Fake news fooling millions!

• Author: Stoffers, Carl

Fabricated stones on social media are influencing major events like the presidential election. How can we separate fact from fiction?

Last March, a fake news site called The Boston Tribune went viral with a story that the government was secretly tracking Americans using computer chips in credit cards. In October, another site peddling bogus news, The Free Thought Project, got more than 28,000 people on Facebook to share its claim that U.S. Marines were heading to Europe to battle Russia. And a third site, The Political Insider, had thousands sharing a fabricated report in August that Hillary Clinton was selling weapons to ISIS.

These invented stories are part of a disturbing trend: Fake news sites--many with official-sounding names and professional designs--are flourishing. Once found only in the dark corners of the internet, these sites have begun to play a role in major events, including the recent presidential campaign. In fact, some political analysts say fake news stories spread on social media might have helped tip the election to Donald Trump.

Experts are warning that these sites are eroding the public's ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. At the same time, tech companies like Facebook and Google are struggling with how to deal with fake news--an effort that's complicated by free speech concerns.

"These fake news sites exist to misinform through a whole cycle of misinformation," says Jeremy Littau, a digital media professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. "They're trying to get you to believe something that's independent of the truth."

Part of the problem is that fake news can be hard to identify (see "How to Spot Fake News"). More than 80 percent of middle school students couldn't distinguish between legitimate news stories and ads disguised as news, according to a recent Stanford University study. In the same study, 40 percent of high school students believed a news story they were shown was real simply because a photo accompanied it--even though no sources were cited in the article.

What's more, although many hoax stories are blatantly untrue--like the one in November about hundreds of paid protesters being bused to an anti-Trump rally in Texas--some contain partial truths or factual distortions, making them even harder to spot.

Because the internet provides anonymity, anyone with a computer and design software can start a news site and pass it off as legitimate: political partisans trying to help or harm a candidate, amateur bloggers, or even someone just trying to make a buck. That's what motivated a 17-year-old in the European nation of Macedonia to create DailyNewsPolitics.com and begin inventing stories about the U.S. election. "I started the site for a easy way to make money," he told BuzzFeed in slightly broken English.

'Yellow Journalism'

Fake or highly distorted news is nothing new. The earliest American newspapers were instruments of political parties that often printed lies about the opposition. In the 19th century, sensationalized...