LibGuides: Information Literacy: Fake News

Spotting Fake News

How Do You Know It's Fake News?

Fake website
Fake news originals on fake sites (sometimes). Website owners will create sites that look or sound like a real one.
Emotional ploys
The author tugs at your anger or fear or other emotion using trigger words like:
1. "You won't believe!"
2. "You'll never guess!"
3. "Guess what _________ did now!"
No one is covering the story
If it is not also covered in a major news outlet (in the next couple days at least) then it's probably fake. Other fake sites may cover the story and it may travel in circles almost seeming to be real.
Experts neither wrote the article nor were they consulted
Experts have first-hand knowledge of the topic. Credible journalists interview and report on what they say. If neither is in the article then it's probably not credible.
You cannot verify to story
The story contains no links to other sources as proof of their credibility. They do not list sources.

TEDEd: How to Choose Your News

With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart.

TEDEd: How to Choose Your News
Click here to continue the lesson.
How to Tell Fake News from Real News
Want to strengthen your own ability to tell real news from fake news? Start by asking these five questions of any news item:
Four tricky ways that fake news can fool you
What looks like (and reads like) the truth may be riddled with lies if you look more closely, says neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin.

Fact Check Like a Pro from CUNY J and LexisNexis (2017)

In the News: More Fake News

The Atlantic: The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News
Describes the above study: The spread of true and false news online by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, Sinan Aral,* Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Media Lab, E14-526, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
New York Times: After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced (2018)
One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.
NPR:Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them (2016)
2016: Fresh Air. "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."
NPR: We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned (2016)
The "Denver Guardian" was built and designed using a pretty common platform — WordPress. It's used by bloggers and people who want to create their own websites. Jansen found that the first entry ever for the site was done by someone with the handle LetTexasSecede.
EdWeek: Why Students Can't Google Their Way to the Truth (2016)
"In a study conducted by Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues at Northwestern University, 102 college students went online to answer questions about things that matter to them—like how to advise a female friend who's desperate to prevent pregnancy after her boyfriend's condom broke. How did students decide what to believe? One factor loomed largest: a site's placement in the search results. Students ignored the sponsoring organization and the article's author, blindly trusting the search engine to put the most reliable results first."
BuzzFeed News: This Is How Your Hyperpartisan Political News Gets Made (2017)
BuzzFeed News traced a group of liberal and conservative websites back to the same company. "The product they're pitching is outrage," said one liberal writer.
NBS Tech News: Inside the Government Agency Designing Tech to Fight Fake News (2018)
"“If our adversaries are able to generate material that can spread quickly, they can generate all of this in a disinformation campaign,” Doermann warned, emphasizing that people should always be skeptical that anything they are exposed to online could be challenged in one way or another for reality. . . MediFor’s tech can run a heat map to identify where an image’s statistics, called a JPEG dimple, differ from the rest of the photo."
New York Times: Why We’re Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets (2018)
"Even a simple timeline of these tweets can begin to tell a story of how the trolls operated. For instance, there was a flurry of trolling activity on Oct. 6, 2016. As the Washington Post first pointed out using the Clemson researchers’ findings, that may have been related to what happened on Oct. 7, 2016, when WikiLeaks released embarrassing emails from the Clinton campaign. There was another big spike in the summer of 2017, when the Internet Research Agency appeared to have shifted its focus to a specific type of troll — one the researchers call the “Right Troll” — that mimicked stereotypical Trump supporters."

How False News Spreads

Fake News Books

Bunk: the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young
Call Number: 001.95 Y737b 2017 from Emmetsburg
ISBN: 9781555977917
Publication Date: 2017-11-14
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction "There Kevin Young goes again, giving us books we greatly need, cleverly disguised as books we merely want. Unexpectedly essential."--Marlon James Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue's gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers--from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump.Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of "truthiness" where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.

