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Apple CEO Tim Cook says fake news is ‘killing people’s minds’ and tech needs to launch a counterattack - Recode

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Apple CEO Tim Cook says fake news is ‘killing people’s minds’ and tech needs to launch a counterattack - Recode

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Although the election is over, the problem of fake news isn't. Apple CEO Tim Cook said it's time to do something about it.

"All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news," Cook said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Friday.

"There has to be a massive campaign. We have to think through every demographic," Cook said.

While most of the discussion around fake news has centered on fabricated stories and headlines that surface on websites and spread like wildfire through Facebook, earlier this month it was Trump's own not-official spokesperson Kellyanne Conway who shared news of a "Bowling Green massacre" that never happened.

Conway said the made-up event was orchestrated by two Iraqi refugees, as she attempted to defend Trump's immigration and refugee travel ban on individuals from seven majority-Muslim countries.

Even though Conway's false narrative was quickly debunked on Twitter, a recent poll from Public Policy Polling showed that 23 percent of Americans believed the made-up story enough to think it justified Trump's travel ban. Twenty percent were unsure if the fake news was justification enough for the immigration executive order.

Tim Cook says that the proliferation of fake news is "killing people's minds."

Differentiating between fact-checked news and stories that are written to deceive has proven difficult for online readers.

Remember Pizzagate? It was a completely false story that went viral on Facebook late last year that linked Hillary Clinton to a child sex ring run out of pizzeria in Washington D.C. Another poll by PPP at that time showed nearly half of Trump voters thought Pizzagate was true, or at least could be true.

"We are going through this period of time right here where unfortunately some of the people that are winning are the people that spend their time trying to get the most clicks, not tell the most truth," Cook said in the interview.

Or in the case of Kellyanne Conway, straight-up spouting falsehoods on national news.

Much of the fake news controversy has focused on Facebook, where in recent months fabricated stories have become wildly popular. In January, the social media giant rolled out new filtering tools in Germany for users to flag stories that are potentially fake to be reviewed by fact-checkers.

But Cook called for even wider action. "Too many of us are just in the complain category right now and haven't figured out what to do," he said. "We need the modern version of a public-service announcement campaign. It can be done quickly if there is a will."

Apple's Eddy Cue, senior vice president of internet software and services, will be joining Recode's Peter Kafka at the Code Media Conference tomorrow, where he'll be asked more about Apple's position on fake news, especially as the company moves to start making its own TV and movies.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook says fake news is 'killing people's minds' and tech needs to launch a counterattack

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Although the election is over, the problem of fake news isn't. Apple CEO Tim Cook said it's time to do something about it. "All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news," Cook said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Friday.

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Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Two months ago, almost no one was talking about fake news. A Google Trends search for the term shows that it barely registered before October. Now you can hardly turn on the real news without hearing it.

Fake news is a real, specific problem. But in all the furor around who's making it, who's sharing it, its impact, and how to stop it, it's easy to lose sight of something more fundamental: what it is. The broader the definition, the less useful the concept becomes-and it's already verging on counterproductive.

In recent weeks, the term fake news has been applied by various media sources to everything from Breitbart Newsto Donald Trump's tweets to the media commentary of CNN's Brian Stelter. Among the challenges the media faces today, combatting fake news should rank as a relatively straightforward one compared with thornier issues such as bias, sensationalism, and the problem of objectivity. But lumping these together under the banner of fake news makes them all harder to solve. The way to combat actual fakery in journalism is to keep the definition narrow enough that reasonable people across the political spectrum can agree on what does and does not meet the criteria.

It helps to remember that the term fake news gained currency in recent months due to a specific and readily identifiable phenomenon. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, online entrepreneurs and pranksters found that they could reach huge audiences via social media by fabricating sensational stories that played to readers' partisan biases. These stories imitated the style and appearance of real news articles, and they were published on sites designed to look like established newspaper websites or political blogs. (Some pulled this off better than others.) The key facts were made up by the authors, but the successful ones sounded just plausible enough to pass the smell test of a significant subset of readers who were already primed to believe outlandish things about a given candidate.

The most popular of these fake stories and sites have by now become well-known. There was the one about the pope endorsing Donald Trump; the one about Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS; the one about an FBI agent found dead after being suspected of leaking Clinton's emails.

Again, these stories were not simple acts of bad journalism. They were either largely or wholly fictitious, and intentionally so. And for the most part, they were published on obscure, anonymously owned sites that appear to have been created relatively recently for the purpose of publishing fake news, plagiarized or hastily aggregated news, conspiracy theories, propaganda, or a mix of all four. Recent reporting by BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, NPR, and others has exposed the creators of several of the more prominent fake news sites, who have readily admitted that their work was made-up. A surprising number of them originated in Macedonia, where churning out deceptive news stories to a largely pro-Trump audience via Facebook has reportedly become a lucrative cottage industry.

Fake news is the proper term for this sort of content. The word fake means not genuine-a forgery or a counterfeit. It implies an intent to deceive. This phenomenon deserves attention, because the top fake news stories are often shared even more widely than the actual news.

Already, Facebook, Google, and third parties across the web are building tools to combat fake news. Some draw on manually compiled lists of disreputable sites. Others rely on user feedback to flag false or misleading stories. The best will probably combine both approaches, along with more subtle signals, like the patterns by which these stories disseminate.

But these efforts are already running into controversy at the most fundamental level: disputes over what counts as fake news. That's partly because, as the term has entered the national discourse, it has turned out to be a handy cudgel for people who want to criticize the media for a wide range of failings.

First, some in the liberal and mainstream media began to carelessly blur the lines between fabricated news, conspiracy theories, and right-wing opinion by lumping them all under the fake news banner. When Trump tweeted that he had prevented a Ford plant from moving to Mexico, critics were quick to label it "fake news." As it turned out, the tweet was misleading, but it was based in reality. Even if it were fabricated, a false claim by a politician isn't "fake news." It's just a false claim-or a lie, if the falsehood was intentional. A subsequent tweet by Trump, based on an unsubstantiated report from the conspiracy site Infowars, prompted Quartz to call him " editor-in-chief of the fake news movement." Fact-check: He isn't.

Mainstream news outlets reporting on #pizzagate as a fake news story are themselves being labeled as fake news outlets by the conspiracy theorists that propagated it.

Meanwhile, an academic's list of " false, misleading, clickbait-y, and/or satirical 'news' sources" went viral, and many in the media framed it as an authoritative list of " fake news sites." The list, compiled by Merrimack College communication professor Melissa Zimdars, presented actual fake news sites such as Abc.com.co alongside openly satirical sites such as the Onion and, most damagingly, conservative blogs such as Breitbart and even Red State, an influential source of political commentary. Zimdars herself readily acknowledged that the list was not limited to fake news. Still, conservatives were understandably inflamed by some mainstream outlets' embrace of the list, which seemed to raise the specter of crucial distribution platforms like Facebook and Google suppressing conservative opinion as part of their crackdown on fake news.

To be clear, there is no evidence that Facebook and Google used Zimdars' list in any way, and both appear to be taking care not to flag legitimate sites as fake just because they're controversial. But New York magazine used the list as the basis for a "handy browser extension" designed to "flag fake news sites" with an automatic pop-up warning. New York added a note clarifying that not all of the sites on the list were fake, and it said its tool had been edited to remove sites that had been unfairly flagged, but that nuance went overlooked amid the outrage. Zimdars has since taken the list down in response to a backlash that included not just legitimate criticism but nasty threats and abuse.

Spying an opportunity, right-wingers stopped ignoring the fake news discussion and began to co-opt the phrase as a synonym for liberal bias. A Twitter search for the term "fake news" on Tuesday suggested that it has by now crossed over from a liberal rallying cry to a conservative one. Here are three of the most popular tweets that included the phrase:

To state what should be obvious, these are not stories fabricated by hoaxsters or Macedonian teenagers looking to make a buck. They are opinions and analyses with which the tweeters happen to strongly disagree. But throwing the term fake news back at the mainstream media allows the right-wing fringe not only to insult their specific targets, such as CNN, but to devalue the term itself and along with it the idea that there is any clear distinction between truth and fiction. It's no surprise that those on the right who have embraced the meme most enthusiastically include conspiracy-mongers such as Infowars, which built its reputation by suggesting that the U.S. government helped orchestrate the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 attacks. We're now faced with a grim irony in which mainstream news outlets reporting on "Pizzagate" as a fake news story are themselves being labeled fake news outlets by the conspiracy theorists that propagated it.

This is not to say that the truth is always simple or that mainstream news outlets are infallible. Lazy journalism is an epidemic in the social media age, and to some degree or another, it probably always has been. Even the most respected outlets, like the New York Times, get things wrong. And there is a wide spectrum of scrupulousness among online media outlets, which helps to muddy the boundaries between mainstream and fringe outlets, news and opinion, speculation and conspiracy theory. There are plenty of sites that till the borderlands between propaganda and outright falsehood, complicating the task of differentiating fake news from real. It does not help that we have elected a president who not only lies-that's hardly novel for a politician-but feels comfortable doing so even when the lie is so readily refuted that anyone with a computer can debunk it in moments.

In such an environment, fake news in the strictly defined sense is a relatively minor problem compared with the broader crisis of media credibility. Still, it's a real one, and one that ought to be relatively easy to combat. Instead, even the question of what constitutes fake news has begun to devolve into a matter of partisan opinion.

At this point, no one can stop right-wing nuts from attaching fake news as an epithet to every CNN report that bothers them. But there may still be time for the reality-based community to find enough common ground to tackle the original problem. If we can't collectively find a way to counter misinformation so egregious that even its authors admit it's a hoax, the outlook for the media-and the truth-in the Trump era is bleak indeed.

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Two months ago, almost no one was talking about fake news. A Google Trends search for the term shows that it barely registered before October. Now you can hardly turn on the real news without hearing it. Fake news is a real, specific problem.

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Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed | Vanity Fair

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Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed | Vanity Fair

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Less than a month after Donald Trump was improbably elected the 45th president of the United States, a strange story began to make its way across social media. In the quaint days before Russia's dissemination of fake-news stories in the interest of facilitating Trump's victory became front-page news, a 28-year-old named Edgar Maddison Welch began reading about a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that housed young children as sex slaves in a devilish operation masterminded by the recently vanquished Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton. So Welch decided to drive the six or so hours up from his home in Salisbury, North Carolina, to Comet Ping Pong in northwest D.C., where he opened fire with an AR-15.

The Comet Ping Pong story, and the even more disturbing news of the Kremlin's role in our election, merely underscore fake news's rapid ascent from an amorphous notion to perhaps the most significant digital epidemic facing the media, government, and, at the risk of sounding mildly hysterical, democracy itself. One Pakistani military offender, confused by a fake-news story, raised the prospect of a nuclear war with Israel. (Recall that Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump's national security adviser, shared the Comet Ping Pong story on Twitter.) Meanwhile, our current president spent virtually his entire campaign inventing or proliferating fabricated stories such as his suggestion that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy (he wasn't) and his pronouncement that violent crime was at an all-time high in the U.S. (crimes rates, while rising slightly in the last year, are near a 20-year low). While all of these stories were obviously fabricated in various ways, they did share one technological commonality: they were almost entirely text-based. And that is about to change.

At corporations and universities across the country, incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake. Or, in the simplest of terms, advancements in audio and video technology are becoming so sophisticated that they will be able to replicate real news-real TV broadcasts, for instance, or radio interviews-in unprecedented, and truly indecipherable, ways. One research paper published last year by professors at Stanford University and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg demonstrated how technologists can record video of someone talking and then change their facial expressions in real time. The professors' technology could take a news clip of, say, Vladimir Putin, and alter his facial expressions in real time in hard-to-detect ways. In fact, in this video demonstrating the technology, the researchers show how they did manipulate Putin's facial expressions and responses, among those of other people, too.

This is eerie, to say the least. But it's only one part of the future fake-news menace. Other similar technologies have been in the works in universities and research labs for years, but they have never really pulled off what computers can do today. Take for example "The Digital Emily Project," a study in which researchers created digital actors that could be used in lieu of real people. For the past several years, the results have been crude and easily detectable as digital re-creations. But technologies that are now used by Hollywood and the video-game industry have largely rendered digital avatars almost indecipherable from real people. (Go and watch the latest Star Wars to see if you can tell which actors are real and which are computer-generated. I bet you can't tell the difference.) You could imagine some political group utilizing that technology to create a fake hidden video clip of President Trump telling Rex Tillerson that he plans to drop a nuclear bomb on China. The velocity with which news clips spread across social media would also mean that the administration would have frightfully little time to respond before a fake-news story turned into an international crisis.

Audio advancements may be just as harrowing. At its annual developer's conference, in November, Adobe showed off a new product that has been nicknamed "Photoshop for audio." The product allows users to feed about ten to 20 minutes of someone's voice into the application and then allows them to type words that are expressed in that exact voice. The resultant voice, which is comprised of the person's phonemes, or the distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another in each language, doesn't sound even remotely computer-generated or made up. It sounds real. This sort of technology could facilitate the ability to feed one of Trump's interviews or stump speeches into the application, and then type sentences or paragraphs in his spoken voice. You could very easily imagine someone creating fake audio of Trump explaining how he dislikes Mike Pence, or how he lied about his taxes, or that he did indeed enjoy that alleged "golden shower" in the Russian hotel suite. Then you could circulate that audio around the Internet as a comment that was overheard on a hot microphone. Worse, you could imagine a scenario in which someone uses Trump's voice to call another world leader and threaten some sort of violent action. And perhaps worst of all, as the quality of imitation gets better and better, it will become increasingly difficult to discern between what is real behavior and what isn't.

Perhaps the scariest part is that, one day soon, this sort of technology will transcend beyond the academies and institutions to the point where you or I will be able to create fake digital clips as easily as regular people created fake-news stories during this cycle. The technology out of Stanford that can manipulate a real-time news clip doesn't need an array of high-end computers like those used by Pixar; it simply needs a news clip from YouTube and a standard Webcam on your laptop.

In many ways, we're starting to see the beginning of this phenomenon. This week, an animated GIF floated around Twitter depicting Trump at his sparsely attended inauguration. In the short clip, Trump turns around and looks at his wife, Melania; the couple exchanges a few words; she smiles and laughs, and then, as he turns back, Melania's smiles morphs into a sad, maligned look. The problem is that, on social networks, no one knew if the clip was real, or if it was being played in reverse, in which case Melania would have become happy when her husband turned around and looked at her. (As far as I could tell, the clip was real.) Or take the controversy around the movie A Dog's Purpose, which has been boycotted by PETA and countless celebrities after TMZ published a clip of a German shepherd being forced into raging waters on the film's set. While the footage TMZ published was in fact real (and awful, on many levels), one of the film's producers came out to say that the clip from the movie's trailer that PETA was circulating to protest the film was misleading. The dog jumping into the treacherous waters, he said, was computer-generated. It's impossible to tell the difference.

If there's one thing we learned from this election cycle, it is that there are a number of reasons that people create fake-news stories. One of those is financial. Cameron Harris, a college bro, told The New York Times that he made up stories on a fake-news site that he created for $5. Harris, who concocted stories about voter fraud and Hillary Clinton, made as much as $1,000 an hour while millions of people clicked on his fabricated posts. "I spent the money on student loans, car payments, and rent," he bragged to the Times.

