How Good Are You At Spotting Fake News??

Fake news is hard to spot. Large social media organizations are taking precautions on how to avoid the continuous spread of fake news that occurs in our world today. This becomes a major problem come election time, when the information being spread is false or misleading.

Spread of Fake News

It’s horrifying to read about research conducted on the spread of fake news. After looking into it, the article, “Fake News Experts On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them,” https://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505547295/fake-news-expert-on-how-false-stories-spread-and-why-people-believe-them it revealed that over 100 fake news sites are dishing out false information from Macedonia in the Balkins. Researchers visited each site and broke down the information they were releasing. “‘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.'”

How to Spread the News

The main goal, as mentioned in the article, is to get your website up on Facebook and popping up on other people’s profiles. What people have been doing is creating a fake account to enhance their own site’s views and shares.

It turns out that the stories with the highest shares and engagement turned out to be the furthest from the truth. Other content that just involved a picture or gif or meme did not receive as much engagement as the completely falsified stories.

Facebook’s Role

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg came out and defended his website; he stated that Facebook is a tech site and not a media site, since it is meant for people to share their information. It would be incredibly hard to regulate every bit of content that is shared every day.

This is a good and bad thing. People would struggle with the idea that Facebook can monitor what they post vs. the idea of free speech and posting what they want when they want. Along with the freedom to post what they want, people have to appreciate the vast size of Facebook and the 2 billion monthly users that it has.

One thing Facebook makes sure they are efficient about is how they respond to people flagging things as inappropriate on their page. As soon as something is flagged, it is immediately sent through an algorithm that tests if the information and images used are fair.