Fake News Reports in the News

This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook from BuzzFeed News (2016)
A BuzzFeed News analysis found that top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.
The Atlantic: The Grim Conclusions (from MIT study) of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News (2018)
Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.
Washington Post: ‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America
“The more extreme we become, the more people believe it,” Blair replied. He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9.
CNN: Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy (2019)
Quartz: The viral spread of a bogus video shows the insidiousness of misinformation (2019)
The video, which is a collection of mistruths, half-truths, and exaggerations had over 83 million views as of June 5, just four days after it was first published. It has spread to Twitter, where it was shared more than 100,000 times in the same time frame, as well as Instagram. It demonstrates just how ineffective social platforms are at combatting misinformation—because the video actually did go through Facebook’s fact-checking process.
NBC News: POLITICS NEWS New study shows Russian propaganda may really have helped Trump (2019)
The study, by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does not prove that Russian interference swung the election to Trump. But it demonstrates that Trump's gains in popularity during the 2016 campaign correlated closely with high levels of social media activity by the Russian trolls and bots of the Internet Research Agency, a key weapon in the Russian attack. "Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls," wrote Damian Ruck.

Fake News: A Case Study

How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study (2016)
Mr. Tucker's post was shared at least 16,000 times on Twitter and more than 350,000 times on Facebook. The problem is that Mr. Tucker got it wrong. There were no such buses packed with paid protesters.

Fake News Archives

Wikipedia Fake News List
Fake news websites deliberately publish hoaxes and disinformation to drive web traffic inflamed by social media. These sites are distinguished from news satire (which is humorous) as they mislead and sometimes profit from readers' gullibility. While most fake news sites are portrayed to be spinoffs of other news sites, some of these websites are examples of website spoofing, structured to make visitors believe they are visiting trusted sources like ABC News or MSNBC. The New York Times pointed out that within a strict definition, "fake news" on the Internet referred to a fictitious article which was fabricated with the deliberate motivation to defraud readers, generally with the goal of profiting through clickbait. PolitiFact described fake news as fabricated content designed to fool readers and subsequently made viral through the Internet to crowds that increase its dissemination.

Fake Twitter Accounts and their Tweets

PBS: Why Our Brains Love Fake News (2017)

Research on Fake News

Science: The spread of true and false news online (2018)
We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.
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The spread of true and false news online by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, Sinan Aral,* Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Media Lab, E14-526, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Nature Scientific Reports: Echo Chambers: Emotional Contagion and Group Polarization on Facebook (2016)
Recent findings showed that users on Facebook tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups -- i.e., echo chambers. Such a tendency dominates information cascades and might affect public debates on social relevant issues. In this work we explore the structural evolution of communities of interest by accounting for users emotions and engagement. Focusing on the Facebook pages reporting on scientific and conspiracy content, we characterize the evolution of the size of the two communities by fitting daily resolution data with three growth models -- i.e. the Gompertz model, the Logistic model, and the Log-logistic model. Then, we explore the interplay between emotional state and engagement of users in the group dynamics. Our findings show that communities' emotional behavior is affected by the users' involvement inside the echo chamber. Indeed, to an higher involvement corresponds a more negative approach. Moreover, we observe that, on average, more active users show a faster shift towards the negativity than less active ones.
Pew Research Center: The Future of Truth and Misinformation Online (2016)
Experts are evenly split on whether the coming decade will see a reduction in false and misleading narratives online. Those forecasting improvement place their hopes in technological fixes and in societal solutions. Others think the dark side of human nature is aided more than stifled by technology.
BuzzFeed News: Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate (2016)
A BuzzFeed News analysis found that three big right-wing Facebook pages published false or misleading information 38% of the time during the period analyzed, and three large left-wing pages did so in nearly 20% of posts.
Pew Research Center: Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion (2016)
According to a new survey by Pew Research Center, most Americans suspect that made-up news is having an impact. About two-in-three U.S. adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. This sense is shared widely across incomes, education levels, partisan affiliations and most other demographic characteristics. These results come from a survey of 1,002 U.S. adults conducted from Dec. 1 to 4, 2016.
Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content (2010)
"Little of the work on online credibility assessment has considered how the information-seeking process figures into the final evaluation of content people encounter. Using unique data about how a diverse group of young adults looks for and evaluates Web content, our paper makes contributions to existing literature by highlighting factors beyond site features in how users assess credibility. We find that the process by which users arrive at a site is an important component of how they judge the final destination. In particular, search context, branding and routines, and a reliance on those in one’s networks play important roles in online information-seeking and evaluation. We also discuss that users differ considerably in their skills when it comes to judging online content credibility.

Regret the Error

Regret the Error
Craig Silverman reports on trends and issues regarding media accuracy and the discipline of verification.Stories about errors, corrections, fact checking and verification