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After a year in which journalists became a straw man for Trumpian tirades and tweets, it shouldn't be a surprise that the outrage among media over fake news has rebounded back as conservatives claim mainstream media is the source of most of it. Just search Twitter for "fake news" and you'll see what I'm talking about.
In an effort to tamp down on the furor, Facebook recently started asking some readers whether news links use misleading language. But recent studies found that both students and adults are both terrible at discerning the factuality and integrity of news, even when stories don't align politically with a reader's beliefs.
"Consumers are likely to believe even false stories that don’t fit their ideological bias. And the survey calls into question the notion—which Facebook has reportedly begun testing—that consumers themselves can do the work of distinguishing between real and fake news."
Facebook's Instant Articles feature, lauded as a boon to publishers, has backfired by contributing a veneer and sheen to low-quality outlets that now appear identical to established publications while you're on the platform.
Dec 7, 2016As with many other false stories about Clinton that have widely spread online—like the baseless rumor promoted by Infowars and then Trump that millions of non-citizens illegally voted for her, and were encouraged to do so by President Obama—this should be described as what it is: disinformation, or the sort of “black propaganda” intelligence agencies have fabricated in decades past to smear politicians they see as enemies.
↩︎ The Intercept
The filter bubble is a key step in the proliferation of fake news. A new Chrome plug-in allows you to see what news pages your friends like and post from. Here's what mine looks like.
Important to remember: Some news is fake by virtue of deception on the part of companies, like Theranos. Other misdirections can come from the top. Fake news (remember "Mission Accomplished"?) might have been the defining story of the aughts.
2003: Rifle-toting Americans barge into Iraq after reading viral Fake News story about weapons of mass destruction.
— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) December 5, 2016
Disinformation can even come from government agencies. This week the Washington Post found out that the Pentagon hid $125 billion in wasteful spending from auditors, Congress, and the public in order to protect its outsized budget from scrutiny.
“Perhaps what I’ve actually done is scraped the topsoil off the surface of 2016 and found one of the underground springs that has been quietly nurturing it,” says journalist Carol Cadwalladr, who describes the way that the right has proven much more effective, and zealous, in "colonizing" the online real estate adjacent to innocuous queries to create their own reality.
Google quickly stepped in after her article described the dominance of racist pages posing as fact, gamed to appear at the top of touchy queries about Jews and African-American crime.
