The topic of “fake news” continues to show strong earned media results. In February, “fake news” was the strongest rising topical trend when it came to earned media, according to mediaQuant, an earned media researcher. Overall, discussion around fake news rose 23% — now scoring a media rating of 94; it had earned a 93 score in January. Over the previous six months, it had been averaging a 71 media rating score.
As Facebook works with The Associated Press, FactCheck.org and other organizations to curb the spread of fake and misleading news on its influential network, teachers say classroom instruction can play a role in deflating the kind of “Pope endorses Trump ” headlines that muddied the waters during the 2016 presidential campaign.
President Donald Trump early Monday blasted “negative polls” as “fake news,” saying the public wants “border security and extreme vetting.” “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting,” he tweeted.
Randall Rothenberg, the head of online advertising trade body the Interactive Advertising Bureau, is urging marketers, ad agencies, tech firms and media companies to take responsibility and help prevent the spread of fake news online.
President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday that NBC News is not giving him the credit he deserves for job-creation announcements from major U.S. and foreign companies. “No wonder the Today Show on biased @NBC is doing so badly compared to its glorious past. Little credibility!” Trump wrote on Twitter, ending his attack against the network.
Exclusives
The marketing industry is facing a moral quandary in the face of a national debate over the role that fake news played in the presidential election and the realization that many websites that promote false and misleading stories are motivated by the money they can make from online advertising.
Sami Main highlights the dynamics including a subscription boom following the post-election, post-truth wave, the fake news explosion and the acceleration of cord cutting.
If enough people now report news as fake, Facebook will pass the content on to third-party fact-checking organizations including ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes. Stories that fail the fact checking will be publicly flagged as “disputed” and be pushed down users’ news feeds.
The problem with fake news is that it often contains truthful elements, something that makes a simple — or even algorithmic — solution elusive. Gerry Smith explains how professional fact checkers grade stories on a more nuanced scale, and that “even an army of fact-checkers may not be enough to police the deluge of dubious stories on Facebook.”
Fake news is mostly a demand-side problem by those drawn to it largely for the titillation effect, Jack Shafer argues. But he says it’s too important to be left to Facebook’s cure. Rather, we need to learn to live with a certain amount of it, we need to educate people in how to spot fake news and ultimately apply “small doses of reason to our media diet.”
Even President Obama has added his voice to the choir raised against the proliferation of fake news on Facebook that many argued helped sway the election result. Such news can poison politics to a degree that “we won’t know what we’re fighting for,” he said Thursday.
