Rise of fake news for fun - cause trouble - make money

[Anthea]

The US election campaign has involved a lot of fact checking, resulting in an open season for the fakers and fraudsters trying to get you to click. We're nearly there, but don't relax just yet.

This is how fakes happen and how to ensure you're not the one left holding the blushing emoji after an unfortunate sharing incident.

'Rigging the election'

Claims of voter fraud in the Democrat primaries keep resurfacing, apparently supported by video.



The CCTV showing "Democrats stuffing votes into ballot boxes" includes the same footage the BBC used on our Youtube account about Russian elections in September 2016.



The source of the story as identified by Snopes - one of the internet's oldest debunking sites - is a fake news site, Christian Times Newspaper. Which is not the Christian Times, also a newspaper, and a genuine news site.

Making a site look like something you might have heard of - passing off - is about as standard for hoaxers as fake ID is for teenagers. It might look respectable but unless you are absolutely sure, don't share it.

Spoof sites tend to have a lot of broken links that don't go anywhere, or which lead to blatantly false stories.

Haven't I seen you before?

Video being described as something it's not is increasingly challenging for fact checkers. We suggest that you always search video platforms for anything with a similar description.

The hoaxers could have done some pretty basic cropping to hide the datestamp and make the massive Russian flag on the left less obvious. They didn't, which made it easier to spot.

It's not quite faking a Facebook Live from space, but this one does fit the "dog pretending to be a cat" typology of fake story.



Things to ask yourself before you share a claim

Have I heard of the publisher before?
Is this the source I think it is, or does it sound a bit like them?
Can I point to where this happened on a map?
Has this been reported anywhere else?
Is there more than one piece of evidence for this claim?
Could this be something else?

'No justification' for voter fraud claim

Sometimes a fake claim works on the principle that if you throw enough bricks, eventually you build a house. Think moon landings.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has played the voter fraud card, warning his supporters "Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!"



We've dealt with this one already and the answer to "is the US election really rigged?" is "there's just no justification for concern about widespread voter fraud," according to Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Trump-supporter.

The same goes for "dead people vote Democrat", "people bussed in" and "stolen votes" claims.

It's also something of an US Election meme - Newsnight reported on the same sort of claims in 2008

Sharing these sort of claims as accurate will only make it harder for you to spot the outrageously false claims when they come along.

If in doubt, type it out

It's almost inevitable that someone will try and call the US election result using a fake account posing as your preferred big news organisation.

See if you can spot which of these is a genuine BBC News Twitter account.



At a glance anyone could be forgiven for reading BBC Mews as BBC News - character substitution combined with branding that looks official is a common trick of the fakers.

That can mean using a zero (0) instead of an 'o' or two words that look similar on the page - for example gum and gurn. If it looks wrong when you type it out, then it's probably wrong.

If we had a dime for every time we've seen this trick, we'd make Warren Buffett look like a pauper.

Our advice is to make a list of accounts you know are genuine now and use them as a reference on the night. If it's a site you're less familiar with, check where else it is mentioned and what they say about it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37848350

[Anthea]

The rise and rise of fake news

The deliberate making up of news stories to fool or entertain is nothing new. But the arrival of social media has meant real and fictional stories are now presented in such a similar way that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the two apart.

While the internet has enabled the sharing of knowledge in ways that previous generations could only have dreamed of, it has also provided ample proof of Winston Churchill's line that "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on".

So with research suggesting an increasing proportion of US adults are getting their news from social media, it's likely that more and more of us are seeing - and believing - information that is not just inaccurate, but totally made up.

There are hundreds of fake news websites out there, from those which deliberately imitate real life newspapers, to government propaganda sites, and even those which tread the line between satire and plain misinformation.



One of them is The National Report which advertises itself as "America's Number 1 Independent News Source", and which was set up by Allen Montgomery (not his real name).

"There are times when it feels like a drug," Montgomery told BBC Trending.

"There are highs that you get from watching traffic spikes and kind of baiting people into the story. I just find it to be a lot of fun."

One of The National Report's biggest ever stories was a scare about a US town being cordoned off with a deadly disease, and as Montgomery explains they've mastered the art of getting people to read and share their fake news offering.

"Obviously the headline is key, and the domain name itself is very much a part of the formula - you need to have a fake news site that looks legitimate as can be," Montgomery says.

"Beyond the headline and the first couple of paragraphs people totally stop reading, so as long as the first two or three paragraphs sound like legitimate news then you can do whatever you want at the end of the story and make it ridiculous."

But why go to such trouble? The answer is there is big money to be made from sites by The National Report which host web advertising, and these potentially huge rewards entice website owners to move away from funny satirical jokes and towards more believable content because it is likely to be more widely shared.

"We've had stories that have made $10,000 (about £8,100). When we really tap in to something and get it to go big then we're talking about in the thousands of dollars that are made per story," Montgomery says.



But how much should be worried by fooled by sites that set out to get fake news stories up and running?

Brooke Binkowski from Snopes, one of the largest fact checking websites which fights online misinformation, believes that while individual fake news stories may not be dangerous their potential to cause damage becomes more powerful over time and when considered in the aggregate.

"There's a lot of confirmation bias," she says. "A lot of people want proof that their world view is the accurate and appropriate one."

And that idea of reinforcing people's beliefs and falsely confirming their prejudices is something that Allen Montgomery says his fake news site actively tries to exploit.

"We're constantly trying to tune into feelings that we think that people already have or want to have," he says.

"Recently we did a story about Hillary Clinton being fed the answers prior to the debate. There was already some low level chatter about that having happened - it was all fake - but that sort of headline gets into the right wing bubble and they run with it."

Buzzfeed's Craig Silverman, who heads a team looking into the effects of fake news, explains just how easily fake news can end up being reported as true by the mainstream media.

"A fake news website might publish a hoax, then because it's getting social attention another site might pick it up, write that story as though it's true and may not link back to the original fake news website," Silverman says.

"From there it's a chain reaction until at some point a journalist at a largely credible outlet might see it and quickly write something up, because many journalists are trying to write as many stories as possible and write stories that get traffic and social attention. The incentive is towards producing more and checking less."



And as Anthony Adornato, assistant Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College in New York explains journalists are not only under increasing pressure but in many cases are also not being given sufficient guidance on how to properly verify stories.

"The policies in newsrooms haven't caught up with the practice," Adornato says.

"Its commonplace that news outlets are relying on content that folks have shared, but not every newsroom has a policy regarding how to verify and authenticate this information."

A recent study of local TV stations in the US conducted by Adornato revealed that that nearly 40% of their editorial policies did not include any guidelines on how to verify information from social media, yet news managers at the TV stations admitted that at least a third of their news bulletins had reported information from social media that later was revealed to be false or inaccurate.

So with the fake news floodgates now wide open, has the battle to contain it already been lost?

Allen Montgomery says Facebook has taken steps to reduce the impact of fake sites like his own.

"We were specifically targeted by the Facebook changes in their news feed algorithm. They've drowned out our stories from being shared and from being liked, and I have no doubt that they are doing the same to other fake news sites. Really though, if there's money to be made - and there is - you just have to get more creative."

Montgomery says he now has nine fake news sites around which he moves content to try to beat Facebook censoring.

So if fake news sites aren't going away, Buzzfeed's Craig Silverman says that more needs to be done to ensure that people aren't duped by them.

"Journalists need to get training so that they can quickly spot fakes, and people in school should learn how to read things critically online - they should learn how to research and check multiple sources online."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-37846860