Fake news websites in the United States

Fake news websites deliberately publish hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation to drive web traffic inflamed by social media. These sites are distinguished from news satire as fake news articles are usually fabricated to deliberately mislead readers, either for profit or more ambiguous reasons, such as disinformation campaigns. North Macedonia, Romania, and the United States. However, prior to the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, fake news had not impacted the election process to such a high degree. Subsequent to that election, the issue of fake news turned into a political weapon between supporters of Clinton and Trump; due to these back-and-forth complaints, the definition of fake news as used for such argumentation became vaguer. == Methods ==

Fake news websites use a variety of methods to fool their readers into believing their content, either by attempting to persuade the readers that they are legitimate or by distracting readers with incredible news. Clickbait adverts Fake news websites often have article titles that are incredible, prompting the user to click on it and read more. This method of enticing readers to view content on their website often leads to exaggerated or even fake titles. When linked to from other sites, usually social media, having an extraordinary story title played a large part in tricking users who cannot tell if the article is real or not. This became especially relevant in the 2016 U.S. election. Additionally, out-of-context or manipulated images can cause readers to incorrectly assume an article's legitimacy, often due to their inflammatory image choice. Facebook's Vice President of News Feed says the social media giant defines clickbait "as headlines that withhold significant amounts of information and mislead the user". Because it is difficult to determine what content exactly is fake news, the website uses a data set to calculate the likelihood of a headline being clickbait. Impersonation Another method of gaining readers is impersonating a legitimate news organization. This can come in two forms, either by copying a popular news organization's website formatting and pretending to be a lesser known publication or by completely copying an existing website down to its name and authors. or cnn-trending.com. ABCnews.com.co was a fake news website that "crudely" spoofed legitimate journalistic organization ABC News, but was in reality completely unrelated. The site published only fake stories, usually with a realistic clickbait headline, albeit with story-details containing enough flaws that the "discerning reader would likely notice" it was false. The Denver Guardian was a blog site registered in 2016 that claimed to be a legitimate newspaper in Denver, but only ran a single fabricated story that went viral. Typosquatting Typosquatting, a form of cybersquatting, is based on Internet users mistyping the name of a popular Web site. A typosquatter will monitor how many clicks a "typo" domain name receives and use the information to sell advertising for the sites that receive a high volume of "accidental" traffic. Many popular fake news websites like ABCnews.com.co attempted to impersonate a legitimate U.S. news publication, relying on readers not actually checking the address they typed or clicked on. They exploited common misspellings, slight misphrasings and abuse of top-level domains such as .com.co as opposed to .com. Many social media users were duped, believing they were going to an actual news publication's website. Obscurity Since the authors of these websites are not actual reporters, many fake news sites either pretend to have the identity of a reporter or simply do not include an 'About Us' page. When these sites are publicized by actual organizations, they receive a bit of legitimacy along with more viewers. == Fake news campaigns ==