Some people create fake news simply to demonstrate how easy it is to mess with the mainstream media. Then there is the reality that other governments can weaponize fake news as an act of digital terror. After interfering with our election process (a point that even Trump now concedes), Putin's propaganda henchmen are now doing the same thing in Europe. Even given the relatively primitive technology currently at our disposal, it has been chillingly effective. It has become clear, after all, that most new consumers don't want to know if what they are reading is real or fake;, they just want to know that it helps support their worldview. As Pew Research has noted, in today's media-saturated society, "liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds."

What's even scarier, actually, is where these technologies and ossified worldviews will be by the 2018 midterm election, or the presidential election in 2020. At that point, one suspects, there will not only be thousands of fake-news articles floating around the Internet, but also countless fake videos and fake audio clips, too. If you combine those technologies with a president who is known to lie about even the most trifling matters, we won't know what is real and what is fake any longer. If ever there was a time for the people creating technologies to keep in mind the impact of their creations, it's now.
VIDEO: The Evolution of Donald Trump's Presidential Campaign

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Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed

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Less than a month after Donald Trump was improbably elected the 45th president of the United States, a strange story began to make its way across social media.

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UK MPs launch inquiry into the impact of 'fake news'

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UK MPs launch inquiry into the impact of 'fake news'

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The Committee notes that the public has moved away from traditional sources of news, like newspapers and TV bulletins, and are now getting their updates via social media, where it can be hard to verify the source of the story and the veracity of its content. Facebook, Twitter and Google may be asked to play a more active role in addressing the spread of fake news, but the inquiry will also take into account whether their marketing tools are incentivising website owners to post misleading stories in order to boost advertising revenue.

"The growing phenomenon of fake news is a threat to democracy and undermines confidence in the media in general." said Damian Collins MP, Chair of the Committee. "The Committee will be investigating these issues, as well as looking into the sources of fake news, what motivates people to spread it, and how it has been used around elections and other important political debates."

In the lead-up to the US Election, Facebook was thrust into the spotlight over its handling of fake news. In August 2016, the company changed its trending news section, replacing human editors with an algorithm. The idea was to remove bias, but in reality it made easier for false stories to trend on the social network. The Committee says it will factor political outcomes in its inquiry, acknowledging that voters "were subjected to possibly unprecedented amounts of fake news" and that it may have had "a significant impact on democratic processes."

The inquiry will run until March 3rd, after which it will share how the UK public differs to other countries in terms of accepting fake news and how other governments, like Germany, are tackling the epidemic.

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UK MPs launch inquiry into the impact of 'fake news'

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The Committee notes that the public has moved away from traditional sources of news, like newspapers and TV bulletins, and are now getting their updates via social media, where it can be hard to verify the source of the story and the veracity of its content.

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Solutions that can stop fake news spreading - BBC News

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Solutions that can stop fake news spreading - BBC News

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There may be actual solutions to the spread of fake news.

Fake news - from false celebrity gossip to the fabricated story of Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump - became a huge issue during the US election campaign. Those who peddled falsehoods were motivated sometimes by profit and sometimes by politics.

British parliamentarians are launching a committee to look at the problem. But globally, there are various methods being offered to fix it.

The team behind BBC World Hacks - our news solutions-focussed journalism unit - has been looking into some of the most promising potential solutions.

Humans check the most suspect stories

Facebook, which came under heavy criticism for allowing fake news to be circulated during the election period, have taken steps to offer combat the issue.

One of those steps is the enlisting of the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), a branch of the Florida-based journalism think tank Poynter. Facebook users in the US and Germany can now flag articles they think are deliberately false, these will then go to third-party fact checkers signed up with the IFCN.

Those fact checkers come from media organisations like the Washington Post and websites such as the urban legend debunking site Snopes.com.

The third-party fact checkers, says IFCN director Alexios Mantzarlis "look at the stories that users have flagged as fake and if they fact check them and tag them as false, these stories then get a disputed tag that stays with them across the social network."

Another warning appears if users try to share the story, although Facebook doesn't prevent such sharing or delete the fake news story. The "fake" tag will however negatively impact the story's score in Facebook's algorithm, meaning that fewer people will see it pop up in their news feeds.

Mantzarlis says there is as of yet no firm evidence that this actually stops fake news spreading on a large scale, and there are questions over how sustainable the programme might be. Facebook is not paying the IFCN members to provide fact-checking services. There's also nothing stopping the fake news from being posted and spread in the first place - and perhaps quite widely before being tagged.

"There is a lag, so until and unless a story is flagged as false that story does continue to spread on the social network," says Mantzarlis.

Humans flag whole sites as fakes

In 2009, Le Monde, one of the biggest French newspapers, set up a fact-checking unit called Les Decodeurs (The Decoders). Increasingly the unit is turning its attention to fake news, and they've devised a web extension called Decodex.

"You just put it on your browser and then when you come to a fake news site you get a pop up appearing saying 'warning this is a fake news site'," says Samuel Laurent, editor of Les Decodeurs. "If you click on the tool you will have access to a little paper describing the website and saying why we think it's not trustworthy."

The extension is linked to a database that Les Decodeurs has compiled which ranks sites as "fake", "real" or "satire".

But there are several hurdles which likely prevent a relatively simple piece of software from being the silver bullet for fake news. Users firstly have to be aware of the problem of false stories. They have to know about the extension and be concerned enough to download it. And they have to trust Le Monde journalists and the paper's centre-left perspective.

"We know that we won't convince everyone and we know that fake news readers already think we are the fake news," Laurent says. "Our goal is to just provide this tool for people who are really sceptical or who just don't know who to trust.

"People who have already fallen into the fake news vortex, it's too late for them."

Use algorithms to fight algorithms

Algorithms are part of what spreads fake news - because juicy yet false stories which become popular can be pushed out to new eyeballs by the software that runs social networks. But some programmers think computer code could also be part of the solution.

"From an algorithmic perspective it's possible for social media sites to recognise that website was only created two weeks ago, therefore it's probably likely that this is a less trustworthy site," says Claire Wardle of journalism non-profit First Draft News.

First Draft is working with Google and Facebook to explore whether they could incorporate code to stop the spread of fake news. Wardle is adamant that tweaking algorithms is not like censorship.

"I'm talking about a bit like a spam folder in your email, those emails still sit there, but you have to go to your spam folder to look for it," she says.

But human language and news stories are complicated in ways that computers have difficulty dealing with, and any automated method of fact checking risks reflecting the biases of the programmers who created it.

"There are some very smart people looking at automated solutions now, around automated fact checking, which can get up to about 80% accurate," Wardle says. "I would argue we are always going to need human eyes at the very end to say 'hang on, have we got entirely duped'... we want a combination of algorithms and human experience."

More on this story

Hear the full story on World Hacks, from the BBC World Service.

Don't miss BBC Trending's story The rise and rise of fake news
'Pizzagate': The fake story that shows how conspiracy theories spread Facebook, news and the meaning of truth 'Why I write fake news stories'
Teach people how to spot fake news themselves

The previous solutions are technical fixes, but Bill Dodd has taken a different tack. His proposal would incorporate digital literacy into school curriculums.

"We already have a curriculum right now that teaches critical thinking skills but it hasn't kept up with the digital age," says Dodd, a Democratic lawmakers who has introduced a bill in the California state senate.

Senator Dodd admits not all the detail has yet been worked out, and it it would be the job of the California Board of Education to update the curriculum, but he has some of what might be included, including "trying to discern what the reputation of different sources are.

"If you are dealing with the BBC or the New York Times, chances are you don't have to go any further, but if you are dealing with some unnamed source, you are going to have to go in a little deeper to determine whether or not that's fact or fiction," he says.

And of course, his solution would take years to implement, and would apply to just one state in one country.

"There's so much news coming at kids, and many adults have this as well, but you got to start somewhere," Dodd says.

More from BBC Trending

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Stop the creation of fake news in the first place

During the US election, many fake news stories were written not by politically motivated Donald Trump supporters, but by people looking to make some quick cash. And so one way to stop such output would be to eliminate the financial incentives that make fake news profitable.

"To make any decent money, and a lot of the fake news sites do make decent money, you need to start serving millions of ads," says Cliff Lampe, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, "which is why the viral content market has been so important over the last few years."

In November, Google and Facebook announced moves to restrict advertisements on fake news stories.

But fake news producers, like others making content designed to go viral, are quick to adapt to platform rule changes.

"I think this will work for the moment, but I believe that people are going to be able to come up with a workaround and be able to manipulate that attention market in the future," Lampe says.

In addition to removing the carrot, there's some big sticks being considered. In Germany, for instance, lawmakers are even proposing criminalising people who post fake news.
Reporting by Harriet Noble and Charlotte Prichard You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.

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Solutions that can stop fake news spreading

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There may be actual solutions to the spread of fake news. Fake news - from false celebrity gossip to the fabricated story of Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump - became a huge issue during the US election campaign. Those who peddled falsehoods were motivated sometimes by profit and sometimes by politics.

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In a Swirl of ‘Untruths’ and ‘Falsehoods,’ Calling a Lie a Lie - The New York Times

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In a Swirl of ‘Untruths’ and ‘Falsehoods,’ Calling a Lie a Lie - The New York Times

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News Analysis

Words matter.

And from the moment he became president, Donald J. Trump has unleashed so many of consequence that the public has barely had time to parse their full implication. Words about the dishonest media, the end of Obamacare, the construction of that border wall with Mexico - this is an abbreviated list, and he hasn't even completed his first week in office.

Amid the verbal deluge, President Trump this week repeated an assertion he made shortly after his election: that millions of ballots cast illegally by undocumented immigrants cost him the popular vote. If true, this would suggest the wholesale corruption of American democracy.

Not to worry: As far as anyone knows, the president's assertion is akin to saying that millions of unicorns also voted illegally.

But such a baseless statement by a president challenged the news media to find the precise words to describe it. This will be a recurring challenge, given President Trump's habit of speaking in sales-pitch hyperbole and his tendency to deride any less-than-flattering report as "fake news."

The words needed to be exactly right. "And the language has a rich vocabulary for describing statements that fall short of the truth," said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. "They're 'baseless,' they're 'bogus,' they're 'lies,' they're 'untruths.'"

Rarely are these words, each with its own nuance, applied directly to something said by a president, though others have also dissembled (like Bill Clinton on whether he had sex with an intern). "This is the very unique situation that we find ourselves in as journalists and as a country," said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. "We have an administration that seems to be asserting a right to its own facts and doesn't seem to be able to produce evidence to back those claims."

Still, carefully chosen words can capture that. "A whole vocabulary has come bubbling up that would not have been used five years ago," Mr. Nunberg said in an interview. "People are going to have to sit down and decide: Are we going to want to go over the moral consequences of telling an untruth? The mere fact of it being untrue? Or the fact that it's bogus, baseless or groundless?"

Some news organizations used words like "falsely" or "wrongly" - adverbs that tend to weaken the impact - in framing what the president said. Some used "with no evidence," or "won't provide any proof," or "unverified claims," or "repeats debunked claim."

The New York Times, though, ultimately chose more muscular terminology, opting to use the word "lie" in the headline. After initially using the word "falsely," it switched to "lie" online and then settled on "Meeting With Top Lawmakers, Trump Repeats an Election Lie" for Tuesday's print edition.

People noticed, and debated its use. That is because, from the childhood schoolyard to the grave, this is a word neither used nor taken lightly. It stands apart from most other terms in the linguistic ballpark of untruths, including "falsehood," which Chuck Todd, the host of "Meet the Press," recently used to counter the Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway's Orwellian phrase, "alternative facts."

To say that someone has "lied," an active verb, or has told a "lie," a more passive, distancing noun, is to say that the person intended to deceive. In addition, Mr. Nunberg said, "a certain moral opprobrium attaches to it, a reprehensibility of motive."

The question of intent has informed National Public Radio's approach to covering Mr. Trump's many disputable claims: that he saw thousands of people in Jersey City cheering as the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, for example, or that the news media had made up a feud between him and the country's intelligence agencies, despite his own tweets likening those agencies to Nazi Germany.

On NPR's "Morning Edition" on Wednesday, Mary Louise Kelly explained that she had looked up the definition of "lie" in the Oxford English Dictionary. "A false statement made with intent to deceive," Ms. Kelly said. "Intent being the key word there. Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump's head, I can't tell you what his intent was. I can tell you what he said and how that squares, or doesn't, with facts."

Michael Oreskes, NPR's senior president for news, supported the decision. In an article on the NPR website, Mr. Oreskes said that "the minute you start branding things with a word like 'lie,' you push people away from you." The inherent risk, he suggested, was that news organizations would be seen as taking sides.

Editors at The Times also consulted dictionaries. And they had some prior experience with the matter, having approved the use of the L word once before in reference to Mr. Trump.

In September, when he grandly announced the findings of a yearslong so-called investigation into what nearly everyone else never doubted - "President Obama was born in the United States, period" - The Times published a Page 1 article with the headline "Trump Gives Up a Lie but Refuses to Repent."

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said that he learned of Mr. Trump's latest comments in a text message from an editor on Monday night. After consulting with other top editors, he decided that the use of "lie" was warranted.

For Mr. Baquet, the question of intent was resolved, given that Mr. Trump had made the same assertion two months earlier through his preferred mode of communication, the tweet: "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

( Nota bene: The tweet actually contains what might be considered two untruths - or falsehoods, or erroneous assertions, or bogus claims - since Mr. Trump's victory was no landslide, but among the closer elections in American history.)

Mr. Baquet said he fully understood the gravity of using the word "lie," whether in reference to an average citizen or to the president of the United States. He emphasized that it should be used sparingly, partly because the term carries such negative connotations, and partly so that it does not lose potency.

"On the other hand, we should be letting people know in no uncertain terms that it's untrue," Mr. Baquet said, referring to the president's assertion of a voter-fraud epidemic. "He repeated it without a single grain of evidence, and it's a very powerful statement about the electoral system."

Mr. Baquet said that emails from readers seemed split on the appropriateness of the word's use. Meanwhile, Mr. Benton, of the Nieman Journalism Lab, applauded its use as a noun in the Times headline ("Trump Repeats an Election Lie"); in this construction, he said, "the lie can exist as a reality distinct from the speaker's intention."

Over all, the tension between the Trump administration and much of the mainstream media is - what's the word?

Troubling, according to Sara Brady, a crisis-communications specialist based in Florida. She says that a complete breakdown of the already fractious relationship affects everyone.

"The media run the risk of being disrespectful to the president of the United States," she said. "But the problem is: If he doesn't get called out in some way, we as Americans are never going to know what's true and what's not."

In other words: Words matter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: In Swirl of 'Untruths' and 'Falsehoods,' Calling a Lie a Lie. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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In a Swirl of 'Untruths' and 'Falsehoods,' Calling a Lie a Lie

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News Analysis Words matter. And from the moment he became president, Donald J. Trump has unleashed so many of consequence that the public has barely had time to parse their full implication. Words about the dishonest media, the end of Obamacare, the construction of that border wall with Mexico - this is an abbreviated list, and he hasn't even completed his first week in office.

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For Trump, Everything Is a Rating - The New York Times

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For Trump, Everything Is a Rating - The New York Times

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Critic's Notebook

For Donald J. Trump the TV star, ratings were made to be embellished. This turns out to be true as well of Donald J. Trump the president.

