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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

Can someone provide some links to fake news articles? I feel like the term "fake news" became popular after the election yet I haven't actually seen any fake news. Maybe it's because I don't use Facebook?

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Leading up to the election Macedonian teenagers pumped out a bunch of pro Trump made up "news" for profit.

They didn't care about Trump per se, they went where the money was. Pro Trump got the page views like nothing else.

The stories were mainly spread through Facebook shares.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...

>"Yes, the info in the blogs is bad, false, and misleading but the rationale is that 'if it gets the people to click on it and engage, then use it,'" said a university student in Veles[a Macedonian town] who started a US politics site

> I feel like the term "fake news" became popular after the election

You're not wrong. It seemed like suddenly this phrase was everywhere.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fak...

As the Republican coalition is made up of finance people and arms dealers, the Democratic coalition is made up of PR companies and management consultants (a lot like UK Labour.) They overestimated their effectiveness over a general populace, but there's no questioning their expertise in thought-leading the cosmopolitan middle class.

The only question is why wasn't it everywhere before the election?

It most definitely was, but a heated, nearly year and a half long election provided a big economic opportunity for fake news.

Because the mainstream media thought that Trump won't win, and articles attacking him were thought to be "enough". After he won, they needed a new propaganda strategy.

"Fake news" was news before Trump won the election

It was a bit complacent of them, and complaining now isn't going to affect the result. The existence of Macedonian web sites with completely made-up news stories was known about well before the US presidential election, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-...

This should have been a big story before the election, but it seems to have been barely reported on.

Here are some from the mainstream media. They're not the sort of articles that are being complained about, though.

Fake news: http://web.archive.org/web/20070220194853/http://www.timeson...

Debunked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein%27s_alleged_shr...

Fake news: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3664181/JK-Rowling-j...

Debunked: https://skwawkbox.org/2016/07/27/exclusive-interview-with-th...

Fake news: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3686082/Hours-challe...

Debunked: http://www.rationalskepticism.org/news-politics/uk-labour-pa...

Fake news: http://news.sky.com/story/corbyn-heckled-over-eu-vote-its-yo...

Debunked: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/06/news-agenda-...

Best place to check for the latest in fake news is, as always, snopes.com

I can't imagine the kind of pressure they've been under the past year to debunk all these absurd viral stories.

Why do you trust snopes for political fact checking?

The point is, you shouldn't. He's generally pretty accurate though, because he actually investigates stories instead of just accepting them. And that's what you should do if you don't want to be caught out. Some stories are just urban myths (David Mikkelson's/Snopes's original focus), many are just press releases, some are planted by various PR outfits, others are planted by people with a particular agenda. Be skeptical, and investigate whenever you can.

He? Kim LaCapria was doing a lot of the fact checking on political articles during the campaign.

I'm not familiar with the other contributors. I know of David Mikkelson and Barbara Hamel from alt.folklore.urban, and snopes.com was founded by them, and was originally exclusively about urban myths (the "Archive" part).

I think one of the problems is that people who are familiar with the original contributors are transferring that trust to new staff doing the political side.

Can you share your reasons for not trusting snopes debunking of fake news?

Because they hired an author who is a liberal pundit[1][2]. I'm fine with her being a liberal. I also fine with honest pundits of all stripes, but I'm not ok with that in a fact checking site. I think if you are going to claim to do political fact checking, you really need to hire someone who isn't a political pundit. It results in other pundit sites doing this[3].

1) http://www.inquisitr.com/132960/good-job-teahadists-obama-ad...

2) http://www.inquisitr.com/402558/scandal-envy-behind-petraeus...

3) http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/28/snopes-caught-lying-about-...

I don't use them for political fact checking in the nuanced sense of, for instance, how much repealing Obamacare will add to the deficit. Something that is open for interpretation, difficult to nail down, and politically sensitive. That kind of thing is not their specialty.

I do use them to see if headlines are completely made up. For instance, take the story,

"FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment in murder-suicide"

This simply didn't happen, and the source is a website masquerading as a news organization. Snopes is good for rooting out stories such as this, that have no corroboration, no basis in fact or reality.

http://www.snopes.com/fbi-agent-murder-suicide/

Just recently: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/07/german-police-...

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/30/14128508/facebook-fake-ne...

Same here. I see hysteria about it everywhere, and have yet to see a single instance of it.

This thread is full of examples.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/30/14128508/facebook-fake-ne...

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