Definition
Fake news websites deliberately publish hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation to drive web traffic inflamed by social media. These sites are distinguished from news satire
as fake news articles are usually fabricated to deliberately mislead
readers, either for profit or more ambiguous reasons, such as
disinformation campaigns. Many sites originate in or are promoted by Russia, North Macedonia, Romania, and the United States.
Many sites directly targeted the United States both because the U.S. is
a high-value ad consumer and extraordinary claims to be more likely to
be believed during a political crisis.
The New York Times noted in a December 2016 article that fake news had previously maintained a presence on the Internet and within tabloid journalism in years prior to the 2016 U.S. election. However, prior to the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, fake news had not impacted the election process to such a high degree.
Subsequent to that election, the issue of fake news turned into a
political weapon between supporters of Clinton and Trump; due to these
back-and-forth complaints, the definition of fake news as used for such
argumentation became vaguer.
Methods
Fake news websites use a variety of methods to fool their readers into
believing their content, either by attempting to persuade the readers
that they are legitimate or by distracting readers with incredible news.
Impersonation/Typosquatting- ABCnews.com.co, a fake news website that "crudely" spoofs legitimate journalistic organization ABC News, but was in reality completely unrelated. The site published only fake stories, usually with a realistic clickbait headline, albeit with story-details containing enough flaws that the "discerning reader would likely notice" it was false.
Clickbait - Denver Guardian, a blog site registered in 2016 that claimed to be a legitimate newspaper in Denver, but only ran a single fabricated story that went viral.
Three examples of fake news websites.
Clickbait
Fake news websites often have article titles that are incredulous, prompting the user to click on it and read more.
This method of enticing readers to view content on their website often
leads to exaggerated or even fake titles. When linked to from other
sites, usually social media, having an extraordinary story title played a
large part in tricking users who cannot tell if the article is real or
not. This became especially relevant in the 2016 election. Additionally,
out-of-context or manipulated images can cause readers to incorrectly assume an article's legitimacy, often due to their inflammatory image choice.
Impersonation
Another
method of gaining readers is impersonating a legitimate news
organization. This can come in two forms, either by copying a popular
news organization's website formatting and pretending to be a lesser
known publication or by completely copying an existing website down to
its name and authors. Exact copies can trick viewers into believing the website is an official organization such as the Bloomberg.ma, or cnn-trending.com.
Typosquatting
Many popular fake news websites attempted to impersonate legitimate U.S. news publication by using a method known as Typosquatting,
where fake websites get as close as possible to the original URL, only
differing by a letter or two. A clear example is ABCnews.com.co.
Typosquatting relies on readers not actually checking the address they
typed or clicked on, since often these websites target common
misspellings, slight misphrasings and abuse of top-level domains
by used .com.co as opposed to .com. This also gets many viewers from
social media who believe they are going to an actual news publication's
website.
Obscurity
Since
the authors of these websites are not actual reporters, many fake news
sites either pretend to have the identity of a reporter or simply do not
include an 'About Us' page.
These websites almost never have any other publications that reference
them or information about themselves on tertiary sources like Wikipedia.
When these sites get publicized by actual organizations, it gives them a
bit of legitimacy, which helps them get viewers.
Fake news campaigns
Fake
news campaigns are when multiple fake news websites are published with
similar topics in hopes of convincing a broader audience, either by
quantity or by reference.
2016 election cycle
Fake
news websites played a large part in the online news community during
the election, reinforced by extreme exposure on Facebook and Google.
Approximately 115 pro-Trump fake stories were shared on Facebook a
total of 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared a
total of 7.6 million times. There were two main reasons for creating fake news, economical and ideological.
The teenagers in Veles, for example, produced stories favoring both
Trump and Clinton that earned them tens of thousands of dollars. Some fake news providers seek to advance candidates they favor. The Romanian man who ran endingthefed.com, for example, claims that he started the site mainly to help Donald Trump's campaign.