Mr. Trump spent his first weekend in office at war with math. He said on Saturday that his inauguration crowd - which photographs showed was dwarfed by Barack Obama's estimated 1.8 million in 2009 - "looked like a million, a million and a half." His staff members backed up that claim with what his adviser Kellyanne Conway memorably termed "alternative facts."

For the political news media, the brazenness was stunning. But those of us who cover television have seen this kind of thing before: the inventions of a celebrity, surrounded by yes men and women, who creates his own reality.

We recognize it because, not so long ago, that celebrity was Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Trump has a reputation among TV reporters for using his own bespoke numbers. In 2015, he came to a Television Critics Association panel for his final season hosting "The Celebrity Apprentice" and declared it "the Number 1 show on television."

It was not. Publicly available Nielsen ratings flatly proved that. Pressed by reporters, he insisted that it was at least the top-rated show on Monday nights. It was not that either. (It finished the season 67th.)

It was a bizarre performance even by the usual ratings-spin standards of the critics association sessions. "The Apprentice" was, in its first season, a genuine hit. It declined afterward, but hung on as a modest performer. That's no mean feat. But that wasn't enough for Mr. Trump. So it wasn't true for Mr. Trump.

Last year, Mr. Trump's former "Apprentice" publicist, Jim Dowd, was interviewed for the PBS "Frontline" election documentary "The Choice." Mr. Trump, he recalled, would demand that he call up TV-ratings reporters and tell them, "Number 1 show on television, won its time slot," even if "we were Number 72." (Mr. Dowd died in September.)

Mr. Trump has always used an aspirational calculator. As a real estate developer, he built Trump Tower with 58 stories and declared it 68 stories tall.

He carried his scorekeeping obsession into his celebrity career. For his 2011 Comedy Central roast, The Huffington Post reported, writers were told not to joke about Mr. Trump being less wealthy than he says he is. He edited a gag that said he lived in a "25,000-square-foot penthouse atop my solid-gold space station," raising the square footage to 50,000.

Running for president meant a new set of ways to keep score, and fudge it: The polls - rigged, unless they favored him. His rally attendance - huge, yet not too huge for him to embellish.

And, again, the TV ratings, and not just for his own events. On Twitter, two weeks before his inauguration, he taunted Arnold Schwarzenegger, his replacement on "The Celebrity Apprentice," for getting "'swamped' (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT."

If you knew all this, then you knew, when you saw the expanses of white space on the National Mall on Friday, that Defcon 1 klaxons were going to be blaring in the command center of Mr. Trump's ego.

He would be made small. His crowds would be smaller than Mr. Obama's - smaller than the Women's March! It would be in pictures, on TV, where things are the most real of all.

It would make him look, in his understanding of the world, like a loser. Donald J. Trump is not a loser. Ergo, it was not true.

The smaller turnout for Mr. Trump's inauguration is actually a decent symbol of his election victory, in which he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes but won the presidency on the strength of an intense base.

To put it again in TV terms, Mr. Trump won by niche-casting rather than broadcasting. He identified a key demographic in the right markets and successfully targeted it. His margin of victory in the decisive states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was just over 77,000 votes combined, around the average audience of the Spanish-language NBC Universo channel.

This is a perfectly valid strategy, in politics and in TV. And in practice, Mr. Trump has embraced the politics of niche-casting, not just in the campaign but in his inaugural speech, which made no effort to reach beyond his base.

But as much as Mr. Trump has adapted to modern media, he is still a 70-year-old man who came of age in the era of three TV networks, when there were no niche hits.

Just as he could not be satisfied with the niche success of "The Apprentice," he seemingly cannot bear being a niche president. It eats at him. He wants to win total viewers, not just the key demo.

He doesn't want to change to achieve that. But he wants the credit. Thus his repeated lie that he would have won the popular vote if not for "millions" who voted illegally. Thus the million-plus inaugural fans he conjured up like extra floors to sell a condo building.

Celebrities have support staff dedicated to maintaining their bubbles. (Even Mr. Trump's bringing staff members to cheer him at events - like his first postelection news conference - is familiar from the critics association panels. Journalists are professionally forbidden from applauding the celebrities they cover, so network staffers whoop it up to massage their stars' egos.)

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Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Trump has his press secretary, Sean Spicer, and Ms. Conway, each playing their version of the bulldog Hollywood publicist. Their job is to keep the talent happy. In a news briefing on Monday, Mr. Spicer essentially argued that the inaugural-crowd comparisons were accurate, but it was "demoralizing" for the news media to make them.

With these enablers around him, don't expect Mr. Trump to change much. On Sunday, he tweet-bragged that "31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!" Mr. Trump's TV ratings were also about 7 million viewers lower than Mr. Obama's first inaugural in 2009.

Mr. Trump's tendency to treat truth as negotiable was idiosyncratic in a TV star. In a president, it's disturbing. Alternative facts are what they use in alternatives to democracy.

If anything, presidents receive more grades and metrics than candidates do, from approval polls - rigged again, apparently - to unemployment figures, which Mr. Trump cast doubt on when they were favorable to Mr. Obama. Every sign says that Mr. Trump will respond to these figures exactly as he has in the past: as the TV star, up early in the morning, stewing, waiting for the overnight ratings to come in.

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Critic's Notebook For Donald J. Trump the TV star, ratings were made to be embellished. This turns out to be true as well of Donald J. Trump the president. Mr. Trump spent his first weekend in office at war with math.

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A Fifth of U.S. Newspapers Kept the Women’s Marches Off the Front Page

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A Fifth of U.S. Newspapers Kept the Women’s Marches Off the Front Page

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According to an admittedly conservative estimate from FiveThirtyEight, more than 3.2 million people attended women's marches in hundreds of towns and cities around the world on Saturday. It may well have been the largest demonstration in U.S. history.

And yet a full half the hundreds of newspapers archived by the Newseum didn't make the marches the lead story in Sunday's issue. A tally of around 450 papers' front pages found that, while publications in all major U.S. cities and many papers in other countries led with coverage of the marches, 27 percent mentioned the protests in a smaller spot on the front page. More than a fifth-22 percent-didn't mention the march at all.

The Women's March on Washington was the main event on Saturday, but there were marches in communities all over the country. Many local papers likely steer clear of national stories, which could explain why some of them ran pieces on relatively small local matters on the front page if there wasn't a nearby march to cover or a cabal of local folks heading to D.C. for the big one. That may be why the Enterprise Ledger of Alabama ran an A1 story on an awards banquet for the local football team, and why the Delaware State News printed " A Vision for Dover Mall" on the front page, with no mention of the 1,000-person march that happened elsewhere in the state.

But many U.S. local papers dedicated their entire Sunday front pages to Trump, ignoring the massive marches against him-and against the systemic forces that got him to the presidency-completely. On the day after the marches, the front page of Alabama's Sunday Dothan Eagle featured a story on Trump's CIA press conference, a piece on Trump's executive order affecting the Affordable Care Act, and a Q and A with local political party leaders about "the future of jobs, military, and guns." Florida's Villages Daily Sun populated the near entirety of its front page with pretty capsule biographies of Trump's proposed cabinet. The News-Star of Monroe, Louisiana, ran a big color photo of women pledging allegiance at a local Donald Trump party on Friday night, a day and a half before the paper came out. " Trump Ready!" read the headline. Nearly 200 people marched in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Saturday, in solidarity with millions of others around the world; but you wouldn't know it from the Sunday issue of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, whose front page featured an NFL preview and giant illustration about a teen's mental health.

In other words, it's possible that a not-insignificant swath of America has no idea that one of the largest single organized protests the world has ever seen took place on Saturday. There has been much talk since the election about how social media networks and ideologically skewed online media outlets have erected so-called "bubbles" around segments of the country, but for those people who still get their news from the local paper, the bubbles may be particularly impermeable.

As Quartz's Christopher Groskopf points out, the people who are most likely to make the local papers their primary news source are disproportionately old, white, and rural-dwelling-demographics that usually lean conservative and went for Trump in November's presidential election. These people aren't necessarily getting their "news" from Breitbart and Fox. They're absorbing a less extreme but similarly limited worldview from their local papers. Taking a peek at these communities' news sources can make for a fascinating thought experiment on alternate universes-or " alternative facts." The progressive bubble hears about hateful Trump rallies and underestimates their power. In some right-wing bubbles, the resistance doesn't even exist.

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A Fifth of U.S. Newspapers Kept the Women's Marches Off the Front Page

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According to an admittedly conservative estimate from FiveThirtyEight, more than 3.2 million people attended women's marches in hundreds of towns and cities around the world on Saturday. It may well have been the largest demonstration in U.S. history. And yet a full half the hundreds of newspapers archived by the Newseum didn't make the marches the lead story in Sunday's issue.

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Fake News: Why We Fall For It | Psychology Today

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Fake News: Why We Fall For It | Psychology Today

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I think of myself as a relatively intelligent person, and yet, like many, I fell for this meme when it turned up in social media. The iconic image of the conspiracy theorist used to be a loner holed up in a cabin in the woods or in his mother's basement. In isolation, he could construct his theories drawing connections between unrelated events without the benefit of a challenging questioner.

Ironically, we create similar insular worlds through our use of social media. We seek out like-minded people to share ideas that confirm biases we may not even be aware we have.

Two common phenomena contribute to our inability to catch on to our biases, making us prey to fake news: implicit bias and confirmation bias.
Implicit Bias
Implicit bias refers to the idea that as humans we have a tendency to group people into categories. We are inclined to trust people we consider a member of our own group more than those of a different group. The word implicit indicates that it is a bias that influences us without our knowing it.

As a liberal, I identify with other liberals. I received this bit of fake news from a member of my own group, which led me to trust it. Also, as a liberal, I have an implicit bias regarding Republicans. It wasn't a leap to imagine that Donald Trump was using his purported belief in Republican's gullibility to gain power. Who has egg on his face now?

As we all have groups that we belong to, we all have implicit biases. This is one of the reasons why we need others to help call us out, especially members of groups to which we don't belong. They are more likely to perceive our biases.
Confirmation Bias
I was also susceptible to this piece of fake news because it confirmed what I already thought, my confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias refers to our tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already know or believe to be true. We are likely to believe "facts" that conform to our beliefs. More startling, we may actually turn a blind eye to facts that contradict our beliefs. We usually think of seeing as believing, but in this case, we don't see what we don't already believe.

I always believed that Donald Trump was in the Presidential race for his own gain. Also, he didn't seem to be ideologically wedded to either party. He had been a campaign contributor to both over the years. So, when I saw this meme I didn't even question that it could not be real. I overlooked the fact that the photograph depicts him 10 years younger than the date stated and that publishing such a statement would be obviously counterproductive for a Presidential bid. It simply confirmed what I already thought, and I bought it.
A Lethal Combination
When implicit biases and confirmation biases work together, their potential to lead us astray increases exponentially. As our implicit bias leads us to trust and view more positively those of our own group, we become more insulated, only hearing from people of our own group. As those of our own group share our beliefs, they share "facts" that confirm our beliefs. It is a feedback loop, and we end up living in a bubble.
Enter Social Media
Social media works on these biases like steroids, making us susceptible to being seduced into alternative realities constructed by conspiracy theorists. Online we tend to associate with the people who have the same political leanings as we do. This is our implicit bias at work. When our "friends" send us fake news articles that conform to what we already believe, reflecting our confirmation bias, we are likely to buy the "information" wholesale. Moreover, audience optimization in sites like Facebook, ensures that we are fed the news we tend to read, this news further confirms our biases.

Pizzagate is another good example. Negative beliefs about the Democrats led some Republicans to believe a fake news story about a child sex ring being run out of a pizza restaurant with ties to the Democratic Party. One person was so persuaded and outraged, he showed up with a rifle to investigate.

We no longer need to be holed up in a log cabin or socially isolated. We can live in the biggest city in the country, and as long as we keep our faces buried in our smart phones, we will feel connected to the group we belong to and read the information we want to believe. And we will be sitting ducks for anyone who wants to feed us fake news!

We owe it to ourselves to be receptive to people from different groups and with different ideas. They can help us question our assumptions. Sometimes we need a reality check, most often when we don't even know it.

When sharing "news" on social media, a good rule of thumb is to check it out before you share it. Here are some guidelines from the Huffington Post.

David Braucher, L.C.S.W, Ph.D., is a graduate of The William Alanson White Institute. He is on the Editorial Board of the journal, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Associate Editor of the blog, Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Action. He has lectured at the NYU School of Social Work and written on relationships. He is in private practice in The West Village/Chelsea in Manhattan. Visit his webpage: www.drbraucher.com.

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I think of myself as a relatively intelligent person, and yet, like many, I fell for this meme when it turned up in social media. The iconic image of the conspiracy theorist used to be a loner holed up in a cabin in the woods or in his mother's basement.

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White House Backs ‘Alternative Facts’ - WSJ

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White House Backs ‘Alternative Facts’ - WSJ

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Defending a series of false statements by the official White House spokesman, a senior Trump administration adviser on Sunday suggested the official had been invoking "alternative facts" rather than untruths.

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Jeff Zucker renews at CNN through the 2020 election

This story, plus Comcast bids $65 billion for 21st Century Fox, Trump tags US media as nation's 'biggest enemy' after North Korea summit, a new fact sheet on key audience and economic indicators for the newspaper industry, and more, all in today's media headlines.

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Journalism & Media - Pew Research Center

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This story, plus Comcast bids $65 billion for 21st Century Fox, Trump tags US media as nation's 'biggest enemy' after North Korea summit, a new fact sheet on key audience and economic indicators for the newspaper industry, and more, all in today's media headlines.

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Cambridge scientists consider fake news 'vaccine' - BBC News

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Cambridge scientists consider fake news 'vaccine' - BBC News

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The appearance of fake news on websites and social media has inspired scientists to develop a "vaccine" to immunise people against the problem.

A University of Cambridge study devised psychological tools to target fact distortion.

Researchers suggest "pre-emptively exposing" readers to a small "dose" of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims.

Stories on the US election and Syria are among those to have caused concern.

"Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus," said the University of Cambridge study's lead author Dr Sander van der Linden.

"The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible."

The study, published in the journal Global Challenges, was conducted as a disguised experiment.

More than 2,000 US residents were presented with two claims about global warming.

The researchers say when presented consecutively, the influence well-established facts had on people were cancelled out by bogus claims made by campaigners.

But when information was combined with misinformation, in the form of a warning, the fake news had less resonance.

Fabricated stories alleging the Pope was backing Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton sold weapons to the so-called Islamic State group were read and shared by millions of Facebook users during the US election campaign.

The world's largest social network later announced new features to help combat fabricated news stories, and there is pressure on Google and Twitter to do more to tackle the issue.

Meanwhile, German officials have reportedly proposed creating a special government unit to combat fake news in the run-up to this year's general election, while a senior Labour MP only last week warned that British politics risks being "infected by the contagion".

What is fake news?

The deliberate making up of news stories to fool or entertain is nothing new. But the arrival of social media has meant real and fictional stories are now presented in such a similar way that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the two apart.

There are hundreds of fake news websites out there, from those which deliberately imitate real life newspapers, to government propaganda sites, and even those which tread the line between satire and plain misinformation, sometimes employed to suit political ends.
The rise and rise of fake news

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The appearance of fake news on websites and social media has inspired scientists to develop a "vaccine" to immunise people against the problem. A University of Cambridge study devised psychological tools to target fact distortion.

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Fake Think Tanks Fuel Fake News—And the President's Tweets | WIRED

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Fake Think Tanks Fuel Fake News—And the President's Tweets | WIRED

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Fake news isn't just Macedonian teenagers or internet trolls. A longstanding network of bogus "think tanks" raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies' pull quotes and flashy stats become the "evidence" driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump's tweets.

These organizations have always existed: They're old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reach. They've been ginning up so-called research for everyone from shady corporations to anti-LGBTQ groups to white supremacists for decades-they're practiced, and their faux-academic veneer is thick and glossy. Which makes them harder to brush off than your garden-variety liar. "Fake think tanks use a mix of selected truths, half-truths, and downright fabricated stuff in order to manipulate people," says Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City College of New York and author of Nonsense on Stilts: How To Tell Science from Bunk. "We don't live in the age of post-truth. We live in the age of internet-enabled bullshit."

So phony think tanks are hard to spot, let alone discredit and combat. Their mix of pseudoscientific camouflage, long-held political connections, and social media gets them influence-and a whole lot of clicks.

A Who's Who of Propagandists

Propagandists undercut scholarship in service of an agenda. Anywhere science has become politicized is fertile ground for their trade. So you get anti-vaxxers on the left and climate-change deniers on the right. And because politicized science is often tied to business interests (looking at you, Exxon Mobil), explicitly corporate-colluding organizations exist, too. The Employment Policies Institute is just an anti-minimum wage increase PR firm run by actual PR firm Berman and Co, which is run by notorious former corporate lobbyist Richard " Dr. Evil" Berman.

'We don't live in the age of post-truth. We live in the age of internet-enabled bullshit.'

Massimo Pigliucci, CCNY

And because business interests and power-brokering cross borders, fake news think tanks don't end with domestic groups: "You have this additional strain of foreign influences spreading disinformation," says Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. "Like bots from abroad retweeting factoids intermixed with fake news." You've probably read some of Russia's handiwork.

They also tend toward hate: There's the white supremacist National Policy Institute and Jared Taylor's New Century Foundation; the anti-LGBTQ work of the Family Research Council and American College of Pediatricians; and a whole slew of groups fixated on immigration. Three of the biggest-Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA-are intertwined, all connected in their origins to white nationalist John Tanton.

The Southern Poverty Law Center designates most of these organizations as bona fide hate groups. ¹ And yet most-FRC, CIS and FAIR in particular-enjoy relationships with some powerful politicians. Trump himself has met with leaders of the anti-immigration groups, hired people from FAIR and the Family Research Council, and cited the anti-immigration groups' erroneous figures.

How They Get Away With It

Which doesn't necessarily mean Trump is willfully amplifying disinformation. "For the lay person who reads about these topics for 10 minutes a week, I don't think there is an easy way to see who's full of it," says Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

That's because phony think tanks are professional mimics, from the innocuous-sounding names-the Employment Policies Institute practically steals its name from the Economic Policy Institute-to their online presences. "It used to be you could trust a dot-edu or a dot-org," says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "Now some of the main hate sites are dot-orgs."

Then there's their "research methods," which have a long history: "It's the tobacco playbook," says Graves. "When the tobacco industry was facing the health community's concerns about the manifest consequences of smoking, they set to work debunking the science, and endowing people with expertise they don't actually have."

Once you have some talking heads (or online personalities, like NPI's Richard Spencer), you've got to give them something to say. Most of these organizations aren't doing their own studies, but repurposing others' work. For some, it's cherry-picking the most convenient data points. "The anti-vaxxer movement bases its claims largely on a single, discredited and retracted paper," Pigliucci says, "And simply ignores dozens upon dozens of scientific papers that don't fit their preferred narrative."

Others comb through many papers to construct a new narrative. The Family Research Council does quite a bit of that, as does the homophobic American College of Pediatricians (which doesn't call itself a think tank). "We internally assemble and analyze peer-reviewed literature," says Lisa Hawkins, the ACPeds' executive administrator. "This is less susceptible to bias since we do not create the research design or conduct the actual research."

Total baloney: "If everyone is on the same page, all the peer review internally won't matter," says Nowrasteh. In other words, since everyone in the group all starts from the same viewpoint-gay people are bad and dangerous-that's what they see as they "assemble" (read: cobble together and mis-contextualize) peer-reviewed literature. Which is how FRC and ACPeds came to assert homosexuality is connected to pedophilia, even though none of their source material agreed.

'Their disinformation has been weaponized through search algorithms.'

The masters of mis-contextualized stats? Those anti-immigration groups. "I've never had to republish my numbers because they were wrong," says Steven Camarota, director of research at CIS, the think-tanky arm of the Tanton trifecta. "But you could interpret them in different ways, and the problems may or may not be due to immigration." Seems legit. And that's how they've seeded almost every immigration myth we debunked here.

But here's the thing. Legally speaking, these think tanks are as legitimate as Heritage or Brookings: think tanks don't have a regulatory agency. Many-NPI, EPI, ACPeds, CIS, the New Century Foundation, FRC-are even tax exempt, registered as 501(c)3 non-profits like most legitimate think tanks. "So they've been able to convince someone at the IRS that what they do is educational," says Donald Abelson, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario who studies think tanks. "And the only time the IRS gets involved is if they violate 501(c)3 regulations by showing overt partisanship."

Even mainstream think tanks only just following this rule, finding loopholes in the tax code for partisan breakaway organizations like the Center for American Progress Action Fund or Heritage Action for America. "The term 'think tank' has become so diluted over the years," says Abelson. "It has created additional space on the American political landscape for these types of organizations to emerge and gain notoriety."

How They Gain Power

Most of these organizations are just hate groups with a dozen employees sitting in a tax loophole. But that doesn't mean their reach is limited-it's quite the opposite. "Their disinformation has been weaponized through search algorithms," says Beirich. "Think-tanky white supremacist organizations have generated enough material that a search topic like 'black on white crime' is dominated by their propaganda. That's what happened to Dylann Roof, and how Trump ended up tweeting those false statistics."

Their content plays well on social media. "Misinformation and fake news triggers hot cognition- it bypasses your focus on accuracy and goes directly to your feelings," says Joseph Kahne, a professor of education at UC Riverside who studies engagement with media and politics online. "If the misinformation confirms their prior policy position, they are far more likely to say its accurate."

Which these organizations know, and exploit. "There is one basic reason why CIS is influential," Camarota says. "It's that there's nobody else criticizing immigration in a thoughtful way. It's like we're the best hockey player in Ecuador." When you carve out a niche supplying confirmatory information you know people are looking for, it doesn't matter if you're right or not. And that extends beyond arguments happening on your uncle's Facebook feed, because appealing stats and buzzwords are politically expedient, too. "I get contacted by Congressional staffers all the time," Camarota says. "We have a good relationship with Senator Jeff Sessions, so I'm hoping that we will play a very substantial role in informing and influencing policy."

According to Abelson, think tanks aligning themselves with an ascendant political figure is their boat to the mainstream. That's what Heritage did with Ronald Reagan, and what these groups are doing with Donald Trump-so far, successfully. "Look, people connected to these groups are going to be in the White House. Kris Kobach is deciding on immigration policy and he's spent the last ten years deep in the heart of FAIR," Beirich says. "That's the ultimate reach." And with no regulatory agency, and a consistent campaign to delegitimize mainstream media, few mechanisms exist to keep these groups in check.
¹Correction (March 31, 2017, 1:45PM ET): A previous version of this story incorrectly described NumbersUSA as an SPLC-designated hate group. The organization does not appear on SPLC's list. The story has also been updated to clarify that John Tanton is not officially NumbersUSA's founder. NumbersUSA describes itself as an "immigration reduction" organization.

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Fake Think Tanks Fuel Fake News-And the President's Tweets

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Fake news isn't just Macedonian teenagers or internet trolls. A longstanding network of bogus "think tanks" raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies' pull quotes and flashy stats become the "evidence" driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump's tweets. These organizations have always existed: They're old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reach.

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We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned : All Tech Considered : NPR

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We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned : All Tech Considered : NPR

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A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story - the fake one.

We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously. So we brought in some professional help.

By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. In the interest of real news he helped us track down the owner of Denverguardian.com.

Jansen started by looking at the site's history. "Commonly that's called scraping or crawling websites," he says.

Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. He says that nothing you do on the Web disappears - it just gets buried - like a fossil. But if you do some digging you'll find those fossils and learn a lot of history.

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.

The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.

"That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything," Jansen says. "I was able to track that through to a bunch of other sites which are where that handle is also present."

The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company. Jansen found an email address on one of those sites and was able to link that address to a name: Jestin Coler.

Online, Coler was listed as the founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia. Coler's LinkedIn profile said he once sold magazine subscriptions, worked as a database administrator and as a freelance writer for among others, International Yachtsman magazine. And, using his name, we found a home address.

On a warm, sunny afternoon I set out with a producer for a suburb of Los Angeles. Coler lived in a middle-class neighborhood of pastel-colored one-story beach bungalows. His home had an unwatered lawn - probably the result of California's ongoing drought. There was a black minivan in the driveway and a large prominent American flag.

We rang the front doorbell and a man answered, his face obscured by a heavy mesh steel screen. I asked for Jestin Coler. The man indicated that's who he was. But when I asked about Disinfomedia, he said, "I don't know what to tell you guys. Have a good day."

We left Coler our contact information thinking he wasn't likely to talk. But a couple of hours later he had a change of heart. He sent us an email and we set up an interview.

Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

"The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.

During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says. "It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election."

Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals - but they just never take the bait.

Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites - he won't say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the "Denver Guardian" that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.

"The people wanted to hear this," he says. "So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then ... our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire."

And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.

However, Coler insists this is not about money. It's about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was "correct."

Coler says he has tried to shine a light on the problem of fake news. He has spoken to the media about it. But those organizations didn't know who he actually was. He gave them a fake name: Allen Montgomery.

Coler, a registered Democrat, says he has no regrets about his fake news empire. He doesn't think fake news swayed the election.

"There are many factors as to why Trump won that don't involve fake news," he says. "As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage."

Coler doesn't think fake news is going away. One of his sites - NationalReport.net - was flagged as fake news under a new Google policy, and Google stopped running ads on it. But Coler had other options.

"There are literally hundreds of ad networks," he says. "Early last week, my inbox was just filled every day with people because they knew that Google was cracking down - hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites."

Coler says he has been talking it over with his wife and may be getting out of the fake-news racket. But, he says, dozens, maybe hundreds of entrepreneurs will be ready to take his place. And he thinks it will only get harder to tell their websites from real news sites. They know now that fake news sells and they will only be in it for the money.

Below are highlights of NPR's interview with Coler.

Interview Highlights
Tell me a little about why you started Disinfomedia?
Late 2012, early 2013 I was spending a lot of time researching what is now being referred to as the alt-right. I identified a problem with the news that they were spreading and created Disinfomedia as a response to that. The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.
What got you engaged in this?
My educational background is in political science. I've always enjoyed the ideas of propaganda and misinformation. Then I coupled that with an interest in what makes things go viral. So that led me to finding those groups and ultimately to finding contributors. But it was just something I had an interest in that I wanted to pursue.
When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?
Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin's famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn't something that started with Trump. This is something that's been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it's always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.

We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
How many domains do you own and run?
Well, I would say there's somewhere around 25 domains that I am currently managing. National Report has been my bread and butter, where I've spent most of my time. I have people who work with me and for me in developing and maintaining the other sites and social media kind of stuff. [Coler later said not all his sites are fake news.] So I, for the most part, focus on National Report, and a lot of the other stuff is run by other folks on the team.
So, you're the publisher of an empire.
Well I wouldn't go so far as to call it an empire but, yes, it's several sites [chuckle].
How many people do you have writing for you?
It comes and goes, and as for actual employed writers, again these guys sort of make their own money through ad code. So I don't say, 'Hey, you have to write 10 stories this week' and this and that. Really, we have a more free-form idea where people, when their creativity strikes them then they can write something. And if they're in a slump then they just go dormant for a while. With that said, at any given time there's probably 20, 25 contributors all over the country. ...
Talk about the "Denver Guardian."
Well, it's kind of a side project. We have some people working on next steps in the fake-news industry, and that came from that whole discussion. We had purchased several domain names that sounded legitimate. ... More local news sort of stories. The idea was to make the sites look as legit as possible so the home page is going to be local news and local forecast, local sports, some obituaries and things of that nature, and then the actual fake news stories were going to be buried off the home page.

We've tried lots of things in the past. The dot-com-dot-co domains were something I toyed in for a while. Those I quickly got away from because you don't get away long with borrowing someone's copyright or trademark. That was something that worked very well from a fake-news perspective. People were fooled into the domain name, but that wasn't so much what we were after. So again, the next step was to go after more city-type sites. And the "Denver Guardian" was one of those sites.
You're talking about the future of this (fake-news business) which looks more insidious because it's more real?
That's the way that it's going to be. Not just from where I am. I mean, this is probably going to be my last run in the fake-news biz, but I can promise you that it's not going to go away. It's even going to grow bigger and it's going to be harder to identify as it kind of evolves through these steps. ...
Do you know who wrote the actual FBI Clinton story?
I do know who wrote the story, but only through an anonymous pen name. Privacy is something that we take very seriously in our writers group. The actual reasonings behind that story ... it's one of hundreds that have been written about mysterious deaths of Clinton associates or political foes. This one kind of took off more than others, I believe, just because of the nature of the story. The people wanted to hear this. So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional. The town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. Then, we had our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.
Why hide your identity?
This isn't the safest business to be in, to be honest. Just the number of death threats I've received. I have a beautiful family, a beautiful life.

Some of these people that we ... bait is probably the right word - are often - let's call them the deplorables, right? They're not the safest crowd. Some of them I would consider domestic terrorists. So they're just not people that I want to be knocking on my door.
It seems like National Report is getting spoofier.
If you went to National Report today, it's specifically satire. "Chris Christie nominated to Supreme Food Court." "Sarah Palin Banning Muslims from Entering Bristol Palin." They're a little bit more offensive than some people care for their satire. I mean fat-shaming and slut-shaming isn't something that is normally met with applause. But again, it's a lot more fun in nature.
Do you make serious money?
It depends on what you would call serious money. I think I do pretty well.
Can you say how well?
I would rather not. There have been some people who have been reported on recently. The folks in Long Beach that were doing just all right stuff. They were reporting $10,000 to $30,000 a month; I think that's probably a relative ballpark.
So you're doing as well as those?
Yes.
You're making money through the ads?
Yes.
Who do you work with?
We have several advertisers. Google was one, although they shut down my account last week. We've replaced them with other advertisers.
Can I ask who?
There are literally hundreds of ad networks. Literally hundreds. Last week my inbox was just filled everyday with people, because they knew that Google was cracking down - hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites. I kind of applaud Google for their steps, although I think what they're doing is kind of random. They don't really have a process in place for identifying these things. I happen to know a very successful site that, as of today, of this morning is still serving Google ads. So it seems to be a kind of arbitrary step that they're taking either based on, I don't know if it was my reputation within the industry or specifically the "Denver Guardian" site that angered them, or I don't know what it is, but back to your question, there's hundreds of people that will work with me.
What can be done about fake news?
Some of this has to fall on the readers themselves. The consumers of content have to be better at identifying this stuff. We have a whole nation of media-illiterate people. Really, there needs to be something done.
Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
Sure.
Are you one of the biggest in the fake-news biz?
If you look at someone who has specifically sometimes peddled in fictional news then I think that I would probably be considered one of the larger sites.
As a liberal, do you have any regrets?
I don't. Again, this is something that I've been crying about for a while. But outside of that, there are many factors as to why Trump won that don't involve fake news, right? As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.
You don't feel responsible.
I do not.
Do you think you would have kept doing it if it wasn't so lucrative?
Really, the financial part of it isn't the only motivator for me. I do enjoy making a mess of the people that share the content that comes out of our site. It's not just the financial incentive for me. I still enjoy the game I guess.
Would you do this all over again?
Well, I guess it came to a head here and we're talking about it. It'll be interesting to see what happens moving forward. If I had to, if I knew specifically the "Denver Guardian" situation, that would have been handled differently. But everything else, as far as the work I've done with National Report, I'm very proud of, and I'm going to continue doing it.

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We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned

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A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

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CNN looking for reporter to cover 'wave' of 'fake news' | TheHill

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CNN looking for reporter to cover 'wave' of 'fake news' | TheHill

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CNN, whose coverage has been targeted recently by President-elect Donald Trump Donald John Trump Trump suggested that North Korean TV anchor should get a job in US: report AT&T announces it has completed acquisition of Time Warner Classified Israeli report raises questions about Trump-Kim summit: report MORE , is looking for a reporter to cover "fake news."

"CNNMoney is expanding its Media team," a Turner job advertisement reads.

"We're going to be examining the wave of 'fake news' stories and the people behind them, but more than that we're going to be looking at truth - what happened to it, why so many of us no longer believe it, and where those people are going to get their information instead."

CNN wants someone with six years of writing and reporting experience who gets "angry every time they see an inaccuracy."

"This writer should live on the Internet, and be intimately aware of its darkest corners. They should be capable of doing a quick news story, and of spending days or weeks obsessing about a subject," the ad continues. "They should get angry every time they see any inaccuracy in any story, whether large or small, and whether published by a fake news site or a real one."

Other qualifications include "debunking myths," "confronting the 'real' media about the role it's playing" and "keeping tabs on fake news stories bubbling up around the Internet, and turning around quick articles about them."

"They should be the kind of person who can't pass by a single rabbit hole without being desperate to jump in to see where it leads. And they should be able to tell a story that people can't help reading," the job description concluded.

No salary is mentioned in the ad.

CNN has been characterized as "fake news" by Trump on several occasions, most recently in a confrontation with White House correspondent Jim Accosta during a news conference on Jan. 11.

CNN President Jeff Zucker stated his network's "credibility has never been higher" in a recent interview with New York Magazine.

CNN's media team is led by "Reliable Sources" host and senior media correspondent Brian Stelter.

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CNN looking for reporter to cover 'wave' of 'fake news'

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CNN, whose coverage has been targeted recently by President-elect Donald Trump Donald John Trump Trump suggested that North Korean TV anchor should get a job in US: report AT&T announces it has completed acquisition of Time Warner Classified Israeli report raises questions about Trump-Kim summit: report MORE , is looking for a reporter to cover "fake news."

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2016 Lie of the Year: Fake news | PolitiFact

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2016 Lie of the Year: Fake news | PolitiFact

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Ignoring the facts has long been a staple of political speech. Every day, politicians overstate some statistic, distort their opponents' positions, or simply tell out-and-out whoppers. Surrogates and pundits spread the spin.

Then there's fake news, the phenomenon that is now sweeping, well, the news. Fake news is made-up stuff, masterfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports that are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word.

In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse - promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters - gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity.

Fake news: Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop.

Fake news: Democrats want to impose Islamic law in Florida.

Fake news: Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan chanted, "We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back."

None of those stories - and there are so many more like them - is remotely true.

Fake news found a willing enabler in Trump, who at times uttered outrageous falsehoods and legitimized made-up reports. Clinton emboldened her detractors and turned off undecideds with a lawyerly parsing of facts that left many feeling that she was lying. Her enemies ran wild.

Each year, PolitiFact awards a "Lie of the Year" to take stock of a misrepresentation that arguably beats all others in its impact or ridiculousness. In 2016: where to start? With such a deep backlash against being truthful in political speech, no one person (though there are world-class frontrunners) and no one political claim perfectly stands out as the dust settles from an extraordinary campaign.

Because of its powerful symbolism in an election year filled with rampant and outrageous lying -- PolitiFact is naming Fake News the 2016 "winner."

Oxford Dictionaries selected " post-truth" as its word of the year and defined it as the state of affairs when "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

Fake news is the boldest sign of a post-truth society. When we can't agree on basic facts -- or even that there are such things as facts -- how do we talk to each other?

It's a media ecosystem where "everything is true and nothing is true," said President Barack Obama in an postelection interview with the New Yorker. "And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal - that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation," he said.

For those who care about accuracy and evidence, it's time to recognize that something really has gone off course.
What made 2016 different
Bad information has always lived online. Before fake news, there were electronic message boards where people shared conspiracy theories and emails instructing you to FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Before the computer, there were anonymous pamphlets and chain letters sent through the mail.

But in 2016, most viral lies spread on Facebook. They were reinforced by Google searches, in which stories from dubious sites jumped to the top of your screen based on traffic.

Bad actors would create fictitious Web pages that people couldn't resist sharing: claims that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump, or that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS, or that she helped fund ISIS. (None of those things is true.)

The popular website BuzzFeed analyzed the interest in these fake stories and found that they got more shares, reactions and comments during the final three months of the campaign than real stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, for example.

Craig Silverman, a Toronto-based journalist with a long track record of reporting on misinformation and media errors, headed up BuzzFeed's analysis of fake news on Facebook during the 2016 election.

"Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anonymous messaging ... these things have always been around and circulating," said Silverman, now BuzzFeed's media editor. "But Facebook is a game changer because of its size."

With 1.79 billion people around the world using Facebook each month, Facebook dwarfs other online platforms. Hoping to encourage people to be better informed, Facebook after the 2012 election introduced new tools explicitly aimed at helping users read news and share stories. Ironically, Facebook's technology and good intentions fueled the rise of fake news in 2016.

Creators of fake news found that they could capture so much interest that they could make money off fake news through automated advertising that rewards high traffic to their sites. A man running a string of fake news sites from the Los Angeles suburbs told NPR he made between $10,000 and $30,000 a month. A computer science student in the former Soviet republic of Georgia told the New York Times that creating a new website and filling it with both real stories and fake news that flattered Trump was a "gold mine."

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said the fake news problem on the site has been overblown. "There have been claims that it swayed the election, and we don't think it swayed the election,'' she said on the show recently. "But we take that responsibility really seriously. And we're looking at things, like working with third parties, helping to label false news, doing the things we can do to make it clearer what's a hoax on Facebook."
Well-wishers left flowers and notes outside Comet Ping Pong, the pizza restaurant in Washington that was the target of fake news stories linking it to a child sex trafficking ring. (AP)​Tracking and checking fake news
Fake news swims in the same electronic currents as everyday exaggerations, hard-charging opinion and political hyperbole. That makes it seem normal, even when it's just crazy, made-up stories that develop under the radar before blowing up into viral memes.

Take, for example, the rumor that Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop. BuzzFeed reported that the rumor seemed to start from a Twitter account associated with white supremacy.

From there, users on the online forums 4chan and Reddit argued (perhaps facetiously) that evidence for the theory was to be found in Podesta's stolen emails, which WikiLeaks had posted on the Internet weeks before. Podesta's repeated use of the word "pizza" in his email was a code word for pedophilia, they theorized, and Comet Ping Pong housed secret rooms to imprison children. Fake news sites, such as YourNewsWire.com, tap-news.com and USA Newsflash, turned the story into Facebook posts that earned roughly 100,000 interactions per post.

Other fake news had less convoluted origins. Paul Horner runs a string of websites, some looking deceptively like mainstream news organizations. He created a post that said protesters at Trump rallies were paid $3,500 to disrupt the rally as a dirty tricks plot. He told the Washington Post he knew it wasn't true but wrote it as a parody that could make him money if people actually believed it. "I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off," he said.

What happened next is classic: Trump himself repeated the claim about paid protesters at a rally.

In fact, all campaign long - and since the election - people of stature and education have repeated fake stories. Trump's nominee for national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, repeated the false claim that Florida Democratic senators voted to impose Islamic Sharia law in the Sunshine State ( Pants on Fire). Flynn's son, who had a role on the transition team, repeated the Clinton "pizzagate" rumor.

So you can only blame the Internet to a point.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speak during the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9, 2016. (New York Times)The 2016 election, a bridge to fake news
The PolitiFact staff debated a number of other specific claims as possible lies of the year. (Our annual poll of readers showed they were sick of the whole election. Readers voted the 2016 election itself as the biggest falsehood of the year.)

We considered Clinton's defensive statements about her emails. She said she "never received nor sent any material that was marked classified" on her private email server while secretary of state. That was False; some classified material did end up there.

She said that FBI director James "Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people." Pants on Fire. Comey called her actions careless and was careful not to endorse her comments.

As for Trump, who took Lie of the Year honors in 2015 for his body of work, there were many possibilities. Since the Tampa Bay Times started PolitiFact in 2007, no other major politician has a worse record for accuracy, with more than 70 percent of his claims rated Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire.

This year's unfounded Trump claims included:

That he opposed the war in Iraq before it started. This is False, even though he made the claim again and again.

That widespread voter fraud is happening in the United States. This is Pants on Fire; both Democratic and Republican election officials say it's not true. Trump said it during the election when he was down in the polls, and he said it after he won, too.

That Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Pants on Fire. Trump seems to have gotten this one from a report in the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer.

On Election Day, when asked if Trump was honest and trustworthy, 64 percent of voters said no, according to exit polls. But when asked if Clinton was honest and trustworthy, voters were almost equally dubious; 61 percent said no.

Clinton's PolitiFact scorecard reflected much more accuracy than Trump's, but her detractors saw it more as calculation than candor.

"There was a large part of the Democratic primary electorate who had concerns about the secretary's veracity and forthrightness," said Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders' campaign manager, once the election was over.

Trump won thanks to the voters who said he was the better candidate to bring about change.

"This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally," said former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski at a postelection forum. "The American people didn't. They understood it. They understood that sometimes - when you have a conversation with people, whether it's around the dinner table or at a bar - you're going to say things, and sometimes you don't have all the facts to back it up."

Or put another way (with apologies to Billy Joel), to some voters, even when Trump may be wrong, he may be right.
We can't handle the truth
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump was blasted for his falsehoods. But buoyed by those who saw him as more authentic than choreographed pols, he took a bold approach to truthfulness - essentially saying: Catch me if you can - and even if you do, it doesn't matter.

That's a dangerous state for fact-checkers -- and a free society -- to be in, said Jacob T. Levy, a libertarian and political scientist at McGill University.

"The fact-checking model presumes that all audiences are equally interested in the truth and all politicians are concerned about being caught lying. But 2016 exploded that," he said. "Trump exposed a way in which it can't work, which is when you overwhelm the system with a repeated refusal to be embarrassed about saying things are not true. That suggests something new and dangerous."

In the weeks since the election, a public conversation has emerged about post-truth politics, specifically how to encourage truth and bat down falsehoods.

"What we need to do is to figure out a way to deploy the weapons of truth as effectively as other people are deploying the weapons of dissembling," said Politico senior political correspondent Glenn Thrush on a recent episode of the Diane Rehm Show.

While Trump garners much support with his party, some conservatives say he needs to be confronted on his falsehoods, because they lead to authoritarianism. People who are credulous enough to believe fake news will also believe and follow elected officials who lie.

Evan McMullin of Utah, a former CIA officer, ran for president as a conservative independent alternative to Trump and has been warning fellow conservatives to support factual accuracy as a means of resisting government coercion.

McMullin listed on Twitter 10 ways average Americans can resist authoritarianism, including following many credible sources of news. "Be very well-informed and learn to discern truth from untruth," he said.

Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College who studies fact-checking, said that studies show people are willing to update some of their beliefs if presented with contradictory information. Fact-checkers and people who care about democratic governance have to keep asserting the importance of accurate information, even as the media figures out new ways to tell the truth in more compelling ways.

"There's a real darkness here if we give up on facts," Nyhan said. "Standing up for facts is a kind of patriotic act, and a necessary one."
Sign up for the PolitiFact email newsletter at bit.ly/politifactemail.

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PolitiFact - 2016 Lie of the Year: Fake news

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Ignoring the facts has long been a staple of political speech. Every day, politicians overstate some statistic, distort their opponents' positions, or simply tell out-and-out whoppers. Surrogates and pundits spread the spin. Then there's fake news, the phenomenon that is now sweeping, well, the news.

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How the Fake News Crisis of 1896 Explains Trump - The Atlantic

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How the Fake News Crisis of 1896 Explains Trump - The Atlantic

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"The trouble is that the fakemakers are green and wild," the Indianapolis Journal explained in 1896, in response to made-up stories being pushed by Bryan supporters. "They assume that the people of this country are densely ignorant and will accept as truth any fake which they can devise." (The Journal concluded it was "too late to undo the mischief which this absurd publication of fakes has inflicted.")

One newspaper, The Polk County Republican, of Tennessee, carried this boilerplate warning near its masthead in the early 20th century: "All communications, to receive attention, must have the writer's name to it. This is our only protection against 'fake' news and the rule will not be broken under any circumstances."

In 1898, fake news was seen as enough of a problem that a promise against it made its way into the motto of The St. Paul Globe:

(Library of Congress)

Some newspapers "not only reproduce fake news from day to day, but boast of its accuracy in the face of the most humiliating exposures," the Daily Public Ledger, a Kentucky newspaper, wrote in 1898. "For all that, they are making a mistake. They can fool some of the people all of the time, but the number will diminish as exposures multiply. Truth will win in the long run, and the papers that seek the best sources of information and give the most accurate information possible, ignoring fakes and discrediting doubtful stories, will always be the ones trusted by a majority of the reading public."

Within the journalism industry, there was much bellowing about the importance of vetting sources and verifying the accuracy of stories before publishing. Then, as today, there was harrumphing over what would eventually become known as clickbait. In one particularly spirited editorial in The Sun, of Jacksonville, Florida, a columnist blasts another local paper as "a harlot of newspaperdom. Living without conscience and devoid of shame, money-getting is its only object."

"Degeneracy of any kind is a menace to society, but the type exerting the utmost force toward the imperil of citizenship is degenerate journalism," the editorial continues. "The great newspaper, sinking downward into an immoral slough; dragging its readers into a slimy morass of untruth."

Journalists, of course, are predisposed to believe truth will inevitably triumph. That belief is at the heart of what journalists set out to do: "Seek truth and report it." The question today, when there are so many sources of information available at any given moment and so much vitriol directed at journalists-including from the person set to hold the nation's highest office-is whether the people who are reporting the truth are being heard.

In 1915, the Chicago Day Book, published a column under the heading "fake news" about the future of journalism. "Some day," the writer concluded, "the people of this country will demand as much protection against adulterated news as they now get against adulterated food for the stomach."

Some day. But not yet.

Adrienne LaFrance is the editor of TheAtlantic.com. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic.

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How the Fake News Crisis of 1896 Explains Trump

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"The trouble is that the fakemakers are green and wild," the Indianapolis Journal explained in 1896, in response to made-up stories being pushed by Bryan supporters. "They assume that the people of this country are densely ignorant and will accept as truth any fake which they can devise."