The election cycle of the US office of president has become a focal point around which many campaigns of fake news are organized. 2016 election cycle Fake news websites played a large part in the online news community during the election, reinforced by extreme exposure on Facebook and Google. Approximately 115 pro-Trump fake stories were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared a total of 7.6 million times. There were two main reasons for creating fake news: economical and ideological. Some fake news providers seek to advance candidates they favor. The Romanian man who ran endingthefed.com, for example, claims that he started the site mainly to help Donald Trump's campaign. • Denver Guardian – known for anti-Hillary Clinton articles • Disinfomedia – anti-right articles that aimed to trick alt-rights • NewsPunch – inflammatory for both sides as well as conspiratorial • SubjectPolitics.com – known for anti-Hillary Clinton articles Social media Professor Philip N. Howard of the University of Oxford found that about one half of all news on Twitter directed at Michigan prior to the election was junk or fake. The other half came from real news sources. Criticized for failing to stop fake news from spreading on its platform during the 2016 election, Facebook thought that the problem could be solved by engineering, until May 2017 when it announced plans to hire 3,000 content reviewers. Fraudulent stories during the 2016 U.S. presidential election popularized on Facebook included a viral post that Pope Francis and actor Denzel Washington had endorsed Donald Trump. BuzzFeed News found that on Facebook during the last three months of the election, fake news stories received more attention than real news stories. It was discovered that the top twenty fake news stories had 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments, while the top twenty real news stories were only shared, commented on, and reacted to 7,367,000 times. One prominent fraudulent news story released after the election—that protesters at anti-Trump rallies in Austin, Texas, were "bused in"—started as a tweet by one individual with 40 Twitter followers. Over the next three days, the tweet was shared at least 16,000 times on Twitter and 350,000 times on Facebook, and promoted in the conservative blogosphere, before the individual stated that he had fabricated his assertions. Shortly after the election, Obama again commented on the problem, saying in an appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems". President Trump also commented significantly on fake news, creating the Fake News Awards to highlight real news outlets that publicly "misrepresented" him. "Pizzagate" In early November 2016, fake news sites and Internet forums falsely implicated the restaurant Comet Ping Pong and Democratic Party figures as part of a fictitious child trafficking ring, which was dubbed "Pizzagate". The conspiracy theory was debunked by the fact-checking website Snopes.com, The New York Times, and Fox News. The restaurant's owners and staff were harassed and threatened on social media. After threats, Comet Ping Pong increased security for concerts held inside its premises. Days after the attack, Hillary Clinton spoke out on the dangers of fake news in a tribute speech to retiring Senator Harry Reid at the U.S. Capitol. Clinton called the spread of fraudulent news and fabricated propaganda an epidemic that flowed through social media. According to Will Robinson, a Democratic consultant and a founding partner of New Media Firm, "This is the first post-mass media election in which, for the first time in U.S. history, more significant amounts of money will be spent on social media and digital than on broadcast." Glen Bolger, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican polling firm, predicted that "If you like clean, positive, issue-oriented campaigns, you're going to be disappointed. It's going to be rough and tumble." In December Facebook and Twitter disabled a global network of 900 pages, groups and accounts sending pro-Trump messages. The fake news accounts managed to avoid detection as being inauthentic, and they used photos generated with the aid of artificial intelligence. The campaign was based in the U.S. and Vietnam. "There's no question that social media has really changed the way that we talk about politics," said Deen Freelon, a media professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The No. 1 example is our president who, whether you like him or not, uses social media in ways that are unprecedented for a president and I would say any politician." A 2019 article in USA Today stated that "[In the 2020 election,] with so many people running for president and so many bad actors trying to spread disinformation about them, it will be difficult to determine what is 'fake news' and who created it. The question is not if or when there will be disinformation campaigns, because they have already started." == Notable examples of fake news websites ==

Many of these websites are categorized as fake news because they have a satirical take on the news, but ultimately fail to convince their readers that their content is actually fake. RealTrueNews that the author believed would teach his alt-right friends about reader gullibility. Chacon wrote a fake transcript for Clinton's leaked speeches in which Clinton explains bronies to Goldman Sachs bankers. Chacon later told Brent Bambury of CBC Radio One program Day 6 that he was so shocked at readers' ignorance he felt it was like an episode from The Twilight Zone. The Daily Beast reported on the popularity of Chacon's fictions being reported as if it were factual and noted pro-Trump message boards and YouTube videos routinely believed them. Huzlers Similar to Global Associated News, many readers have been tricked into believing the satire website Huzlers. Snopes has over 30 separate fact checks on their articles, each one correcting the fake news from Huzlers. According to owner Pablo Reyes Jr., the website does not "try to trick people intentionally". 70news 70news was a WordPress-based blog site, which produced fake news during 2016; in particular, one story falsely stated that Donald Trump had won the popular vote in the 2016 election, fooled search engine algorithms and ranked very highly in results the day after the election. When googling "final election vote count", the website 70News was the top one to come up. It truthfully stated that Trump had won the electoral college but falsely stated that Trump was ahead of Hillary Clinton in the popular vote. By the next day, the story had dropped one spot to number two on the search list. Google commented that its software algorithms use hundreds of factors to determine the ranking. Disinfomedia In addition to disconnected sites that run on an inadequate budget, there are sites with many connections behind them: from Los Angeles founded Disinfomedia, a company that owns many fake news sites. He gave interviews under a pseudonym, Allen Montgomery. After the election, Horner said that he felt his efforts helped Trump. In a follow-up interview with Rolling Stone, Horner revealed The Washington Post profile piece on him spurred increased interest with over 60 interview requests from media including ABC News, CBS News, and CBS's Inside Edition. Horner explained his writing style: articles that appeared legitimate at the top and became increasingly absurd as the reader progressed. Within a few days, the story had earned him around $5,000. Chandler, Arizona, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. == Spread and identification of fake news ==

