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I believe this guy is absolutely disgusting and should be prosecuted. He passes this off as...ha ha...it's a joke....but, people are actually believing what he is writing and it's affecting the national debate in a very negative way.

 

On top of that, when are people going to pull their heads out of their asses when they see a headline on social media?

 

 

Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’

You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

You mentioned Trump, and you’ve probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

Why? I mean — why would you even write that?

Just ’cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that’s just insane. I’ve gone to Trump protests — trust me, no one needs to get paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.

I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].

 

 

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In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.

 

During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

 

Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.)

 

Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.bfmO1G71E#.ui9P28z2K

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I don't think he should be prosecuted. Its not his fault people are dumber than poo. I have numerous family members who do believe most of the fake news that comes on and it gives me a headache seeing them share it, its numbing that people can be so niave and utterly incompetent.

 

Working in the media this is also frustrating, myself and my fellow coworkers at our station work hard to get the facts and give both sides ( we've dumped stories because we didn't have both sides of it) Now I can't say that's true for all of the news people in Rapid ( shockingly the one who isn't, is very pro Trump with his constant Facebook posts).

Then people blame the media for a bias and conspiracy and coverups, its all bull.

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Facebook Fake News Explained

 

News stories are supposed to help ordinary voters understand the world around them. But in the 2016 election, news stories online too often had the opposite effect. Stories rocketed around the internet that were misleading, sloppily reported, or in some cases totally made up.

 

Over the course of 2016, Facebook users learned that the pope endorsed Donald Trump (he didn’t), that a Democratic operative was murdered after agreeing to testify against Hillary Clinton (it never happened), that Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old girl (a total fabrication), and many other totally bogus “news” stories. Stories like this thrive on Facebook because Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes “engagement” — and a reliable way to get readers to engage is by making up outrageous nonsense about politicians they don’t like.

 

A big problem here is that the internet has broken down the traditional distinction between professional news-gathering and amateur rumor-mongering. On the internet, the “Denver Guardian” — a fake news site designed to look like a real Colorado newspaper — can reach a wide audience as easily as real news organizations like the Denver Post, the New York Times, and Fox News.

 

----

 

Publicly, Facebook’s CEO has downplayed the site’s role in distributing fake news online. But privately, there’s a raging debate inside Facebook about how it could do more.

 

BuzzFeed reports that some Facebook employees are frustrated by Zuckerberg’s blasé response to concerns about fake news on the social media platform.

 

“What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that,” one anonymous engineer wrote, according to BuzzFeed. “He knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.”

 

One reason Facebook’s management has been so cautious on this issue is that it’s still smarting from the controversy earlier this year over Facebook’s trending news feature. Until this summer, Facebook employed a team of professional journalists to curate the trending news box that appeared in the right-hand rail next to the Facebook newsfeed.

 

Then in May, one of Facebook’s trending news editors told Gizmodo that the team was routinely suppressing trending stories that slanted in a conservative direction. That caused a massive backlash, including questions from Republicans in Congress about Facebook’s editorial policies. This led to Facebook terminating the entire trending news team. Today, Facebook uses software to choose which headlines appear in this box.

 

But with the human editors gone, Facebook had a new problem: It started to see fake stories showing up in the trending box. Facebook’s trending news algorithm simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to distinguish an accurate news story from an inaccurate one.

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I have numerous family members who do believe most of the fake news that comes on and it gives me a headache seeing them share it, its numbing that people can be so niave and utterly incompetent.

 

I am not on the Facebook, but my wife is. She had to mute (is that what its called? not unfriend them, but not see their posts) multiple family members (on my side and hers) over the past year because all they would do is share these fake stories about Trump/Clinton.

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So....let me make sure I understand this.

Facebook put a team together to stop fake news from trending on their site. There was more fake news that leaned right wing so right wingers were upset. Since right wingers were upset, Facebook did away with the team working on it and used software. The software is not working to identify fake news and right wingers are eating up all the crap stories they can find and believing them.

 

To me, one of two things has to happen:

 

a) Right wingers have to come to realize what a fake news story is and realize that most of what they keep passing around the internet is completely fake.