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Call for Chapter Proposals: Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America | radical eyes for equity

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Call for Chapter Proposals: Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America | radical eyes for equity

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Call for Chapter Proposals: Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America

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Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America Co-editors P.L. Thomas and Christian Z. Goering Critical Media Literacies and Youth series, Sense Publishers Series Editor, William Reynolds Rationale In the fall of 2016, just after the U.S. elected Donald Trump president, a black female first-year student submitted an essay on the prospects for Trump's...

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From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece - The New York Times

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From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece - The New York Times

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From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece (Published 2017)

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Cameron Harris, a recent college graduate, pulled six million people into his bogus story about the discovery of fraudulent ballots for Hillary Clinton.

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How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study - The New York Times

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How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study - The New York Times

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Images posted on Twitter by a marketer in Austin, Tex., the day after the presidential election. Credit...

Eric Tucker, a 35-year-old co-founder of a marketing company in Austin, Tex., had just about 40 Twitter followers. But his recent tweet about paid protesters being bused to demonstrations against President-elect Donald J. Trump fueled a nationwide conspiracy theory - one that Mr. Trump joined in promoting.

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.

But that didn't matter.

While some fake news is produced purposefully by teenagers in the Balkans or entrepreneurs in the United States seeking to make money from advertising, false information can also arise from misinformed social media posts by regular people that are seized on and spread through a hyperpartisan blogosphere.

Here, The New York Times deconstructs how Mr. Tucker's now-deleted declaration on Twitter the night after the election turned into a fake-news phenomenon. It is an example of how, in an ever-connected world where speed often takes precedence over truth, an observation by a private citizen can quickly become a talking point, even as it is being proved false.

Mr. Tucker, who had taken photos of a large group of buses he saw near downtown Austin earlier in the day because he thought it was unusual, saw reports of protests against Mr. Trump in the city and decided the two were connected. He posted three of the images with the declaration: "Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin"

Mr. Tucker said he had performed a Google search to see if any conferences were being held in the area but did not find anything. (The buses were, in fact, hired by a company called Tableau Software, which was holding a conference that drew more than 13,000 people.)

"I did think in the back of my mind there could be other explanations, but it just didn't seem plausible," he said in an interview, noting that he had posted as a "private citizen who had a tiny Twitter following."

He added, "I'm also a very busy businessman and I don't have time to fact-check everything that I put out there, especially when I don't think it's going out there for wide consumption."

Several hours later, the first important step occurred. Mr. Tucker's tweet was posted to the main Reddit community for Mr. Trump under the heading: "BREAKING: They found the buses! Dozens lined up just blocks away from the Austin protests." It quickly generated more than 300 comments, some of which blamed the protests on George Soros, the liberal billionaire philanthropist, who is a frequent target of the group.

The next morning, the frenzy began. A user on Free Republic, a conservative discussion forum, linked to the Reddit thread about Mr. Tucker's post, increasing the attention and spreading it further into the online world. Later, Facebook pages like Robertson Family Values, which is named for but not affiliated with the stars of "Duck Dynasty," and Donald Trump Commander in Chief 2020, linked to the Free Republic discussion. Those posts were shared more than 5,000 times each, and more than 300,000 Facebook users have linked to the Free Republic thread.

Sean Hughes, the director of corporate affairs for the bus company Coach USA North America, said he learned about the rumor involving its vehicles after receiving a couple of curious emails and hearing from a friend in New Jersey who had seen the claim on Facebook and wanted to know if it was true.

A reporter at the Fox television station in Austin contacted Mr. Hughes later that day, and he responded with a statement noting that "at no point were Coach USA buses involved in the Austin protests." But that did little to stem the online furor.

"That reporter said, 'You're probably going to get a lot more phone calls because it's all over the place,'" Mr. Hughes said in an interview on Thursday.

"You're the second journalist to actually call me to see what was going on, no bloggers or anything, and we're easily accessible on our website," Mr. Hughes said.

He added, "I just kind of wish people looked into facts before they go ahead and do something like that, because it could be easily debunked based on a quick phone call or two, or a couple emails."

During this time, Mr. Tucker was replying to queries on Twitter about whether he had proof to support his claim. He confirmed in a post that he "did not see loading or unloading" but that the buses were "quite near protests at right timing." That admitted lack of evidence, however, had little effect. By about noon, Mr. Tucker's initial post had been retweeted and liked more than 5,000 times. There was more to come.

Around 6 p.m., the conservative blog Gateway Pundit posted a story using Mr. Tucker's images under the headline "Figures. Anti-Trump Protesters Were Bussed in to Austin #FakeProtests." The post, which included a mention of "Soros money," has been shared on Facebook more than 44,000 times, according to statistics on the website.

The story line became a prominent one throughout the conservative blogosphere, with other sites incorporating Mr. Tucker's tweet into posts about paid protesters, referring to him as an eyewitness in Austin.

Then, shortly after 9 p.m., Mr. Trump sent this tweet:

Mr. Tucker considered deleting his tweet about the buses, but Mr. Trump's message emboldened him. "I figured if he were to say something like that, I might be barking up the same tree," Mr. Tucker said.

When asked if Mr. Trump might have been relying, at least tangentially, on the erroneous message he had sent about the buses, Mr. Tucker said, "I don't want to say why Trump tweeted when he tweeted. I just don't know and I truthfully don't think any of us will ever know."

Doreen Jarman, a spokeswoman for Tableau, said the company issued a statement to the local television station KVUE and The Austin American-Statesman on Nov. 11, saying that the buses were connected to the company's conference.

The American-Statesman posted an article online shortly after noon, said Asher Price, the article's author. Around 2 p.m., Mr. Tucker tweeted a link to his blog, where he acknowledged that he could have been "flat wrong," and mentioned that he had voted for Gary Johnson. The rumor-checking website Snopes also debunked the claim that the buses were connected to any protests. None of this seemed to have much impact.

Mr. Tucker's initial tweet continued to generate thousands of shares on Facebook through Free Republic and pages like Right Wing News and Joe the Plumber.

After midnight, Mr. Tucker deleted his original tweet, then posted an image of it stamped with the word "false" for posterity. It did not receive much attention.

After a week, that message had 29 retweets and 27 likes. The Snopes article has been shared about 5,800 times according to its website, a fraction of the number for the fake version of the news. Faced with the impact of his initial tweet, Mr. Tucker, who now has about 960 Twitter followers, allowed himself a moment of reflection.

"Anytime you see me in the future going out there where I think there's going to be a big audience, I can assure you I'm going to try my best to be balanced with the facts and be very clear about what is opinion and what is not," Mr. Tucker said.

If he could go back, he said, "I might have still tweeted it but very differently. I think it goes without saying I would have tried to make a more objective statement."

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Eric Tucker, a 35-year-old co-founder of a marketing company in Austin, Tex., had just about 40 Twitter followers. But his recent tweet about paid protesters being bused to demonstrations against President-elect Donald J. Trump fueled a nationwide conspiracy theory - one that Mr. Trump joined in promoting.

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Researchers Created Fake News. Here’s What They Found. - The New York Times

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Researchers Created Fake News. Here’s What They Found. - The New York Times

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Before the term "fake news" became an all-purpose insult for news coverage a person doesn't like, it had a more specific meaning: stories invented from whole cloth, designed to attract social shares and web traffic by flattering the prejudices of their intended audience. Think of untrue claims like the Trump endorsement by Pope Francis or the investigation of the Clinton Foundation for running a pedophile sex ring.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, there was even some speculation that these types of stories were enough to swing the result toward Donald J. Trump. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, raised that possibility, and one author of made-up viral news told The Washington Post that "I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me."

Some new research from two economists throws at least a bit of cold water on the theory that false news was a major influence on the election result. They offer some hard data on how pervasive voters' consumption of fake news really was during the 2016 election cycle. The research also reveals some disturbing truths about the modern media environment and how people make sense of the incoming gush of news.

Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford commissioned a survey in late November hoping to discern just how deeply some of the fake news embedded itself with American voters. The two asked people, among other things, whether they had heard various pieces of news that reflected positively or negatively on one of the candidates - of three varieties.

There was completely true news: Hillary Clinton called some Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables," for example, or Mr. Trump refused to say at a debate whether he would concede the election if he lost.

There was fake news, as identified by fact-checking sites like Snopes and PolitiFact - big things like the Pope Francis story and smaller items, like Mr. Trump threatening to deport the "Hamilton" creator Lin-Manuel Miranda to Puerto Rico.

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Hillary Clinton on Sept. 11, 2016, the day she stumbled and needed help after a memorial ceremony. That news was real, but not all news surrounding the election was. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

The third category was most interesting. The researchers created "fake fake" news. That is, they invented some headlines that were the type of thing fake sites produce, but had never actually been published during the campaign. One of these placebo headlines was that "leaked documents reveal that the Clinton campaign planned a scheme to offer to drive Republican voters to the polls but then take them to the wrong place," and its inverse in which it was the Trump campaign scheming to take Democrats to the wrong polling place.

There is some good news in that more people reported having heard, and believed, the true statements than the false statements. Only 15.3 percent of the population recalled seeing the fake news stories, and 7.9 percent recalled seeing them and believing them.

The more interesting result: Those numbers are nearly identical to the proportion who reported seeing (14.1 percent) and believing (8.3 percent) the placebos, the "fake fake" news stories. In other words, as many people recalled seeing and believing fake news that had been published and distributed through social media as recalled seeing fake news that had never existed and was purely an invention of researchers.

That's a strong indication about what is going on with consumers of fake news. It may be less that false information from dubious news sources is shaping their view of the world. Rather, some people (about 8 percent of the adult population, if we take the survey data at face value) are willing to believe anything that sounds plausible and fits their preconceptions about the heroes and villains in politics.

"False remembering is incredibly correlated with people's priors," Mr. Gentzkow said. "One way to think about it is we know our memories are very imperfect. And if you ask me if I saw something, I'm partly asking myself how likely it is that I saw it. People are doing inference."

Mr. Allcott and Mr. Gentzkow do some math around how influential each fake news story would need to have been on people who read it to have meaningfully affected the election results. They conclude that a single news article would need to have been as persuasive as 36 television campaign ads to have been the difference between a Trump victory or loss.

But there's a bigger, and perhaps more worrying, implication of this research. It suggests that the most straightforwardly fraudulent forms of fake news are a small part of what is shaping how people understand the world. People's hunger for information that suits their prejudices is powerful, and in the digital media age, a pile of it emerges to satisfy that demand.

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Researchers Created Fake News. Here's What They Found.

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Before the term "fake news" became an all-purpose insult for news coverage a person doesn't like, it had a more specific meaning: stories invented from whole cloth, designed to attract social shares and web traffic by flattering the prejudices of their intended audience.

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The Honest Truth about Fake News … and How Not to Fall for It (with Lesson Plan) | The Lowdown | KQED News

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The Honest Truth about Fake News … and How Not to Fall for It (with Lesson Plan) | The Lowdown | KQED News

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Welcome to the world of "fake news."

Digital deception

It comes as little surprise that the web is chock full of commercial click-bait hoaxes: get-rich-quick schemes, free Caribbean cruises, erectile dysfunction treatments ... you name it.

But as it turns out, the internet is also teeming with bogus information sites that masquerade as real news. And in the run-up to the 2016 election, many of these hoax news posts spread like wildfire. [Snopes, a fact-checking site, maintains a comprehensive and growing list of fake news outlets.]

President-elect Donald Trump's contempt for "the mainstream media," an industry he uniformly dismisses as a corrupt, lying "bunch of phony lowlifes," has further obscured the boundaries between fact and fiction. So, too, has his use of Twitter to widely disseminate unsubstantiated allegations and, on numerous occasions, downright falsehoods.

Even President Obama weighed in (while still president), assailing the rapid accumulation of fake news as a "dust cloud of nonsense."

"If we are not serious about facts, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, than we have problems," he said at a recent press conference.

Fake news, real profit, serious consequences

In fact, a recent BuzzFeed News analysis of election-related web articles published in the three months before Election Day found that the 20 most popular fake news stories generated significantly more engagement on Facebook (shares, reactions, comments) than did the top 20 real news stories from major news outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times.

And of course, the more engagement, the more ad revenue; a major financial incentive for unethical folks with overactive imaginations to whip up ever more outlandish, attention-grabbing conspiracy theories.

According to the analysis, the majority of the most popular and prolific purveyors of fake news -- websites like Ending the Fed and InfoWars -- are either full-on hoax sites or "hyperpartisan" right-wing platforms that creatively obscure the truth (a handful of left-wing sites were also in the mix).

Strangely, BuzzFeed also found more than 100 U.S. politics websites run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, usually authored by web-savvy, entrepreneurial young people -- including teenagers -- trying to make a fast buck by creatively duping American media consumers.

One recent notably viral fake news headline espoused an utterly baseless conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C. family-friendly pizza place was actually a front for a child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton's campaign manager. Michael Flynn, Jr., son of retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn -- Trump's pick for national security adviser, and a Clinton-related conspiracy theorist himself -- further promoted the story, while serving on Trump's transition team, by sharing it with his thousands of Twitter followers. The younger Flynn has since been removed from the transition team due to his aggressive trolling habit.

But the bogus rumor, which became known as Pizzagate, had some serious ramifications when a man armed with an assault rifle entered the restaurant on Sunday, Dec. 4 and fired several shots in what he later told police was an attempt to "self-investigate" the claim (there were no reported injuries).

And no, you really can't make this stuff up.

To what degree the overall proliferation of fake news affected the election results remains unclear. But it almost certainly did have some impact, particularly on undecided voters.

After initially deflecting criticism that his company bore some level of responsibility for the dramatic spread of political misinformation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a post (on Facebook, of course) less than a week after the election, stating: "We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here."

Several days later, both Google and Facebook announced new efforts to prevent identifiable fake news sites from using their respective advertising networks to generate revenue.

Fake news is nothing new

Fake news has long had a presence in America's media landscape: Since the colonial period, various news outlets have played fast and loose with the truth for commercial or political gain. A particularly notorious era of journalistic misinformation emerged in the 1890s when competing newspapers owned by rival media titans William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought mercilessly for the attention of readers by liberally embellishing stories to sell more papers, a style that became known as yellow journalism.

But the sheer volume of information at our fingertips (and thumbs) today, and the ease with which we can inadvertently spread falsehoods with the simple click of a "share" button, puts us in uncharted territory.

Impressionable young minds

Young people are among the most vulnerable and impressionable consumers of this kind of misinformation, according to a recently released study by Stanford's History Education Group. Researchers collected nearly 8,000 responses from middle school, high school and college students -- aka "digital natives" -- around the country who were asked to evaluate online information presented in tweets, comments and articles.

"Overall, young people's ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak," the report states.

"Our 'digital natives' may be able to flit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they are easily duped."

The researchers were consistently "shocked" by the number of students who couldn't effectively evaluate the credibility of the information they were presented with.

More than 80 percent of middle schoolers in the study believed that "native ads" resembling articles were actually real news stories, even though they were labeled "sponsored content."

High school students were asked to evaluate a post from a popular image-sharing site featuring a picture of unusually formed daisies and titled "Fukushima Nuclear Flowers: Not much more to say, this is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects." Despite the complete lack of attribution or evidence, most students accepted the picture at face value.