Major sites involved
- ABCnews.com.co - pro-right
- Conservative Daily Post - both anti-left and anti-right
- Denver Guardian - known for anti-Hillary Clinton articles
- Disinfomedia - anti-right articles that aimed to trick alt-rights
- Ending the Fed - pro-right
- News Examiner - anti-left articles
- SubjectPolitics.com - known for anti-Hillary Clinton articles
- YourNewsWire.com - inflammatory for both sides as well as conspiratorial
Social media
Professor Philip N. Howard of the University of Oxford found that about one half of all news on Twitter directed at Michigan
prior to the election was junk or fake. The other half came from real
news sources. Criticized for failing to stop fake news from spreading on
its platform during the 2016 election, Facebook
thought that the problem could be solved by engineering, until May 2017
when it announced plans to hire 3,000 content reviewers. Fraudulent stories during the 2016 U.S. presidential election popularized on Facebook included a viral post that Pope Francis and actor Denzel Washington had endorsed Donald Trump. Alternet reported that Trump himself had been the source of some of the related misinformation.
BuzzFeed News
found that on Facebook during the last three months of the election,
fake news stories received more attention than real news stories. It was
discovered that the top twenty fake news stories had 8,711,000 shares,
reactions, and comments, while the top twenty real news stories were
only shared, commented on, and reacted to 7,367,000 times.
One prominent fraudulent news story released after the election—that
protesters at anti-Trump rallies in Austin, Texas, were "bused
in"—started as a tweet by one individual with 40 Twitter followers.
Over the next three days, the tweet was shared at least 16,000 times on
Twitter and 350,000 times on Facebook, and promoted in the conservative
blogosphere, before the individual stated that he had fabricated his
assertions.
President Barack Obama
commented on the significant problem of fraudulent information on
social networks impacting elections in a speech the day before Election Day in 2016, saying lies repeated on social media created a "dust cloud of nonsense". Shortly after the election, Obama again commented on the problem, saying in an appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems". President Trump has also commented significantly on fake news, creating the Fake News Awards to highlight real news outlets that publicly misrepresented him.
"Pizzagate"
In early November 2016, fake news sites and Internet forums falsely implicated the restaurant Comet Ping Pong and Democratic Party figures as part of a fictitious child trafficking ring, which was dubbed "Pizzagate". The conspiracy theory was debunked by the fact-checking website Snopes.com, The New York Times, and Fox News. The restaurant's owners and staff were harassed and threatened on social media. After threats, Comet Ping Pong increased security for concerts held inside its premises.
Days after the attack, Hillary Clinton spoke out on the dangers of fake news in a tribute speech to retiring Senator Harry Reid at the U.S. Capitol. Clinton called the spread of fraudulent news and fabricated propaganda an epidemic that flowed through social media. She said it posed a danger to citizens of the U.S. and to the country's political process. Clinton said in her speech she supported bills before the U.S. Congress to deal with fake news.
Notable examples of fake news websites
Many
of these websites are categorized as fake news because they have a
satirical take on the news, but ultimately fail to convince their
readers that their content is actually fake.
RealTrueNews
Marco Chacon created the fake news site RealTrueNews to show his alt-right friends their alleged gullibility. Chacon wrote a fake transcript for Clinton's leaked speeches in which Clinton explains bronies to Goldman Sachs bankers. Chacon was shocked when his fiction was reported as factual by Fox News and he heard his writings on Megyn Kelly's The Kelly File. Trace Gallagher repeated Chacon's fiction and falsely reported Clinton had called Bernie Sanders supporters a "bucket of losers" — a phrase made up by Chacon. After denials from Clinton staff, Megyn Kelly apologized with a public retraction.
Chacon later told Brent Bambury of CBC Radio One program Day 6 that he was so shocked at readers' ignorance he felt it was like an episode from The Twilight Zone. In an interview with ABC News, Chacon defended his site, saying it was an over-the-top parody of fake sites to teach his friends how ridiculous they were. The Daily Beast reported on the popularity of Chacon's fictions being reported as if it were factual and noted pro-Trump message boards and YouTube videos routinely believed them.
In a follow-up piece Chacon wrote as a contributor for The Daily Beast
after the 2016 U.S. election, he concluded those most susceptible to
fake news were consumers who limited themselves to partisan media
outlets.
Global Associated News (MediaFetcher.com)
MediaFetcher.com
is a fake news website generator. It has various templates for creating
false articles about celebrities of a user's choice. Often users miss
the disclaimer at the bottom of the page, before re-sharing This website
has prompted many readers to speculate about the deaths of various
celebrities.
