I think (all) the ad networks are the grandfathers of fake news. Maybe it's not news, but with "native advertising" the trend to forward folks to a blog post about this AMAZING PRODUCT instead of shopping cart started. I blame Taboola!
think about all the 'promoted stories', 'paid content', ads that look like search results, astroturfing on reddit, etc etc.
The term 'fake news' is misleading. This stuff isn't 'news' at all. The stories often have poorly drawn conclusions that misinterpret primary sources and get people's tempers going, or make them aware of new products, or herbal supplements, or garner more subscribers, etc.
Fake news does not look like ads, and if targeted to receptive individuals, it gets retweeted/fb-shared to a like-minded audience. The comparison with "nobody clicks on ads" is not apt.
Social media + sponsored content = fake news problem. It’s taking the trust and integrity of the platform and selling that in exchange for exposure to unverified content.
Purveyor of fake news says people are falling for fake news.
Washingtonpost is as much fake news as anything.
The entire media market is based on people falling for fake news. Otherwise washingtonpost, nytimes or any media wouldn't exist. Advertisements ( aka fake "news" ) wouldn't work if people didn't fall for it.
The original concept of fake news was actually quite interesting: People who knowingly writes completely false things ("The statue of liberty has fallen down" or "Water found on the sun") just to get people to click the ads. It's a much easier problem to solve than biased news.
I thought it was weird that people would create fake news, but I just realized that it's all about getting clicks/ad views.
If Facebook/Google instituted a policy of denying ad payouts to fake news (assuming that could be reliably determined) then the problem would correct itself. Of course, content creators would argue that it's "entertainment" and that "no one really believes it" but that's another issue. :)
It's not even that surprising. Most of the major news sites are stuffed full of ads that look like fake news articles these days. They probably have the sense to turn them off on articles about fake news, but otherwise they don't care. You just don't hear about it as much because news sites don't generally criticise their fellow news sites in the same way they do sites like Facebook and YouTube that are a threat to their entire industry.
Exactly my thought when reading the article. Of course Facebook and Google have the power to stop fake news, simply move away from the ads business model and suddenly there's no incentive to invest in fake news.
Fake news is an offshoot of the web being an advertising space with a seemingly unending supply of brain hacked human bots.
That's neither fake nor news. 1) You'd have to have a pretty loose definition of news to include that message as news. And 2) Ad-blockers obviously affect page content (by you know, blocking it). I don't have the data to support it but anecdotally I've definitely seen it affect performance via javascript issues that arise.
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