Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

SilverSurfer, is it you love fake news because conservatives have benefited much more from the practice over decades? .. to blame MSM for it is not valid .. satire has been around for centuries .. lies, too, lol, of course, take the subject of "miracles" for one .. you know all the Jesus faces on bread and walls and fences et al .. anyway, back to the point .. couple of excerpts from a Vox article ..


The scariest part of Facebook’s fake news problem: fake news is more viral than real news

Mark Zuckerberg says fake news on his site is too rare to be an issue — but he's the only one.

Updated by Aja Romano@ajaromano Nov 16, 2016, 12:30pm EST

[...]

That seems like a reasonable supposition. But as Caulfield shows — again, using Facebook’s publicly available traffic APIs — it’s probably not a realistic one. Caulfield found that at least one article from a fake news site was shared far more widely and thus reached a far greater number of people than some concurrently “trending” articles from respected news sources like the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. Ultimately, the fake article garnered thousands more shares than several of the real news stories he looked at.



The story in question, headlined “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead,” came from a website called the Denver Guardian, a fake news site created for what appears to be the sole purpose of disseminating fake anti-Clinton and right-wing propaganda. Though its posts are easily unmasked as hoaxes with minimal fact-checking, Facebook, as many have already lamented, has no built-in way to help users tell the difference between an article from a regular news website and one from the “Denver Guardian” that might show up in their news feeds, masquerading as real news.

[...]

The public is also doing its part: A Merrimack College communications professor named Melissa Zimdars has released a simple Google Doc .. https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview .. that lists “False, misleading, clickbait-y, and or satirical ‘news’ sources,” with a loose category system to help you determine the level of deceit you’re dealing with. It includes satirical sites like the Onion and the New Yorker’s Borowitz Report; misleading and hyperbolic clickbait like Infowars, Breitbart, and Political Blindspot; and fake sites that intentionally try to pass themselves as real ones, like MSNBC.com.co. .. http://msnbc.com.co/ .. Zimdars isn’t alone: The website Fake News Watch .. http://fakenewswatch.com/ .. also lists categories of fake news sites to be on the lookout for, and New York magazine has created a Chrome extension .. http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/heres-a-browser-extension-that-will-flag-fake-news-sites.html .. that alerts the user to fake news sites based on Zimdar’s list. .. http://www.vox.com/2016/11/16/13626318/viral-fake-news-on-facebook

when fake newspapers and stories from them are created to influence an election result then to see that as funny, and not to be taken seriously sure feels irresponsible to me ..

Thankfully some are taking the newest Fake News phenomenon seriously.