Huzlers
Similar
to Global Associated News, many readers have been tricked into
believing the satire website Huzlers. Snopes has over 30 separate fact
checks on their articles, each one correcting the fake news from
Huzlers. According to the owners Pablo Reyes, Huzlers swear they're not trying to fool anyone.
70news
70news was another WordPress-based blog site, which produced fake news during 2016; in particular, one story falsely stating that Donald Trump had earned the most popular votes in the 2016 U.S. election, fooled search engine algorithms and ranked very highly in results the day after the election.
Disinfomedia
In addition to sites run on a shoestring budget, there are sites with more of an infrastructure behind them: Jestin Coler from Los Angeles founded Disinfomedia, a company that owns many fake news sites. He gave interviews under a pseudonym, Allen Montgomery. With the help of tech-company engineer John Jansen, journalists from NPR found Coler's identity. Coler explained how his intent for his project backfired; he wanted to expose alt-right echo chambers, and point out their gullibility. He stated his company wrote fake articles for the left-wing that were not shared as much as those from a right-wing point of view.
National Report & News Examiner
Both of these fake news websites heavily profited through the use of clickbait headlines, which were usually false. Paul Horner, a lead writer at both of these websites, focused significantly on the election, since it drew strong ad revenue. He told The Washington Post he made $10,000 per month through ads linked to fake news. After the election, Horner said that he felt his efforts helped Trump. In a follow-up interview with Rolling Stone, Horner revealed The Washington Post profile piece on him spurred increased interest with over 60 interview requests from media including ABC News, CBS News, and CBS's Inside Edition.
Horner explained his writing style: articles that appeared legitimate
at the top and became increasingly absurd as the reader progressed. These two websites often referenced each other.
Christian Times Newspaper
In an interview with The New York Times,
Cameron Harris of Annapolis, Maryland, explains how he profited from
creating fake news on his website, ChristianTimesNewspaper.com, that
included a false story claiming that premarked ballots for Mrs. Clinton
were being held in boxes at a warehouse in Ohio. Within a few days, the story had earned him around $5,000.
KMT 11 News
During the summer of 2016, KMT 11 News
published a series of fake news stories regarding celebrity appearances
and filming locations in random local towns. These towns included Brentwood, Tennessee, Chandler, Arizona, and Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Spread and identification of fake news
44 percent of all US adults get their news from Facebook.
Investigations conducted in 2017 showed nearly 40 percent of content by
far-right Facebook pages and 19 percent of extreme left-leaning pages
were false or misleading. In the 10 months leading up to the 2016 presidential election,
20 fake news articles shared on Facebook dramatically increased from 3
million "shares, reactions, and comments" to nearly 9 million.
Mainstream media articles, on the other hand, declined from 12 million
"shares, reactions, and comments" in February to only 7.3 million by
Election Day.
A study conducted by the Stanford Graduate School of Education
from January 2015 revealed difficulties that middle, high school, and
college students experienced in differentiating between advertisements
and news articles, or identifying where information originated.
One concern noted by researchers of the study is that democracy is at
risk of devolving due to the ways in which falsehoods about civic issues
can quickly spread with a growing ease of access. In one assessment,
high school students were asked to evaluate two Facebook posts
mentioning Donald Trump's candidacy for president; one was from an actual Fox News account and the other was from a fake account.
Over 30 percent of students stated that the fake account was more
reliable because of its graphic elements and only a quarter recognized
the significance of the blue checkmark on Twitter and Facebook, which indicates that an account was marked as legitimate.
U.S. Response
Educational
Elementary
school teachers have decided to challenge results from the Stanford
study by showing children the importance of not being deceived by what
is fake. Fifth grade teacher Scott Bedley in California created his own
version of "Simon Says", in which students are given three minutes to read an article and decide whether a news story is true or false. Those who think it's false are told to stand up while those who think it's true remain in their seats. Bedley worked with another teacher in Kansas, Todd Flory, to devise a "fake news challenge" via Skype whereby Flory's class picked two real articles and wrote a fake one, to be presented to Bedly's class in California.
Teachers are promoting these learning techniques with the hope that
such strategies and skills will stay with their students' for the rest
of their adolescent and adult lives.