Fukushima Nuclear Flowers

"They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't verify it. They simply accepted the picture as fact," Sam Wineburg, a history and education professor at Stanford University, and the lead author of the study, told NPR in a recent interview.

Many of the high school students in the study also couldn't tell the difference between real and fake news sources in their Facebook feed.

Meanwhile, most college students in the study didn't suspect any kind of bias in a tweet from a left-leaning activist group that cited a public opinion survey on gun ownership and background checks.

New polling shows the @NRA is out of touch with gun owners and their own members https://t.co/wm6weuaCbd #NRAfail pic.twitter.com/y4K4r5EcYX

- MoveOn.org (@MoveOn) November 18, 2015

It's incumbent on educators, the study authors note, to show students how to be more discerning about the information they consume. In other words, how to identify fact from fiction and not to be a sucker.

"But the only way we can deal with these kinds of issues are through educational programs and recognizing that the kinds of things that we worry about, the ability to determine what is reliable and not reliable, that is the new basic skill in our society," said Wineburg.

Along those lines, WNYC's On the Media made this nifty cheat sheet, which combined with an array of excellent, non-partisan political fact-check sites, provide the necessary tools to weed out the fake and focus on what's really going on.

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The Honest Truth about Fake News ... and How Not to Fall for It (with Lesson Plan)

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Welcome to the world of "fake news." Digital deception It comes as little surprise that the web is chock full of commercial click-bait hoaxes: get-rich-quick schemes, free Caribbean cruises, erectile dysfunction treatments ... you name it. But as it turns out, the internet is also teeming with bogus information sites that masquerade as real news.

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Don’t Fret About Fake Political News - POLITICO Magazine

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Don’t Fret About Fake Political News - POLITICO Magazine

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A full panic has descended upon the established media over the incidence and prevalence of "fake news," which has been rising like methane fumes from the deeps of the Web. Transmitted to readers primarily through Facebook News Feeds, some of the more notable rogue outlets include National Report, News Examiner, World News Daily Report, ABCNews.com.co, and Empire News. A recent BuzzFeed report discovered 100 pro-Trump sites pumping out fake news from Macedonia alone.

Some of the choicest slices of fake news, according to stories documenting them in the San Jose Mercury News, CNN.com, andthe Washington Post, include reports that Twitter, Google and Facebook buried the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton; that tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots for Clinton had been discovered; that Elizabeth Warren had endorsed Bernie Sanders for president; that Donald Trump had died; and that John Podesta had been practicing witchcraft. And that's just the tame, political bunk.

Story Continued Below

The threat of fake news was recently recognized by President Barack Obama, who called as a "dust cloud of nonsense." But the most full-throated warning about fake news came a few days ago in the New York Times, wheretechnology columnist Farhad Manjoo fretted in a feature story that it was loosening the country's collective grip on the truth. Manjoo asserted, "if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth."

Everything? While we can all agree that fake news is bad and real news is good, is fake news really as unstoppable and dangerous as Obama and Manjoo make it out to be? Is real news as helpless against the fake news blitzkrieg as some claim? Are we really doomed to suffocate in a sea of Internet bullshit?

We'd have more cause for alarm if fake news was something new, but it isn't. If you define fake news as deliberately erroneous reports-not journalistic mistakes and miscues like much of the reporting in the run up to the Iraq War-fake news has been a reading staple for as long as the journalists have spun words. During the pre-revolutionary period, American newspapers published a series of articles about the British occupation of Boston (and attributed to Samuel Adams) that deliberately bent facts to serve propaganda ends. Thomas Jefferson later lamented over the rampant "falsehoods & errors" that appeared in the press. Should the press ever straighten itself out and devote itself to truth, he wrote, "I fear such a paper would find few subscribers."

In his 1942 article "Facetious News Writing, 1833-1889," Frank Luther Mott documented the tendency of the penny press to enliven its pages by adulterating the news with pranks and fancy designed to sucker gullible readers. Newspapers indulged themselves with massive hoaxes, such as a six-part series in the New York Sun of 1835 about the discovery of life on the moon. In 1844, the Sun published a hoax about a transatlantic balloon voyage. That same year, an Ithaca newspaper and others published a hoax about future president James K. Polk "hot-branding" his slaves. Mark Twain wrote many hoax stories. A 1874 story about " solar armor" that cooled anybody who wore it got picked up in the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Times, and the Scientific American. I invite you to graze the pages of Hoax.org for additional examples of 19th century fake news. Man-eating trees. The escape from the Central Park Zoo. Plans to tear-down the Great Wall of China. Cotton-picking monkeys. Pandering to readers, every New York World story about shipwrecks included a cat, whether it existed or not. The stories sound absurd, but they're no more absurd than modern fakes.

Fakes grew so common in yesterday's newspapers that smarter readers kept the vigil for fiction masquerading as fact. Scholar Andie Tucher writes, "the word fake itself emerged from the netherworlds that had previously been its main habitat to become a part of the public discourse." In 1913, the New York World had set up a bureau to "stamp out fakes and fakers." By 1915, an entire book devoted to the menace of fake news was published.

It wasn't just scoundrels trafficking in fakes. No less a journalistic hero than H.L. Mencken made up news to sell newspapers, and crowed about it in his memoirs. Early in his career, he concocted a story about a "Wild Man of North Baltimore." In 1905, he made up a detailed account about an important naval battle in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1917, he issued a hoax about the history of the bathtub. After the publication of one of his fakes, a fellow reporter demanded of him, "Why do you tell lies like that?" Mencken's response, "It made a good story, didn't it?"

Ben Hecht wrote fakes at the Chicago Daily News, notably one about a Chicago earthquake. In 1920, the New York City district attorney threatened to prosecute public relations agents who pushed their fakes into print. In the 1920s, Minneapolis' Saturday Press published so many half-baked stories the government attempted to close it down using a law that banned malicious, scandalous and defamatory publications. Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for fake stories he wrote from the Soviet Union for the New York Times. The New Yorker's Joseph Mitchell made a career out of bending fact, constructing composite characters and embellishing in Menckenian service of telling a good story.

Need I go on? In the contemporary era, Truman Capote larded his 1966 true crime book, In Cold Blood, with cooked facts. Nik Cohn made up the primary figure in his 1976 New York magazine article that became the basis of the movie Saturday Night Fever. In 1981 a writer for the New York Times Magazine made up a trip to Cambodia in which he claimed to have spotted Pol Pot. David Foster Wallace ginned up non-existing details for his 2000 Rolling Stone coverage of the John McCain for president campaign. In 2000, Rodney Rothman spiced up a fake story for the New Yorker titled "My Fake Job" with imaginary details. The dishonor role continues. Janet Cooke. Stephen Glass. Christopher Newton. Jack Kelley. Jayson Blair. Jonah Lehrer. Mike Daisey. Perhaps no major outlet publication has ever escaped the fakers' charms, and I haven't started in about the supermarket tabloids or those crazy emails your brother-in-law sends to everybody in his contacts!

If you regard fake news as standard background radiation in our media diet that's so inexorable that it can evade those fabled New Yorker fact-checkers, the current spate of fake stories seems less dire. Not to be a Pollyanna about it, but fake news hasn't killed us yet, so should we expect Internet-era fake news will spell our destruction?

Just remember: Journalism isn't the only trade polluted by fakes. The law routinely bounces attorneys for their lies and fabrications. Science and medicine abounds with unscrupulous operators who invent data to support their research. Accountants cook the books. Wrangling the truth and advancing honesty has always been a difficult business. We don't turn suicidal over crooked attorneys and mendacious scientists, so we shouldn't sicken ourselves in despair over misinformation (and disinformation) appearing on the Web. To combat the liars and pranksters we need to do what we've always done: Rely on our error-detecting and error-correcting skills. Several operations do excellent work on this front. Snopes slays the most pernicious fake news. The fact-checkers at the Washington Post, Politifact, FactCheck.org and many other news operations correct the egregious violations of the truth. On election night, BuzzFeed's most wonderful Craig Silverman tracked and debunked in real time the fakest news hitting the Web. Until recently, the Washington Post's Caitlan Dewey published an excellent weekly column titled "What Was Fake on the Internet This Week," which the paper should resurrect.

Part of me sympathizes with readers who say you can't trust the mainstream media-I became a press critic because I saw the press botch too many stories and wanted to call them out. For a real draught of fake news, try working in a newsroom some time. Reporters' phones ring off the hook with fake tips and the bogus stuff streams into our mailboxes, our email inboxes and via direct message and texts. Half the job of being a journalist is slaying the misinformation before it can find its way into print.

But let's not let news consumers off the hook. Being a proficient news consumer can be as difficult a task as being a good news writer. Some non-discerning readers are more eager to share a hot story at the nail salon or the barber shop than a true one. Other have an appetite for exciting bunk and can't be bothered with the mundane. Others view journalism as a damn-the-facts war on their enemies, and are happy to read what they wish was true. As a former Facebook product manager put it, "bullshit is highly engaging.

You might say, why bother with fact-checkers and Snopes? People will believe what they want to believe. Yes, left to their own devices, many will pickle themselves in hogwash. But that doesn't free the media of our primary duty to get the story and correct the record. Fakery can never be completely defeated, but we can break its siege if we put our wills to the task. One way to inoculate yourself against fake news is to absorb the lessons in this Huffington Post piece on how not to get taken in. Another is to add this extension to your Chrome browser. It throws up a warning flag if you navigate to one of sites identified by media studies professor Melissa Zimdars as a possible fake news site.

Facebook and Google have finally acknowledged their role in trafficking fake news, and have announced plans to defund fake news sites by evicting them from their ad networks. According to a Facebook source who talked to Gizmodo, the company has "the tools to shut down fake news." It's obviously in Facebook's interest to clean up the fake news mess before it does long-term reputational damage to the service. "Where'd you get that? In your Facebook News Feed," might become the new, "Where'd you get that, the Weekly World News?" if Facebook doesn't act.

Journalists can only do so much to defeat fake news. "The central job of journalism is to establish the facts and share them as widely as we can," as NPR Senior Vice President of News and Editorial Director Michael Oreskes said this week. The largest responsibility will always belong to news consumers who need to read and view critically before they share stories. As someone who has forwarded fake news, I know the thrill of being first to share an irresistible but ultimately bogus story. But I'm cured of that. Once clickbitten, I say, twice shy.

******

I was once taken in by a faker and I published him. Some of the historical examples of fakery cited here appeared in a previous column. Thanks to my brain trusters who helped me with the history of fakery Stephen Bates, Mark Feldstein, Michael Socolow, and Kevin M. Lerner. Join my brain trust by sending email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts are legit, my Twitter have survived the cruelest fact-checking, and my RSS feed is more accurate than the Merck Index.

This article tagged under:

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A full panic has descended upon the established media over the incidence and prevalence of "fake news," which has been rising like methane fumes from the deeps of the Web. Transmitted to readers primarily through Facebook News Feeds, some of the more notable rogue outlets include National Report, News Examiner, World News Daily Report, ABCNews.com.co, and Empire News.

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Spurious claims linking the celebrity chef's death to Hillary Clinton were published on a web site notorious for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories.

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Fact-checking U.S. politics | PolitiFact

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Fact-checking U.S. politics | PolitiFact

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Fact-checking journalism is the heart of PolitiFact. Our core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing. The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

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Fact-checking journalism is the heart of PolitiFact. Our core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing. The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

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Facebook and Google move to kick fake news sites off their ad networks | Technology | The Guardian

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Facebook and Google move to kick fake news sites off their ad networks | Technology | The Guardian

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Both Google and Facebook have announced plans to go after the revenue of fake news sites, kicking the hoaxers off their ad networks in an attempt to prevent misleading the public from being profitable.

Google moved first, announcing on Monday a policy update which restricts its adverts from being placed on fake news sites. "We will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, mis-state, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property," a spokeswoman told Reuters.

It remains unclear whether Google has the ability to correctly identify such sites, though. For hours on Monday, the search engine's top news link for "final election results" led to a fabricated story on "70 News" which claimed that Donald Trump had won the popular vote by 700,000 votes. In fact, Clinton is currently in the lead by the same margin, according to the AP.

Later that day, Facebook updated the language in the policies for the Audience Network, its own advertising platform. The platform already bans ads in sites that show "misleading or illegal" content, and the update makes clear that those terms apply to fake news sites as well.

"Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement.

Facebook has been accused of potentially swinging the election in favour of Trump by failing to acknowledge the fact that its algorithm was promoting fake news to millions of users. According to Buzzfeed news, more than 100 pro-Trump fake news sites were being run from a single Balkan town in the run-up to the election.

Cutting off the revenue to such sites by limiting the amount of money they can make from advertising may help limit their proliferation. But Facebook in particular faces a more fundamental issue given the ways in which its algorithm selects posts: if users engage more with fake news than real news, as seems possible, then Facebook's algorithm will promote the fake news. Even if sites can't make revenue through advertising, the possibility of other revenue sources, or even just notoriety, may serve to provide enough motivation.

Facebook is reportedly internally split over how to deal with these concerns. Employees from across the company have secretly come together to try and tackle the problem, BuzzFeed reported on Monday, despite Facebook publicly playing down the role of fake news in the election.

Facebook staff mount secret push to tackle fake news, reports say

Topics

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Facebook and Google move to kick fake news sites off their ad networks

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Both Google and Facebook have announced plans to go after the revenue of fake news sites, kicking the hoaxers off their ad networks in an attempt to prevent misleading the public from being profitable. Google moved first, announcing on Monday a policy update which restricts its adverts from being placed on fake news sites.

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EStanford Report on Student Information Literacy. Executive Summary 11.21.16.pdf

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EStanford Report on Student Information Literacy. Executive Summary 11.21.16.pdf

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Over the last year and a half, the Stanford History Education Group has prototyped, field tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning-the ability to judge the credi...

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Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors : snopes.com

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Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors : snopes.com

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The sharp increase in popularity of social media networks (primarily Facebook) has created a predatory secondary market among online publishers seeking to profitably exploit the large reach of those networks and their huge customer bases by spreading fake news and outlandish rumors. Competition for social media's large supply of willing eyeballs is fierce, and a number of frequent offenders regularly fabricate salacious and attention-grabbing tales simply to drive traffic (and revenue) to their sites.

Facebook has worked at limiting the reach of hoax-purveying sites in their customers' news feeds, inhibiting (but not eradicating) the spread of fake news stories. Hoaxes and fake news are often little more than annoyances to unsuspecting readers; but sometimes circulating stories negatively affect businesses or localities by spreading false, disruptive claims that are widely believed.

So long as social media allows for the rapid spread of information, manipulative entities will seek to cash in on the rapid spread of misinformation. Perhaps the most egregious of the many nonsense peddlers on social media are fake news sites, so here we offer a guide to several of the most frequent (and unapologetic) hoax purveyors cluttering up newsfeeds everywhere.

National Report

No list of shameless misinformation would be complete without a mention of National Report (and its omnipresent former lead writer, Paul Horner), as the site is (or was) perhaps the most prominent example of its genre.

Among National Report's most widespread hoaxes were claims that notorious street artist Banksy was arrested and unmasked (as Paul Horner, naturally), that a teen was imprisoned over a " swatting prank," and that a U.S. company was hiring mercenaries to kill ISIS militants. While most of the site's efforts have been relatively benign, their fake story about an Ebola outbreak's prompting a quarantine in Purdon, Texas, caused headaches for local officials at the height of coverage and anxiety about the virus.

