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

[Pogo]

Another more well-known sort of fake news, this time in English....

​

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

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.​

1. You don't even believe in that definition though. And by you, I'm talking about liberals and the establishment. They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

2. Fake News can have some grains of truth but be meant to mislead, often by omitting details or downplaying them. The media does it as standard procedure now. As a person who read articles since third grade, I can say this is very easy to spot.

 

[Pogo]

They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

Link?

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

Link?

That's what the original paper that spurned the entire fake news narrative did, jackass.

 

[Pogo]

Maybe we ought to use this thread to debunk fake news....

These days and on sites like this, we could make an entire forum for it.

Here's another tool I use --- besides obviously looking for credible corroborating and sourced information channels --- photography. A great many images (such as the 7-year-old girl posted above) are real photos of --- something --- with a completely fabricated story attached, much like the fake quotes Google Image meme generators. So when I see a suspicious story that carries a photo I have a plug-in where I can right-click the image and choose "search image on Google". I think you maybe can dump it into the search bar too without the plug-in. If your suspect story purports to show something that happened in Iraq yesterday, and your search returns the same image from Albania three years ago ---- Eureka, you've struck bullshit.

 

[Pogo]

They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

Link?

That's what the original paper that spurned the entire fake news narrative did, jackass.

So................................... no link.

 

[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.​

1. You don't even believe in that definition though. And by you, I'm talking about liberals and the establishment. They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

2. Fake News can have some grains of truth but be meant to mislead, often by omitting details or downplaying them. The media does it as standard procedure now. As a person who read articles since third grade, I can say this is very easy to spot.

InfoWars is a perfecty example of fake news. All media has some level of bias that affects what they emphasize or downplay or omit and we as readers should learn how to recognize that. But fake media does so to the point where it's almost entirely fictional imo.

 

[Coyote]

Maybe we ought to use this thread to debunk fake news....

These days and on sites like this, we could make an entire forum for it.

Here's another tool I use --- besides obviously looking for credible corroborating and sourced information channels --- photography. A great many images (such as the 7-year-old girl posted above) are real photos of --- something --- with a completely fabricated story attached, much like the fake quotes Google Image meme generators. So when I see a suspicious story that carries a photo I have a plug-in where I can right-click the image and choose "search image on Google". I think you maybe can dump it into the search bar too without the plug-in. If your suspect story purports to show something that happened in Iraq yesterday, and your search returns the same image from Albania three years ago ---- Eureka, you've struck bullshit.

That's really interesting - I've never been able to search images, I've always had to realy on the written word to find info. Same with videos.

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

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.​

1. You don't even believe in that definition though. And by you, I'm talking about liberals and the establishment. They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

2. Fake News can have some grains of truth but be meant to mislead, often by omitting details or downplaying them. The media does it as standard procedure now. As a person who read articles since third grade, I can say this is very easy to spot.

InfoWars is a perfecty example of fake news. All media has some level of bias that affects what they emphasize or downplay or omit and we as readers should learn how to recognize that. But fake media does so to the point where it's almost entirely fictional imo.

That's not true though. In fact, I find them to be more honest of late than all the corporate broadcasters. Here's an hour program; watch it and tell me how this is so fictional....

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

Link?

That's what the original paper that spurned the entire fake news narrative did, jackass.

So................................... no link.

Yup.

And I've told you this on a number of occasions now. I'm not your bitch link chaser. I told you the source, if you can refute it (which you can't b/c I told you the truth), then do so. But don't make this about some bull shit like you always do. It only reflects the fact that you're a little bitch.

 

[Pogo]

Maybe we ought to use this thread to debunk fake news....

These days and on sites like this, we could make an entire forum for it.

Here's another tool I use --- besides obviously looking for credible corroborating and sourced information channels --- photography. A great many images (such as the 7-year-old girl posted above) are real photos of --- something --- with a completely fabricated story attached, much like the fake quotes Google Image meme generators. So when I see a suspicious story that carries a photo I have a plug-in where I can right-click the image and choose "search image on Google". I think you maybe can dump it into the search bar too without the plug-in. If your suspect story purports to show something that happened in Iraq yesterday, and your search returns the same image from Albania three years ago ---- Eureka, you've struck bullshit.

That's really interesting - I've never been able to search images, I've always had to realy on the written word to find info. Same with videos.

I have a handy Firefox plug-in but anyone can use the Google Reverse Image Search.

You can bust a lot of bullshit this way. Propagandists depend on their targets being too lazy to question what they propagate.

 

[Pogo]

They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

Link?

That's what the original paper that spurned the entire fake news narrative did, jackass.

So................................... no link.

Yup.

And I've told you this on a number of occasions now. I'm not your bitch link chaser. I told you the source, if you can refute it (which you can't b/c I told you the truth), then do so. But don't make this about some bull shit like you always do. It only reflects the fact that you're a little bitch.

Cat Toy Meltdown in progress.

It does serve as a reminder of the basic tenet for good journalism and ferreting out fake news, that being:

Burden of proof is always on the asserter.

No exceptions.

 

[TheGreatGatsby]

They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

Link?

That's what the original paper that spurned the entire fake news narrative did, jackass.

So................................... no link.

Yup.

And I've told you this on a number of occasions now. I'm not your bitch link chaser. I told you the source, if you can refute it (which you can't b/c I told you the truth), then do so. But don't make this about some bull shit like you always do. It only reflects the fact that you're a little bitch.

Cat Toy Meltdown in progress.

