Fake news goes further than politics. Its claws reach to everything unscientific. Those claws are -in theory- rather enormous for the amount of unscientific debate on the Internet is huge.<p>Take the following two examples from the alt. health community: David 'Avocado' Wolfe [1] and Dr. Joseph Mercola [2]. The former is a self proclaimed health guru with no medical degree yet he makes all kind of (dangerous) health claims. The latter's similar tho he does have a degree. The latter's article is on a website called Quackwatch. If Quackwatch is credible (I didn't verify) it could be interesting to hook into them, perhaps via an API.<p>Funny enough when I searched for these two (I used DDG, YMMV) in combination with the term fake news I found articles where they comment about other (supposed) fake news. For example, in one article they claimed in the headline CNN distributed fake news. I don't know if that's deliberate, but at least from a SEO PoV it seems clever of them.<p>Another interesting question is, could -in a future- whitelisting be a better default modus operandi than blacklisting?<p>[1] <a href="https://au.be.yahoo.com/lifestyle/real-life/a/34572713/david-wolfe-youre-fake-news-yahoo7-be/" rel="nofollow">https://au.be.yahoo.com/lifestyle/real-life/a/34572713/david...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html</a>
>So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.<p>As long as it remains an assumption that these are 'independent' non-partisan fact-checking organizations, I would discard any conclusions drawn here.<p>Also Breitbart is highly editorialized news and commentary, but it's certainly not fake. The fact that its CEO strategized the largest political upset in recent history is very, very real.
The biggest challenge to branded corporate 'masthead credibility' information sources/'news' aggregators is their reliance on firms like Outbrain for advertising revenue. Outbrain packages up salacious and questionable material as click bait and runs it on sites like SFGate, supposedly as additional 'news' from a partner of SFGate. The result is deterioration of trust and respect for SFGate.<p>The fuzzy term 'fake news' is fraught with problems. We've been lied to so many times in the western world via 'official' sources many people simply don't trust the mainstream media any more. Apparently more people were watching Yogi Bear reruns than CNN in the US a few weeks ago during prime time.<p>The joy of the internet is our ability to consume information from a wide variety of sources, triangulate across many ideas, reporting and opinions to make up our own minds. The old model of having a small number of 'news outlets', such as the four commercial TV channels and one main 'news' broadcast a night that worked so well during the Vietnam war era is long gone.<p>There seems to be a hankering for regulated, rubber stamped 'news' and credibility checks, which I think is profoundly undemocratic and against the principles of free speech.
It is way too simplistic to decree certain sites fake or not, and I would have hoped than an article from MIT would acknowledge this instead of reinforcing this "fake news" meme.<p>If you've heard about yellow journalism as well as Project Mockingbird, then you can appreciate the fact that news is a tool to entertain and manufacture consent and occasionally inform. All of it lies on a spectrum between fake and not fake. Even The Onion which is intentionally satirical, typically has a nugget of truth in each of his stories, which is why it's good satire.<p>If you're not already convinced how ridiculous this term is, consider for a moment: How do you prove if a certain publication is "fake news" or not? If a "not fake news" mainstream news source publishes a single story which is later corrected or retracted, is the entire publication forever labeled "fake news" or is a certain amount of fake stories required for a publication as a whole to be considered fake?
Distribution of propaganda by bots is at least sort-of democratic. I wish there was more analysis of the automated suppression of news by the various platforms (twitter, facebook et al).
Would have liked to have seen a concrete example of where it worked and walked the reader through a simple demonstration. At some point in the article you realize it's all just a bunch of hand-waving.
Paper would be better titled as "Examination of Online News Amplification through Social Bots".<p>There are no multiple-bullet itemized criteria on what makes "Fake News" in the whitepaper.<p>Some of the listed websites makes uses of only links to other websites, also of dubious nature. Perhaps, that's the criteria.
arxiv link to the underlying research: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592</a>
FoxNews and Brietbart are 2 sides of the same coin. They are right/far-right propaganda outlets, who's only aim is political discord. They will use fake or blown out of proportion or Pumped up editorial "news" segments to spread their message to serve an agenda. These bots help their message spread. Any guess who's agenda they serve?