National Report (and its "satirical" brethren) have sustained huge losses of traffic in the wake of Facebook's algorithm changes intended to limit the reach of fake news. In response, sites have been established that spoof the domain names of legitimate news outlets such as the Washington Post and which mirror the National Report 's content in order to more efficiently dupe readers and work around Facebook's restrictions.

(The ubiquitous Paul Horner has since moved on to the equally fake News Examiner site, continuing to offer fictitious stories about subjects such as the world's first successful head transplant.)

World News Daily Report

Straddling the line of fake news and the occasional seed of truth is World News Daily Report. By cobbling together misattributed stolen photographs (and often using extant, long-circulating rumors), World News Daily Report has published several viral claims often preying upon readers' religious beliefs, including hoaxes about a newly-discovered eyewitness account of Jesus' miracles, an ancient rumor about chariot wheels found at the bottom of the Red Sea, and a very old yarn about the discovery of giant skeletons reworked as the tale of a coverup perpetrated by the Smithsonian Institution. However, World News Daily Report frequently branches out to science-based fakery, including japes about the destruction of the world's oldest tree and another about the discovery of a Megalodon shark in Pakistan.

Political conspiracy is another favored topic of World News Daily Report, evidenced by articles claiming that a CIA agent confessed to killing Marilyn Monroe and that Yoko Ono disclosed she once had an intimate partnering with Hillary Clinton.

While National Report and World News Daily Report often take advantage of politically, socially, or religiously divisive issues to drive outrage-based traffic, Huzlers employs a markedly different approach to fake news hoaxes, often invoking the names of popular brands and restaurants in its quest to snare readers with gross-out stories.

Among Huzlers' most prominent yarns: Chipotle was caught using cat and dog meat in their dishes, Starbucks was discovered to be using semen in their beverages, Arizona iced tea tested positive for urine, and McDonald's was outed for including human meat in their products.

Like its fellows, Huzlers tailors its scope to leverage topical news trends. A popular claim made by the site (at the apex of an Ebola outbreak) involved zombies, and another alleged that a man had traded his toddler to buy an Apple Watch.

Empire News

Empire News (spun off from what was initially a sports-related fake news site) is another outlet responsible for the propagation of fabricated claims that spread on sites like Facebook. Some of their stories are apolitical and simply compelling to readers, such as a claim the Netflix entertainment streaming service would be shuttering due to the negative impact of piracy, or one that Las Vegas planned to legalize dog fighting to boost casino revenues.

Other Empire News hoaxes were somewhat news-based, such as one predicting massive national snowfalls for the winter of 2014-2015. Some articles targeted political or social controversies, such as one claiming a protestor in in Ferguson, Missouri, had accidentally burned down his own house. Separate rumors included one holding that Facebook was spying on gun owners for Homeland Security and one claiming that food stamp recipients would be awarded free cars (or that the food stamp program would be discontinued entirely).

When Empire News created a rumor about a WalMart shoplifter reportedly caught with $100 worth of groceries stashed in her vagina, the claim was spread not only by social media users but also by other sites of dubious credibility (such as Huzlers and Daily Viral Stuff).

Fake news sites often play to users' existing beliefs to spread their claims, but Stuppid (a site that truly lives up to its name) is less focused in its contribution to the avalanche of fakery on the Internet. Efforts by Stuppid largely encompass morally offensive fabrications, such as a claim parents admitted to having sex in front of their kids to teach them about procreation, another about a Florida man marrying a baby, and a salacious tale of an incestuous mother-daughter relationship.

Stuppid frequently swipes publicly-available photographs such as mugshots and deliberately misattributes them, as they did in a story about two Floridians allegedly arrested for selling golden tickets to Heaven. Another such story involved a death row inmate's purported request for a last meal of kittens illustrated with a photograph of deceased serial killer Dorothea Puente.

News Examiner

Paul Horner, the prolifically puerile online troll and ubiquitous fake news character (he inserts his name into all his articles) whose work previously appeared on the National Report fake news site, has since started the News Examiner. The News Examiner skirts Facebook's crackdown on fake news sites by mixing real news and listicle items in with its fake news reports, but the site neither identifies its fake news items as "satire" nor carries a disclaimer to that effect.

Fake stories from the News Examiner that have circulated widely enough as real news to prompt numerous inquiries from our readers include articles about the world's first successful head transplant and President Obama's limiting churches to offering twice-monthly services.

Newswatch28 (now Newswatch33)

Newswatch28 i s a relative newcomer to the fake news world, bursting onto the scene in late April 2015 with a site that simulates a TV news web site and likewise skirts Facebook's crackdown on fake news by mixing real news articles in with its completely made-up stories.

The site's "Quest" page unhelpfully informs readers that Newswatch28 presents "Shocking news and stories, celebrity news and gossip. Whether currently occurring, interesting, controversial, abnormal, thought provoking or satirical, we only wish to inform and entertain with the content we publish."

Fake stories from the Newswatch28 that have circulated widely enough as real news to prompt numerous inquiries from our readers include articles about a 76-year-old woman expelled from a KFC for breastfeeding her 42-year-old son, the FDA's approving the sale of tranquilizer guns for use on children, and an Al Pacino death hoax.

In later incarnations, the hoax-purveyor became Newswatch33; among its newer pieces were items claiming that suspected Charleston shooter Dylann Roof raised $4 million in donations, that a study was paying subjects an exorbitant sum of money to smoke pot, that a man killed himself over black actors in Star Wars, and an iteration of the popular fake news claim that NASA confirmed a 15-day period of total darkness.

The Naha Daily appears to be defunct, but during that site's brief lifespan from September 2014 to January 2015 it published several fake news pieces that continue to pop up regularly on social media and web sites - most notably an article claiming that fashion CEO Michael Kors said he is tired of "pretending to like blacks."

That item gained enough traction to prompt calls that Michael Kors be boycotted over his fictitious racist remarks:

#BOYCOTTMK Michael Kors CEO stated "I'm tired of pretending I like blacks" MK said "he doesn't want his purses filled with synthetic hair"

- Cheryl Nidoy (@TLV_Cher) January 7, 2015

Naha Daily also made the pages of snopes.com with fake news pieces about Jaden Smith's plans to have his penis removed on his 18th birthday, Michael Jordan's indifference to kids dying over his sneakers, and Oprah Winfrey 's accusing Bill Cosby of raping her.

The Stately Harold

The Stately Harold shouldn't be fooling anyone, given the deliberate misspelling in its name, a front page filled with articles by "feminist Cassidy Boon" about such hard-hitting topics as "Redefining beauty: Why cankles are hot!" and an introduction from the Chief Editor that states "Hi! My nme is Clive Pebble. I have Dyslexia but my drem evre sens I was a litl boy has ben to strat a newspapr. Nwo I have!!"

Nonetheless, now that social media users often never visit a site's main page, the Stately Harold has since its November 2014 start managed to fool readers with fake news articles about Hillary Clinton's wanting to ban beards, President Obama's referring to Baltimore rioters as "black heroes," a 9-year-old boy's being suspended from school for saying that he "didn't like Obama," and President Obama's pardoning Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The Stately Harold unhelpfully identifies itself as a "satire" site in a manner that is deliberately difficult for readers to find, requiring them to highlight the solid black background of a page footer to disclose the site's "satire" tag:

NewsBuzzDaily

NewsBuzzDaily is pretty low-rent for a fake news site: it doesn't display a logo or masthead on its pages, and it mainly traffics in lame, made-up, exclamation point-driven celebrity gossip items (e.g., "Lebron James Admits To Hair Transplant!!" and "Woman's Lips Explode After Doing Kylie Jenner Challenge!!") along with that lowest form of fake news, celebrity death hoaxes.

Nonetheless, the site has scored a few social media hits with puerile articles about Wendy's restaurants using rat and horse meat to make their chili, and the Fox Network's cancelling the popular TV series Empire after only a single season.

NewsBuzzDaily at least scores some points for carrying a (somewhat less than clear) disclaimer on all their pages advising readers that the site is "a combination of real shocking news and satire news" and that "articles written on this site are for entertainment and satirical purposes only."

Now8News burst onto the fake news scene in mid-2015, racking up an impressive number of successful social media hoaxes despite the barely plausible premise upon which most were based: a man was arrested for having sex with a pig at Walmart, an obese woman was arrested for starving her kids so she could eat their food, a woman was arrested for " trying on" tampons in an aisle at Walmart, a separate woman was arrested for using a sausage to sexually gratify herself (also at Walmart), a man was found cannibalizing a teen in a Texas haunted house attraction, KFC was busted breeding mutant chickens, and McDonald's closed 17,000 locations because the minimum wage was raised.

The site was also responsible for rumors that an old lady was arrested making cat fur coats, a man fed his cheating fiancee's remains to her parents, President Obama lowered the age of consent to 13, a lottery winner died after gold-plating his testicles, a couple was busted running a meth lab in the "attic" of a Walmart, hair elastics presented a grave health threat because they were manufactured from used condoms, a sitter discovered a " clown doll" was actually a tiny rapist, a tube of cookie dough "exploded" inside a female shoplifter's body cavity, and finally, that a woman caused a riot after experiencing gastric distress during a round of " vodka butt shots."

The Reporterz

Man Kills His Date After She, Inspired By Twitter #WasteHisTime2016 Trend, Wasted His Time: https://t.co/iS1KhkSZXu pic.twitter.com/1IJMa3dWob

- The Reporterz (@TheReporterz) January 8, 2016

A fairly new entrant to the fake news round-up in early 2016, The Reporterz started a popular hoax claim that a man killed a woman over her behavior following the #WasteHisTime Twitter trend. In addition, the site started a rumor that the state of Delaware was introducing a "child support card" that limited what mothers can and cannot buy with their stipends.

Empire Herald

Another 2016 contender on the fake news scene was Empire Herald, which among other wild fabrications reported that a meth-addled couple ate a homeless man in Central Park. Created on 24 January 2016, the site managed to spread several (often recycled) fake news claims in the span of a few short weeks.

Satira Tribune

The name Satira Tribune clued many readers in to this web site's intent, and its tagline ("satirical news for satirical folks") certainly drove the point home to those who scrolled down to the bottom of the page. But that didn't stop the site's claims (that MMA fighter Ronda Rousey fought off several muggers, that Jimmy Carter said medical marijuana cured his cancer, that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined Bill Maher for smoking a joint on Real Time, or that Donald Trump paid Sarah Palin $10 million for endorsing him) from spreading on social media.

NC Scooper (Nevada County Scooper)

NC Scooper (or Nevada County Scooper) was one of the few ostensibly humor-based fake news sites whose items floated around social media. Most articles published by NC Scooper were clearly satirical in nature and not intended to deceive readers by spreading false information; nevertheless, a few efforts genuinely confused social media users. Among NC Scooper's crossover bits were pieces claiming official " gun confiscation units" were taking people's weapons, that Merle Haggard left his estate to an LBGT group, that Meg White of the White Stripes was joining Rush, and that Sen. Bernie Sanders called for " chemtrail reform."

Associated Media Coverage

Associated Media Coverage was yet another fresh face on the fake news scene in early 2016. After its February 2016 creation, Associated Media Coverage swiftly leapt into the hoaxmongering business with bits about a motorcycle curfew, an e-juice ban, a two-pet maximum ordinance, and a fabricated claim that a transgender woman was shot in a Colorado department store bathroom.

Associated Media Coverage also has apparently spawned sites that appear to be legitimate local news bearing shocking (but fake) stories: Boston Tribune, Boston Leader, Baltimore Gazette, and Seattle Tribune are four that we have been able to identity so far.

React365 isn't a fake news site per se, but rather a generator for user-created hoax articles. Although the site's stated purpose involved "prank[ing] your friends," articles about mandatory babysitting by grandparents and great white sharks in the Mississippi River escaped into the social media wild.

The Burrard Street Journal

Like Nevada County Scooper, the Burrard Street Journal appeared to be largely comedic in nature and not an intentional purveyor of hoaxes. Although most social media users seemed to recognize the site's purpose, Burrard Street Journal items were occasionally mistaken for real news. Those included claims Donald Trump opined America ought not to have "given Canada its independence," President Trump declared Canadian women the States' largest threat after ISIS, and President Obama asserted he refused to leave office were Donald Trump elected.

The Last Line of Defense (The Resistance)

Although The Last Line of Defense ( The Resistance) carries a disclaimer, it is frequently mistaken for legitimate news about a bevy of topical controversies. Items published by this site which have duped social media users included claims the Obama girls were arrested in Hawaii, that George Soros was arrested for "hate crimes against America," and President Trump " billed " former First Lady Michelle Obama for several billion dollars.

As American As Apple Pie and Freedum Junkshun

Like The Last Line of Defense ( The Resistance), As American As Apple Pie and Freedum Junkshun carry clear disclaimers warning readers they are fake news sites:

When no one can trust the lying fake news liberal media anymore because they hate us and guns and Harley Davidson and meat and OUR president, As American as Apple Pie is here to be your beacon of something you can kinda rely on sometimes, but not really. God Bless America and Amen.

We believe that there is nothing more precious than the mind of an aging conservative. Here we gather a boatload of bullhonkey, works of pure satirical fiction, to give the fist-shakers of the world a reason to hate. Reality is often in the eye of the beholder. You won't find any of it here.

Join the fun in the comments on our Facebook page where you too can watch David Hasselhoff running over someone's poodle magically transformed into a crime against humanity by Barack Obama or yet another murder the Clintons got away with.

Nevertheless, their material is regularly shared as "real news." Items from As American As Apple Pie mistaken for legitimate news included claims Alec Baldwin was arrested for threatening President Trump and a Muslim mayor " outlawed Christmas" within city limits. And like Last Line of Defense, As American As Apple Pie and Freedum Junkshun leverage topical controversies to accumulate social media shares using "outrage bait," as did the latter with a phony story about a flight crew "taking a knee" rather than transporting New Orleans Saints players who engaged in the referenced protest. A 27 October 2017 post to Last Line of Defense's Facebook page confirmed Freedum Junkshun is another of its operations.

BreakingNews365.net and BreakingNews247.net

Like React365, BreakingNews365.net and BreakingNews247.net are not fake news sites. Another series of prank generators, they enable anyone to create any headline and description complete with fabricated shares:

Action News 3 (ActionNews3.com)

Like Now8News, Action News 3 (ActionNews3.com) advances topical fake news items under the guise of a small local news affiliate. Specializing in death hoaxes (phony news items about Morgan Freeman, Bob Barker, and George Zimmerman went viral), the site also leverages social media fads like " creepy clowns " to spread its falsehoods.

abcnews-us.com

Much like abcnews.com.co, this site generates traffic by passing itself off as the actual website for ABC News. As we noted in December 2017, the site's front page, featuring a story about former Today Show host Matt Lauer, was designed to mimic that of ABC News:

Beyond imitating ABC's page design, we found that abcnews-us.com also copied their actual reporting.

While the myriad sites referenced here represent only a small sample of the overall "satire" nuisance on social media, many widely-dispersed fake news claims have originated with them. All of the sites mentioned above exist solely to spread false information, and none can be trusted as legitimate sources, no matter how compelling their claims might be.

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Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors

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The sharp increase in popularity of social media networks (primarily Facebook) has created a predatory secondary market among online publishers seeking to profitably exploit the large reach of those networks and their huge customer bases by spreading fake news and outlandish rumors.