If you use Facebook lately, you will notice a lot of the stories are not 'so true'. There are tons of websites and blogs that publishes news article that are either retrofitted to their liking and not what the news is about.
Some of the 'not so true' stories just like this 'Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid. It turns out that the narrative is false. This is from Washington Post which some of us will take it as-is without hesitation in mind.
Most people today either uses Facebook and twitter and other social media for their news feeds and what is happening around. Mostly the articles there in Facebook are composed of blogs and news bits that are 'not worthy' to read. Some are just driving the traffic to their websites so the ad revenues will go high. So in order to do this, the people behind fake news sensationalize the story by either adding up their opinion on the matters or just adding up stories to suit the readers that they want to cater.
This phenomenon is not new. It was also the problem during the early days of the news paper where sensationalized stories are 'in' to drive up the sale of the paper. same thing goes online now - the only difference is - you don't need printing press to publish your story out there.
So how are we going to combat the fake news if even the known names in publishing industry also fell for it? Like Facebook which implement a third-party verification thru Poynter. As pointed out in FB - "Spammers make money by masquerading as well-known news organizations, and posting hoaxes that get people to visit to their sites, which are often mostly ads." - just to drive the clicks to their websites for revenue. BUT just like the stories of "email forwarding to 50 people", this problem will be there as long as the readers are there. Maybe the ads are to blame? the way Google, Facebook and others set up monetary incentives to click ads are to blame? People will not come up with this idea of setting up fake news sites in the first place if it's not for the money (at least most of them are)
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