources in The Post article who actually attended the meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador was National Security Adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.


McMaster blasted The Post’s report as “false” and told media in a press conference that, “I was in the room, it didn’t happen.”}

Exclusive: Washington Post Paid to Run #FakeNews by Clinton CGI Donor

You fascists are waging a propaganda war against America.

 

[flacaltenn]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

 

[Marion Morrison]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

FCC needs to lay down the law. The integrity of journalism is circling the drain.

To put into perspective: I've run across 4 pieces of actual journalism within the past 6 months.

The most recent was on a C130 pilot that was supporting a Chinook full of Navy seals a few years back.

 

[Coyote]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean...so I may be missing the point in attempting to answer this reply.

The problem with Macedonia is not so much that they create fake news - that it originates there - but they spread it massively.

The second thing is - where do people get most of their news?

According to Pew - 6 in 10 Americans get their news from social media with Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter being the main sources.

I am concerned about the lack of factchecking going on in mainstream news like CNN, NYT, Fox etc but there is more accountability there then there is on the internet.

 

[Coyote]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

FCC needs to lay down the law. The integrity of journalism is circling the drain.

To put into perspective: I've run across 4 pieces of actual journalism within the past 6 months.

The most recent was on a C130 pilot that was supporting a Chinook full of Navy seals a few years back.

I agree, the integrity of journalism is going down but - I've seen a lot of good journalism also. More then 4 pieces.

 

[flacaltenn]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

FCC needs to lay down the law. The integrity of journalism is circling the drain.

To put into perspective: I've run across 4 pieces of actual journalism within the past 6 months.

The most recent was on a C130 pilot that was supporting a Chinook full of Navy seals a few years back.

Not a fan of fact-checkers or govt intervention. If you cannot trust WH press corps or LEGACY media, you WILL eventually listen to other sources. Not so much because of "fake news", but simply because of the stories that the PARTISAN side of the media refuse to cover. That's like "Negative News" or something different.

 

[flacaltenn]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean...so I may be missing the point in attempting to answer this reply.

The problem with Macedonia is not so much that they create fake news - that it originates there - but they spread it massively.

The second thing is - where do people get most of their news?

According to Pew - 6 in 10 Americans get their news from social media with Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter being the main sources.

I am concerned about the lack of factchecking going on in mainstream news like CNN, NYT, Fox etc but there is more accountability there then there is on the internet.

Why didn't the journalist point to SPECIFIC EXAMPLES coming out of this "fake news factory"? It always concerns me when folks get all wound up about something and you have NO IDEA what wound them up.. Was this "fake news" tabloid quality? Was it IMPORTANT to the election? Was it based in ANY truth at all.

My beef here is that Fresh Air DECIDED that FOR YOU and made it important enough to spend the majority of the interview on.. That's not REPORTING --- that's story-telling. Which is what NPR is excellent at. Journalism is the Who, What, Why, When, and How of a story... So maybe this is fake in itself. I can't decide if they didn't commit journalism in telling the story...

 

[Coyote]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

FCC needs to lay down the law. The integrity of journalism is circling the drain.

To put into perspective: I've run across 4 pieces of actual journalism within the past 6 months.

The most recent was on a C130 pilot that was supporting a Chinook full of Navy seals a few years back.

Not a fan of fact-checkers or govt intervention. If you cannot trust WH press corps or LEGACY media, you WILL eventually listen to other sources. Not so much because of "fake news", but simply because of the stories that the PARTISAN side of the media refuse to cover. That's like "Negative News" or something different.

Agree on gov't intervention in news but fact-checking I like. There is a need for it.

But I don't think people go to alternative sites because they trust them any more than other sites but because it's tailored to what they WANT to hear. An echo chamber.

 

[Coyote]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean...so I may be missing the point in attempting to answer this reply.

The problem with Macedonia is not so much that they create fake news - that it originates there - but they spread it massively.

The second thing is - where do people get most of their news?

According to Pew - 6 in 10 Americans get their news from social media with Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter being the main sources.

I am concerned about the lack of factchecking going on in mainstream news like CNN, NYT, Fox etc but there is more accountability there then there is on the internet.

Why didn't the journalist point to SPECIFIC EXAMPLES coming out of this "fake news factory"? It always concerns me when folks get all wound up about something and you have NO IDEA what wound them up.. Was this "fake news" tabloid quality? Was it IMPORTANT to the election? Was it based in ANY truth at all.

My beef here is that Fresh Air DECIDED that FOR YOU and made it important enough to spend the majority of the interview on.. That's not REPORTING --- that's story-telling. Which is what NPR is excellent at. Journalism is the Who, What, Why, When, and How of a story... So maybe this is fake in itself. I can't decide if they didn't commit journalism in telling the story...