Andreas Schleicher, the lead of Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development, announced in 2017 that his organization
was initiating "global competencies” tests will be taken by 15-year-olds
around the world alongside the OECD's current reading, maths and
science assessments, which are conducted every three years. This will
test how well students can discern fake news outside of their
sociopolitical bubble.
Jennifer Coogan, editor in chief of education startup Newsela,
has partnered with the American Press Institute to help combat fake news
consumption in addition to its regular literacy boosting skill classes.
She believes its is now the teacher's responsibility to help teach
their students about which media to believe since it is near impossible
for a parent to monitor every source that a child will read.
Commercial
After receiving heavy criticism for not stopping the extreme number of fake news articles on its platform, Facebook
announced in December 2016 that it would begin to flag fake news. If
enough users flagged a story, the story would be sent to a 3rd party
organization to check its veracity. If it failed, it would lose news
feed priority as well as have "disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers" as a
caption. Facebook is also attempting to reduce their financial
incentives in an attempt to decrease the amount of fake news. The fact
checking organizations involved are ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes.
In 2018, Facebook has admitted that it 'fell short' in stopping
outside meddling in the U.S. presidential election. This admission comes
after increased scrutiny from lawmakers in a broader backlash against
Silicon Valley as well as a Senate hearing for social media company
executives.
Fact-checking organizations
In the aftermath of the election, many fact-checking websites teamed
up with Facebook in order to check on the veracity of linked articles. Many of these organization have also posted lists of fake news websites and guides on how to identify them.
Governmental
Legislative
Members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee
traveled to Ukraine and Poland in March 2016 and heard from officials
in both countries on Russian operations to influence their affairs. U.S. Senator Angus King told the Portland Press Herald that tactics used by Russia during the 2016 U.S. election were analogous to those used against other countries.
King recalled the legislators were informed by officials from both
Ukraine and Poland about Russian tactics of "planting fake news stories"
during elections.
On November 20, 2016, King joined a letter in which seven members of
the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee asked President Obama to
publicize more information from the intelligence community on Russia's
role in the U.S. election. In an interview with CNN, Senator King warned against ignoring the problem, saying it was a bipartisan issue.
Amid worries about fake news and disinformation being spread by Russia, representatives in the U.S. Congress called for more action to track and counter alleged propaganda emanating from overseas. On November 20, 2016, legislators approved a measure within the National Defense Authorization Act to ask the U.S. State Department act against propaganda with an inter-agency panel. The legislation authorized funding of $160 million over a two-year-period. The initiative was developed through a bipartisan bill, the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, written by U.S. Senators Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Chris Murphy. Portman urged more U.S. government action to counter propaganda. Murphy said after the election it was apparent the U.S. needed additional tactics to fight Russian propaganda. U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden said frustration over covert Russian propaganda was bipartisan.
Republican U.S. Senators stated they planned to hold hearings and investigate Russian influence on the 2016 U.S. elections.
By doing so they went against the preference of incoming Republican
President-elect Donald Trump, who downplayed any potential Russian
meddling in the election. U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain and U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr discussed plans for collaboration on investigations of Russian cyberwarfare during the election. U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker planned a 2017 investigation. Senator Lindsey Graham indicated he would conduct a sweeping investigation in the 115th U.S. Congress session.
FTC
In 2013, the
FTC as part of a campaign to crackdown on bogus health claims charged
over $1.6 million to Beony International and owner Mario Milanovic, and
Beony International employee Cody Adams. They conspired to promote their
own weight loss products with fake news websites. These websites
pretended to be legitimate news organizations and promoted their acai
berry weight-loss products heavily.
Counter-Disinformation Team
The United States Department of State planned to use a unit called the Counter-Disinformation Team, formed with the intention of combating disinformation from the Russian government, and that it was disbanded in September 2015 after department heads missed the scope of propaganda before the 2016 U.S. election. The U.S. State Department put eight months into developing the unit before scrapping it. It would have been a reboot of the Active Measures Working Group set up by President Reagan. The Counter-Disinformation Team was set up under the Bureau of International Information Programs. Work began in 2014, with the intention to combat propaganda from Russian sources such as Russia Today. U.S. Intelligence officials explained to former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer John R. Schindler that the Obama Administration decided to cancel the unit as they were afraid of antagonizing Russia. U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard Stengel was point person for the unit before it was canceled. Stengel previously wrote about disinformation by Russia Today.
