Hacker News Reader

I love the onion, but it's deeply disturbing how many people believe their articles are real. There is a small niche online of screenshots of people falling for them: http://literallyunbelievable.org/

I admit that I once fell for an article from the German-based equivalent of the Onion.

I had a good laugh when I checked the domain though.

This page provides some examples of fake news: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an...

"We rated 82 out of a total 666 right-wing Facebook posts as mostly false, for a percentage of 12.3%. Another 169 posts (25.4%) were rated as a mixture of true and false. Viewed separately or together (38%), this is an alarmingly high percentage."

The critical part is the difference in how those on the right and left rate articles that are viewed as right or left leaning. No prizes for guessing how that will turn out.

I'd be surprised if they couldn't identify satire sites.

Some people are not able to tell the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#Taken_seriously ) , and on the other side of the coin, some website could hide behind the the veil of satire to bring fake news ( or maybe put this article as one offshot satire attempt ).