According to Snopes, “In recent years, the spread of fake news stories (designed to drive traffic to fake news-generating sites) by inducing social media users to share links has been increasing in a manner that appears almost exponential.”
Here at BITEME, we love fake news. In fact we used to sit around, reading randomly-clipped articles from the Weekly World News, the Onion, and the New York Post, and then try to guess which paper the clipping came from.
But in case you’re not smart enough to do it yourself, Facebook has announced
Today’s update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook.
Interestingly, the fake ads that used to abound on Facebook seem to be fewer these days.
News flash! Online news stories are sometimes fake.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/online-news-organizations-are-purposely-spreading-fake-news-for-traffic-study/
In the famous words of Cecil Adams, “If hard data were the filtering criterion, you could fit the entire contents of the Internet onto a floppy disk.”
“A team of Italian and American researchers . . . found that adherents to conspiracy theories are highly receptive to claims that support their views and rarely engage with social media pages that question their beliefs.”
Apparently, cognitive bias is news to these researchers. Oh well.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/facebook-conspiracy-theorists-fooled-by-even-the-most-obvious-anti-science-trolling-study/
(Cf. Slenderman — people will believe any fool thing.)
Facebook Reportedly Wants To Tighten Its Grip On Your News:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/24/facebook-hosts-news_n_6931532.html?utm_hp_ref=canada&ir=Canada