It does serve as a reminder of the basic tenet for good journalism and ferreting out fake news, that being:

Burden of proof is always on the asserter.

No exceptions.

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.

 

[Boss]

I don't hear many leftists calling for banning media.

Oh no, of course not... they don't want to ban media any more than they want to ban guns! That's just crazy talk! ...This is a classic example of how the left always plays.

Got an example then?

Oh wait ----- look who I'm talking to...
Never mind.

The liberal left wants to control the information the media can report. I believe in the free press so I am opposed to this.

So is Liberalism. By definition. And btw Gummo "Liberal" and "left" are two different things --- you know that right?

Still looking for this evidence of --- whoever --- wanting to "control the information the media can report". Still not seeing it.

Not all sources are equal. Junk is junk. That doesn't mean bias or that you shouldn't try to read news from a variety of sources. Should I take the National Enquirer seriously? Occassionally, it's right. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

So Americans need a ministry of Truth to hold their hand huh?

Where does anyone suggest that?

aaaand STILL not seeing it.

You know what, asshole? I am really GLAD the liberal left has raised this meme! Those of us on the right can burn social media to the fucking ground with all the "fake news" churned out daily by your PR group (aka: the mainstream media). This is going to be one of those things that comes back to slap you in your goofy little faces repeatedly and you'll wish to the god you don't believe in that you had never opened your mouth about this.

Now to answer your stupid little question... Facebook has already announced that it will partner with ABC News and Snopes to "vet" news items. YouTube is already removing content based on their own fascist policies. These aren't news organizations but it's just a matter of time... liberals are patient... they will push for something for a century if they need to, implementing it incrementally along the way.

 

[Coyote]

You know, FB and Youtube are private companies. They can make their own determination on content. So can Breitbart. And InfoWars.

 

[Uncensored2008]

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.​

So, about 90% of the political stories aired by CNN, MSNBC, or published by the NY Times, WaPO, LA Times, etc. are completely fake, fabricated to promote the party or slander the enemies of the party.

Wail and gnash your teeth, the fraudulent leftist media is washed up, no one believes your shit, no one.

 

[Uncensored2008]

You know, FB and Youtube are private companies. They can make their own determination on content. So can Breitbart. And InfoWars.

As can Carlos Slim's NY Times, the fakest news of all!

 

[Boss]

You know, FB and Youtube are private companies. They can make their own determination on content. So can Breitbart. And InfoWars.

Oh, I completely understand... that's why I said they're not a news organization. But you know what else? In a free market, they can have competition who comes along and doesn't play into this liberal meme and their private company can fail. Does that sound crazy? Ask the guy who owns MySpace!

 

[Uncensored2008]

They're trying to label Info Wars, Breitbart, The Blaze, or any and all alternative media, etc as fake news across the board.

Link?

Simply lumping Brietbart and the Blaze IN with Infowars is dishonest and sleazy.

But what else can we expect from you of the Khmer Rouge?

Here is some NY Times fake news that should hit home with you, huffer.

{
In a December 19 article entitled "Time to End the Electoral College," the newspaper argues that the Electoral College is an “antiquated mechanism” for electing the president. And of course in support of its position, it makes the usual arguments, such as that Americans would prefer to elect the president by popular vote. “For most reasonable people, it’s hard to understand why the loser of the popular vote should wind up running the country,” the Times insists.

Taking that sentence apart, the writer insinuates that anyone who favors keeping the Electoral College is not a “reasonable” person. Second, the writer implies that Democrat Hillary Clinton, the Times' preferred candidate, won the popular vote. Considering that candidates — including Clinton — are not campaigning to win the popular vote, but rather the Electoral College vote, the “popular vote” is not necessarily indicative of what it would have been if the candidates were trying to win it. After all, a football game plan would be quite different if field goals counted four points instead of three, or if total yardage were the way a winner was determined, rather than touchdowns, field goals, and safeties. Besides all that, it takes a majority of the electoral vote to win the presidency, not just a plurality. Clinton did run first in the popular vote, but she did not win a majority of the popular vote. If the country opted to go to a popular vote system, one would think that we would want a candidate who actually won a majority of that vote, that is, if the “will of the majority” is considered so important to detractors of the Electoral College, such as the New York Times.}

N.Y. Times' Fake News That Electoral College Was Created to Protect Slavery

You frauds threw out any HINT of journalistic integrity in the zeal to promote the party; now you are in a panic to try and discredit alternative sources, as if that will rebuild the trust in the bullshit put out by the DNC propaganda outlets.

Fuck the leftist press. Anyone who believes the shit they put out is a fool. Pravda under Stalin was more accurate than the DNC controlled MSM today.

And America knows it.

Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low

No one believes your bullshit Huffer, no one.

 

[Boss]

Taking that sentence apart, the writer insinuates that anyone who favors keeping the Electoral College is not a “reasonable” person. Second, the writer implies that Democrat Hillary Clinton, the Times' preferred candidate, won the popular vote.

Exactly! The leftist media does this ALL THE TIME! They constantly twist context and play games with semantics to infer and imply things that simply aren't true. That's just as bad as a totally made-up story, if not WORSE!

Hillary didn't "WIN" a goddamn thing! I'm so fucking sick of hearing that she "won the popular vote!" She didn't "WIN" anything... she had more popular votes than Trump but her margin of victory in California alone was greater than her overall margin of the popular vote nationwide.

The "antiquated" Electoral College was designed to do exactly what it did this year! It worked perfectly as the founders intended for it to. This election should be a required civics lesson for every high school student going forward to demonstrate how we are a republic and not a democracy.