We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. They claim their outfit is so lucrative that they fear disclosing exactly how much their stories make out of fear that their friends will start asking for loans.īy signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners. The self-proclaimed “new yellow journalists” admit to exploiting distrust of mainstream media with false stories and Facebook-optimized headlines. The Washington Post features two young writers from Long Beach, California, who run the site. Earlier this week, the search giant announced a new effort to restrict hoax sites. “Right now I make like $10,000 a month from AdSense,” he said, referring to Google’s advertising platform. “I hate Trump,” Horner admitted, though he said the income from fake news was too good. “They’ll post everything, believe anything.” “My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time,” Paul Horner told the Washington Post. The lead writer of multiple fake and satirical news sites, including National Report, says he helped elect Trump. Facebook responded by saying it “did not build and withhold any News Feed changes based on their potential impact on any one political party.” Nov. Gizmodo alleges Facebook had developed a tool to suppress fake news but didn’t release it for fear of conservative backlash, since it disproportionately affected right-wing news sites. “Those of us at the company know that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season,” said one Facebook employee. “Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”Įarlier, Zuckerberg had said the idea of Facebook playing a role in the election was a “ crazy idea.” But some of his workers disagree: In response to Zuckerberg’s statement, an unofficial task force secretly forms to tackle the issue, according to BuzzFeed News. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” he writes in a Facebook post. “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Zuckerberg denies Facebook perpetuates fake news. Within three days, a fake news story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly being fired for pro-Clinton views trends for several hours before being removed.īVA News, one of the fake news sites Nov. August 2016įacebook fires its entire Trending News team and says it will instead rely on algorithms, with engineers fixing mistakes later. ( Breitbart editors declined the invitation, saying they had already “out-hustled” Facebook.) June 2016įacebook announces changes to its algorithm to prioritize personal posts and shares from friends and family over business pages, including news outlets. The company releases its 28-page editorial guidelines showing that human editors play a substantial role in the selection process, including blacklisting and removing stories that do not “reflect real-world events.”įacebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also meets with a group of conservative leaders, including Glenn Beck and Barry Bennett, a senior Trump campaign adviser, to discuss their concerns of bias. Tech news outlet Gizmodo reveals that Facebook’s news curators “routinely suppressed” conservative stories from sites like Breitbart or Washington Examiner. So how exactly did fake news stories rise to such outsize prominence on Facebook? We’ve laid out a few key moments: Jan 2014įacebook launches its Trending News section to “surface interesting and relevant conversations in order to help you discover the best content”-optimized to reflect users’ interests and deliver viral news. Under pressure to combat misinformation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised action in a Facebook post early Saturday morning: “I want you to know that we have always taken this seriously, we understand how important the issue is for our community and we are committed to getting this right.” Recent outlandish headlines included “I Was Paid $3500 to Protest Trump’s Rally” and “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary’s Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The definition of “fake news” is broad, and not all these stories are invented from whole cloth, argues David Mikkelson, the founder of debunking website Snopes: Some are better described as “highly distorted clickbait,” containing nuggets of fact repackaged into extraordinary falsehoods by partisans for political effect.
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