 

b) Facebook is just going to have to bite the bullet and stop these stories from appearing on their site. This is going to outrage right wingers that actually believe this crap and those people are going to now start believing that Facebook is ran by a bunch of leftist liberals that are trying to silence the truth.

 

This is not going to end well because I don't see (a) happening.

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I have numerous family members who do believe most of the fake news that comes on and it gives me a headache seeing them share it, its numbing that people can be so niave and utterly incompetent.

I am not on the Facebook, but my wife is. She had to mute (is that what its called? not unfriend them, but not see their posts) multiple family members (on my side and hers) over the past year because all they would do is share these fake stories about Trump/Clinton.

Technically its called "unfollow". But mute is a better term, and less creepy.

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I don't think he should be prosecuted. Its not his fault people are dumber than poo. I have numerous family members who do believe most of the fake news that comes on and it gives me a headache seeing them share it, its numbing that people can be so niave and utterly incompetent.

 

Working in the media this is also frustrating, myself and my fellow coworkers at our station work hard to get the facts and give both sides ( we've dumped stories because we didn't have both sides of it) Now I can't say that's true for all of the news people in Rapid ( shockingly the one who isn't, is very pro Trump with his constant Facebook posts).

Then people blame the media for a bias and conspiracy and coverups, its all bull.

What happens if someone on your station does a story, goes live etc with a topic that is fake? Aren't there some ramifications?

 

I think a lot of people need protecting from themselves. The fact that we haven't been doing a very good job of that in the last few years now has us "celebrating" the election of a reality star, internet trolling criminal.

 

EDIT - we used to be able to count on news stations and papers to hold themselves accountable for doing the diligence that your station does. Since we can no longer do that, I think we've got to do something else. Not sure what that is, but if we have a world where people are this stupid we have an obligation to limit the damage they can do.

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I have numerous family members who do believe most of the fake news that comes on and it gives me a headache seeing them share it, its numbing that people can be so niave and utterly incompetent.

 

I am not on the Facebook, but my wife is. She had to mute (is that what its called? not unfriend them, but not see their posts) multiple family members (on my side and hers) over the past year because all they would do is share these fake stories about Trump/Clinton.

 

I have gone through and stopped following (I think that's the term) some of my friends on Facebook. The other day I opened up Facebook and literally my entire feed was filled with this crap.

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I don't think he should be prosecuted. Its not his fault people are dumber than poo. I have numerous family members who do believe most of the fake news that comes on and it gives me a headache seeing them share it, its numbing that people can be so niave and utterly incompetent.

 

Working in the media this is also frustrating, myself and my fellow coworkers at our station work hard to get the facts and give both sides ( we've dumped stories because we didn't have both sides of it) Now I can't say that's true for all of the news people in Rapid ( shockingly the one who isn't, is very pro Trump with his constant Facebook posts).

Then people blame the media for a bias and conspiracy and coverups, its all bull.

What happens if someone on your station does a story, goes live etc with a topic that is fake? Aren't there some ramifications?

 

I think a lot of people need protecting from themselves. The fact that we haven't been doing a very good job of that in the last few years now has us "celebrating" the election of a reality star, internet trolling criminal.

 

EDIT - we used to be able to count on news stations and papers to hold themselves accountable for doing the diligence that your station does. Since we can no longer do that, I think we've got to do something else. Not sure what that is, but if we have a world where people are this stupid we have an obligation to limit the damage they can do.

Yes, if someone did a fake story or spread lies in their report or live they would end up in a meeting and be in some trouble.

 

I think being in small town Rapid City shelters us from "being first" that you have with 24-7 news networks, and big cities with high crime, corruption and big political names. How many stories were reported by all these stations with the Boston bombing and Sandy Hook? People would just say whatever to them they would want to report it to be "first" and get viewers, more viewers better sales $$$$, that's where a lot of this has come from IMO, the 24-7 brought it with all the misinformation, which led to conspiracies and now has snowballed into the media always lies and these fake sites gaining in popularity

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