‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’

“Fake news” is the phrase du jour across the political, media and technology domains over the past couple of weeks, as a number of people have suggested that false news stories may have swung the result of the US presidential election. Also, these kinds of news are so perfectly framed that one would actually believe them.

Instant internet distribution – with its jungle of special interest and citizen bloggers, aggregators, pundits, provocateurs and promoters – has opened Pandora’s box of fakery.

This could raise questions relating to the impartiality of services like Google and Facebook. Facebook soon followed with an announcement that it will not display ads in sites that present misleading content, including fake news sites.

According to Gizmodo, executives at Facebook have been reviewing its policies and products.

Almost 1.8 billion people around the world use Facebook according to the article, and almost half of American adults use it as a news source.

The same study by Buzzfeed found that stories published by mainstream media pages, such as Politico, CNN, and ABC, earned a 94.8 accuracy rating. She created it not as a direct response to the postelection fake news debate but simply to encourage her students to become more media literate by checking what they read against other sources.

Still, a lot of garbage gets through. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg similarly downplayed the popularity of false news stories in a Facebook post on November 12.

Although Google rarely removes content from its search results, the company is taking steps to punish sites that manufacture falsehoods.

Fake election news got more attention than did real stories on Facebook during the final months of the U.S. presidential campaign, according to an analysis published Wednesday by BuzzFeed News. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article.

The implicit message from those crowing about the problem of fake news is simple: you think the electorate is so foolish or your preferred candidate so weak that a link from girlsjustwannahaveguns.com has the power to change an election. He also published a story that went viral past year about a Yelp vs.

So what is the solution?

Mr Zuckerberg doesn’t want Facebook to be an “arbiter of truth”, yet both Facebook and Google have acknowledged the problem by pledging to deprive fake news sites of advertising dollars. “We fall for fake news because something about it confirms our beliefs about the world and because we are in a news-grazing rather than news-reading culture”. That will appeal to media smart people but likely won’t register with individuals who are wont to believe anything that fortifies their personal predilections.

Where does fake news come from? . Shocking headlines are also a tip-off.