Lecture

Fake news is making news, and it’s a problem.

Not only did BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant inspired a North Carolina man to drive five hours with a shotgun and other weapons to investigate.

The proliferation of fake news sources on social media has raised questions about the duty of sites like Facebook and Twitter to screen content and distinguish fact from fiction.

Throughout 2016, false stories about the election were widely circulated by a variety of websites purporting to be legitimate. An analysis by Buzzfeed News revealed that many of these stories actually received more engagement — measured by the total number of comments, reactions and shares an article receives online — than those from real news sites like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Craig Silverman and his colleagues compared the top 20 fake news articles from the three months leading up to the election to the top 20 from actual news sites and found that engagement was much higher for the fake sources than the real ones..

In addition, the Buzzfeed team found more than 100 fake news sites focused on the U.S. election were being run out of a small town in the Balkan nation of Macedonia and that virtually all were publishing articles favorable for President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign.

Some people say sites like Facebook and Twitter need to do more to identify untrustworthy sources.

Required Viewing/Reading

How online hoaxes and fake news played a role in the election

Silverman, C. (n.d.). This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook. Retrieved from, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook

Stanford Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable To Fake News. (n.d.). Retrieved from, https://www.npr.org/2016/11/22/503052574/stanford-study-finds-most-students-vulnerable-to-fake-news

Recommended Readings

Fake News: How a Partying Macedonian Teen Earns Thousands Publishing Lies. (n.d.). Retrieved May 28, 2018, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-macedonian-teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451

Fake news? That’s a very old story. - The Washington Post. (n.d.). Retrieved from, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fake-news-thats-a-very-old-story/2016/11/25/c8b1f3d4-b330-11e6-8616-52b15787add0_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ac468a665e09

Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C. - The Washington Post. (n.d.). Retrieved May 28, 2018, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.695768bd17f1

Image from Flickr used under a Creative Commons license

Lesson adapted from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/lessons-plans/lesson-plan-how-to-teach-your-students-about-fake-news/