Did you read the OP though?

Fresh Air was interviewing Silverman - about an article he wrote, where he tracked down all this stuff and analyzed it. So even if the interview didn't go into specific examples - I linked to Silverman's article that they were discussing and pulled some actual fake news examples. The interview was less about electoral consequences then the effect and spread of fake news in general.

 

[flacaltenn]

Fake news isn't the media "getting it wrong".
Fake news isn't making a mistake and printing a retraction.
Fake news isn't making wrong predictions.

All of the above are part and parcel of the media business.

Fake news is a story that is completely false.

What is interesting isn't that it's something new, it isn't, but social media has given it an engine and the mainstream public doesn't seem to have the tools to untangle truth from fiction yet. The media is also behind the ball in taking responsibility, fact checking before a story is passed on and also - taking fake news to task and dissecting the story. The reason fake news has become such a player recently may be as simple as economics (earning money through ad click revenue) combined with the rather lawless playing field of social media and the lack of will to factcheck material that confirms with one's own preconceptions or bias.

What's interesting about fake news however, is not the story itself but what lies beneath the surface....

Craig Silverman was interviewed on Fresh Air this evening.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.


He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse.
​

Fascinating interview. Some of the main points covered:

Fake election news outperformed real news sites in social media such as facebook - significantly so 3 months and closer to election. 9 months and 6 months prior to the election, real news sites performed better. What is interesting is he provides the data: BuzzFeed News: Election content engagement and everyone of those fake news articles was a thread in Politics here on USMB. Less then half of the real news articles were.


Here's How Fake Election News Outperformed Real Election News On Facebook

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump’s interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American “refugees” fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.​

...These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

...All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News’ analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump “refugees” from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)​

Now, that leads to another point - WTF - Macedonia? The other point it found was these sites were overwelmingly pro-Trump. What interest or knowledge does a small town in Macedonia (and a large number of those sites are run out of one town) have in American Politics?

Back to the Silverman interview on Fresh Air.

The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites...And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?​

These sites came out of a Veles, a town in Macedonia. The owners were mostly young people - teens and early twenties, and college students. They weren't driven by ideology but by econonics. They could earn money directing traffic to their sites through Google AdSense and they were "using Facebook to drive the traffic to the websites where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic" They don't create the content - they find it elsewhere, but they copy it and proliferate it.



The article goes into a lot more, including what should be done or shouldn't be done to combat it, but this statement was particularly compelling because we're all susceptable to it:

Silverman:

We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.​

I find it problematic that Fresh Air spent so much time finding a "fake news factory" in Macedonia, but didnt' seem to include any examples of its products that I or You might have consumed. I'm not AWARE of any fake news originating in Macedonia -- therefore I DOUBT it had the type of effect as what you see DAILY TODAY on CNN on the pages of the NYTimes...

Overseas, fake news is a form of recreation and entertainment. Because the govt sources suck at anything objective. So I'm not surprised to find folks with that "hobby" in the Balkans or Russia, because there is a glorious history of trying to figure out what's REALLY happening when you are fed Govt propaganda for your entire life.

We are in DANGER of that. If the juvenile behavior of the American press continues. It's a true embarrassment.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean...so I may be missing the point in attempting to answer this reply.

The problem with Macedonia is not so much that they create fake news - that it originates there - but they spread it massively.

The second thing is - where do people get most of their news?

According to Pew - 6 in 10 Americans get their news from social media with Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter being the main sources.

I am concerned about the lack of factchecking going on in mainstream news like CNN, NYT, Fox etc but there is more accountability there then there is on the internet.

Why didn't the journalist point to SPECIFIC EXAMPLES coming out of this "fake news factory"? It always concerns me when folks get all wound up about something and you have NO IDEA what wound them up.. Was this "fake news" tabloid quality? Was it IMPORTANT to the election? Was it based in ANY truth at all.

My beef here is that Fresh Air DECIDED that FOR YOU and made it important enough to spend the majority of the interview on.. That's not REPORTING --- that's story-telling. Which is what NPR is excellent at. Journalism is the Who, What, Why, When, and How of a story... So maybe this is fake in itself. I can't decide if they didn't commit journalism in telling the story...

Did you read the OP though?

Fresh Air was interviewing Silverman - about an article he wrote, where he tracked down all this stuff and analyzed it. So even if the interview didn't go into specific examples - I linked to Silverman's article that they were discussing and pulled some actual fake news examples. The interview was less about electoral consequences then the effect and spread of fake news in general.

Were those examples from the "factory" in Macedonia? If not -- I fail to see the relevance of allowing Silverman to judge the importance of whateverthehell came out of a foreign country without providing examples that would be FAMILIAR to folks who follow election news...