Fake news website

This article is about intentionally misleading websites. For satirical websites, see news satire.

Fake news sites publish hoaxes and misinformation on the Internet to drive web traffic, primarily from social media sharing. These sites are distinguished from news satire because they do not intend to be humorous, but to mislead readers and profit from readers believing the stories to be true.

Prominent fake news sites

Prominent among fake news sites include false propaganda created by individuals in the countries of Macedonia and Russia. The majority of fake news during the 2016 United States election cycle came from adolescent youths in Macedonia attempting to rapidly profit from those believing their falsehoods. An investigation by BuzzFeed revealed that over 100 websites spreading fake articles supportive of Donald Trump were all created by teenagers in the small town of Veles, Macedonia.

BuzzFeed called the problem an "epidemic of misinformation". According to Buzzfeed's analysis, the 20 top-performing election news stories from fake sites generated more shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook than the 20 top-performing stories from 19 major news outlets.

U.S. News & World Report warned readers to be wary of popular fake news sites composed of either outright hoaxes or propaganda, and recommended the website Fake News Watch for a listing of such problematic sources.

Impact on elections

President of the United States Barack Obama commented on the significant problem of fraudulent information on social networks impacting elections, in a speech on 7 November 2016: "The way campaigns have unfolded, we just start accepting crazy stuff as normal. And people, if they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again, as long as it’s on Facebook, and people can see it, as long as its on social media, people start believing it. And it creates this dust cloud of nonsense."

Fraudulent stories during the 2016 U.S. presidential election popularized on Facebook included a viral post that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, and another that wrote actor Denzel Washington "backs Trump in the most epic way possible".

Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded: "Sure" — when asked specifically on 15 November 2016 if fake news sites had likely changed the results of the 2016 United States presidential election. Pichai went on to emphasize the importance of removing all fake news sites from purveyance: "Look, it is important to remember this was a very close election and so, just for me, so looking at it scientifically, one in a hundred voters voting one way or the other swings the election either way. ... From our perspective, there should just be no situation where fake news gets distributed, so we are all for doing better here."

After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the top result on Google for results of the race was to a fake news site. With regards to the false results posted on the website "70 News", Google admitted its prominence in search results was a mistake: "In this case we clearly didn't get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms."

Responses from Google and Facebook

On 14 November 2016, Google responded to the growing problem of fake news sites by banning such companies from profiting on advertising from traffic to false articles through its marketing program AdSense. The company already had a policy for denying ads for dieting ripoffs and counterfeit merchandise. Google stated upon the announcement: "We’ve been working on an update to our publisher policies and will start prohibiting Google ads from being placed on misrepresentative content. Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property."

Facebook made the decision to take a similar move the following day. Facebook explained its new policy: "We do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news. ... We have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news. Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance."

Although the steps by both Google and Facebook intended to deny ad revenue to fake news sites, neither company took actions to prevent dissemination of false stories in search engine results pages or web feeds.

Top staff members at Facebook did not feel that simply blocking ad revenue from these fraudulent sites was a strong enough response to the problem, and together they made an executive decision and created a secret group to deal with the issue themselves. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had said the notion that fake news sites impacted the 2016 election was a "crazy idea". In response, the secret Facebook response group disputed this idea: "It’s not a crazy idea. What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season." BuzzFeed reported that the secret task force included "dozens" of Facebook employees.

Commentary

John Oliver commented on his comedy program Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that the problem of fake news sites fed into a wider issue of echo chambers in the media. Oliver lamented: "Fake facts circulate on social media to a frightening extent. He pointed out such sites often only exist to draw in profit from web traffic: "There is now a whole cottage industry specializing in hyper-partisan, sometimes wildly distorted clickbait."

Merrimack College assistant professor of media studies Melissa Zimdars wrote an article "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y and Satirical 'News' Sources" in which she advised how to determine if a fraudulent source was a fake news site. This included: strange domain names, websites ending in "lo" or "com.co", lack of author attribution, inspect the "About Us" page, poor website layout and style of ALL CAPS.

New York Magazine contributor Brian Feldman responded to the article by Melissa Zimdars, and used her list to create a Google Chrome extension that would warn users about fake news sites. He invited others to use his code and improve upon it.

BBC News interviewed a fake news site writer who went by the pseudonym "Chief Reporter (CR)", who defended his actions and possible influence on elections: "If enough of an electorate are in a frame of mind where they will believe absolutely everything they read on the internet, to a certain extent they have to be prepared to deal with the consequences."

Slate magazine wrote that though fake news sites were controversial, their prevalence was obscuring a wider discussion about the negative impact on society from those who only consume media from one particular tailored viewpoint — and therefore perpetuate filter bubbles.

Indiana University informatics and computer science professor Fil Menczer commented on the steps by Google and Facebook to deny fake news sites advertising revenue: "One of the incentives for a good portion of fake news is money. This could cut the income that creates the incentive to create the fake news sites."

Zeynep Tufekci wrote critically about Facebook's stance on fake news sites in a piece for The New York Times, pointing out fraudulent websites in Macedonia profited handsomely off false stories about the 2016 U.S. election: "The company's business model, algorithms and policies entrench echo chambers and fuel the spread of misinformation."

Writing for MIT Technology Review, Jamie Condliffe said that merely banning ad revenue from the fake news sites was not enough action by Facebook to effectively deal with the problem. He wrote: "The post-election furor surrounding Facebook’s fake-news problem has sparked new initiatives to halt the provision of ads to sites that peddle false information. But it’s only a partial solution to the problem: for now, hoaxes and fabricated stories will continue to appear in feeds." Condliffe concluded: "Clearly Facebook needs to do something to address the issue of misinformation, and it’s making a start. But the ultimate solution is probably more significant, and rather more complex, than a simple ad ban."

Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan has criticized Facebook for "doing so little to combat fake news... Facebook should be fighting misinformation, not amplifying it."

See also

• Big lie
• Confirmation bias
• Disinformation
• Echo chamber (media)
• Epistemic closure
• Filter bubble
• Opinion corridor
• Positive feedback
• Red herring
• Selective exposure theory
• Spiral of silence
• Tribe (internet)

Further reading

• Jamie Condliffe (15 November 2016), "Facebook's Fake-News Ad Ban Is Not Enough", MIT Technology Review, retrieved 16 November 2016
• Rachel Dicker (14 November 2016), "Avoid These Fake News Sites at All Costs", U.S. News & World Report, retrieved 16 November 2016
• Cassandra Jaramillo (15 November 2016), "How to break it to your friends and family that they're sharing fake news", The Dallas Morning News, retrieved 16 November 2016
• Kim LaCapria (2 November 2016), "Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors", Snopes.com, snopes.com, retrieved 16 November 2016
• Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander (3 November 2016), "How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News", BuzzFeed, retrieved 16 November 2016

External links

• Fake News Watch