> Yes I did. Did you read my comment? There is a reason we are all of the sudden talking about Fake News and just a few days almost nobody thought about the phrase. It has little to do with elections in India.
[2014]
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-intern...
> The Internet’s fake news problem
> Some of it is satire (The Onion and, to a less proven extent, its clickbaiting sister site Clickhole continue to bear the standard of mastery), but the larger part of what’s out there is “satire” — from the chronically unfunny half-jokes of the Daily Currant to the shrug-inducing falsehoods of Empire News , the toothlessly goofy sendups of Free Wood Post , the over-the-top Christian-trolling of Christwire , and the more pernicious race-baiting of sites like CreamBPM and Newsbuzzdaily .
https://newrepublic.com/article/118013/satire-news-websites-...
> Upworthy and Viralnova, at least, are honest about what they're selling: gaudy, sentimental, life-affirming stories. But the Currant class promises humor and almost universally fails to deliver it—because the actual goal is SEO clickbait. Given that, you might wonder why they even bother identifying themselves, usually in disclaimers at the bottom of the page, as satirical news sites.The answer is simple: to avoid a lawsuit.
> But the biggest mystery isn’t the identity of the conmen—it’s how much they're hauling in. Barkeley told Slate that his humor provides him with a “tight but livable” income. A number of publically available valuation services, which are by no means precise, estimate that The Daily Currant brings in anywhere from mid-five figures to $130,000 dollars a year on ad revenue alone. Finkelstein, the SEO expert, says even those numbers may be low, as they doesn't include revenue derived from short-term revenue bumps when a story goes viral. “I would estimate their yearly revenue from display advertising at about $100,000–$150,000 a year,” he said, noting that even with his expertise and access to estimation tools, it's not an exact science. “It isn’t perfect, but it is close. But at most, over the few years they’ve existed, The Daily Currant may have made as much as $500,000 in revenue—split between two people who are hardly doing any work.”
> The Daily Currant is likely the king of this particular con. But others may be catching up. The same public revenue calculators place Mediamass’s annual ad revenue alone at just under $40,000; Huzzlers' is rapidly approaching $45,000. Not bad takes, especially when you consider that some of these sites don’t even bother to write their own unfunny canards: They just steal them from other sites.
[2016]
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-human-news-editors-2...
> After a Gizmodo story claimed Facebook editors had suppressed conservative news from the Trending section, the social network fired those editors in favor of an algorithm. As part of the change, the Trending section no longer shows custom headlines and summaries of news topics.
> “We’re not in the business of deciding what issues people should read about," he said. "We don’t create content. We’re not in that business.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/10...
> Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors