Fake News ‘Epidemic’ Turn Out To Be False

The recent furor around the prevalence of fake news on social media turns out to be based on fake news stories published by the mainstream media.  According to President Obama, fake news is so bad that it threatens democracy itself. This is all based on articles published by outlets such as Buzzfeed who suggest that fake news websites beat ‘real’ news by obtaining more ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ during the recent election cycle. Richmond.com reports: There are at least two problems with this. First, the epidemic of fake news is overstated. Second, fake news is far from new. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney took the trouble to look beyond the headline about the Buzzfeed analysis. Turns out the “analysis” was not at all rigorous. It compared only the Facebook engagement metrics — the number of shares, reactions, and comments — for a small handful of stories. The top fake story — about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump — got 960,000 engagements. The top real story, comparing Trump’s level of corruption to Clinton’s, got 849,000 engagements. If Facebook were the only source for news, that could be alarming — although it’s worth noting that engagement does not equal acceptance. How many of [...]

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