44 percent of all US adults get news from Facebook. Investigations conducted in 2017 showed nearly 40 percent of content by far-right Facebook pages and 19 percent of far-left pages were false or misleading. A study conducted by the Stanford Graduate School of Education from January 2015 revealed difficulties that middle, high school, and college students experienced in differentiating between advertisements and news articles, or identifying where information originated. One concern noted by researchers of the study is that democracy is at risk of devolving due to the ways in which falsehoods about civic issues can quickly spread with a growing ease of access. In one assessment, high school students were asked to evaluate two Facebook posts mentioning Donald Trump's candidacy for president; one was from an actual Fox News account and the other was from a fake account. Over 30 percent of students stated that the fake account was more reliable because of its graphic elements and only a quarter recognized the significance of the blue checkmark on Twitter and Facebook, which indicates that an account was marked as legitimate. == U.S. response ==

Educational Elementary school teachers have decided to challenge results from the Stanford study by showing children the importance of not being deceived by what is fake. Fifth grade teacher Scott Bedley in California created his own version of "Simon Says", in which students are given three minutes to read an article and decide whether a news story is true or false. Bedley worked with another teacher in Kansas, Todd Flory, to devise a "fake news challenge" via Skype whereby Flory's class picked two real articles and wrote a fake one, to be presented to Bedley's class in California. Andreas Schleicher, the lead of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), announced in 2017 that his organization was initiating "global competencies" tests that will be taken by 15-year-olds around the world alongside the OECD's current reading, maths and science assessments, which are conducted every three years. This will test how well students can discern fake news outside of their sociopolitical bubble. Jennifer Coogan, editor in chief of education startup Newsela, has partnered with the American Press Institute to help combat fake news consumption in addition to its regular literacy classes. She believes it is now the teacher's responsibility to help teach their students about which media to believe since it is near impossible for a parent to monitor every source that a child will read. Commercial Facebook After receiving heavy criticism for not stopping the extreme number of fake news articles on its platform, Facebook announced in December 2016 that it would begin to flag fake news. If enough users flagged a story, the story would be sent to a third-party organization to check its veracity. If it failed, it would lose news feed priority as well as have "disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers" as a caption. Facebook is also attempting to reduce their financial incentives in an attempt to decrease the amount of fake news. The fact checking organizations involved are ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes. In 2018, Facebook has admitted that it "fell short" in stopping outside meddling in the U.S. presidential election. This admission comes after increased scrutiny from lawmakers in a broader backlash against Silicon Valley as well as a Senate hearing for social media company executives. In today's world young people rely heavily on social media to access information that is broadcast on the news. Many teens described traditional news as "boring" and "the same", implying that it was predictable and devoid of any questioning of power. In contrast, they felt that Facebook postings, YouTube videos, blogs, opinionated talk shows and fake news provided background information and perspectives that enabled them to understand the larger meanings of political events and develop their own opinions. For them, this was a more truthful and authentic rendition of news. Fact-checking organizations In the aftermath of the election, many fact-checking websites teamed up with Facebook in order to check on the veracity of linked articles. U.S. Senator Angus King told the Portland Press Herald that tactics used by Russia during the 2016 U.S. election were analogous to those used against other countries. In an interview with CNN, Senator King warned against ignoring the problem, saying it was a bipartisan issue. Amid worries about fake news and disinformation being spread by Russia, representatives in the U.S. Congress called for more action to track and counter alleged propaganda emanating from overseas. On November 20, 2016, legislators approved a measure within the National Defense Authorization Act to ask the U.S. State Department act against propaganda with an inter-agency panel. By doing so they went against the preference of incoming Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who downplayed any potential Russian meddling in the election. Counter-Disinformation Team The United States Department of State planned to use a unit called the Counter-Disinformation Team, formed with the intention of combating disinformation from the Russian government; it was disbanded in September 2015 after department heads missed the scope of propaganda before the 2016 U.S. election. The U.S. State Department put eight months into developing the unit before scrapping it. It would have been a reboot of the Active Measures Working Group set up by President Reagan. The Counter-Disinformation Team was set up under the Bureau of International Information Programs. == See also ==