KEEPING IT REAL

In honor of April Fools’ Day, we’re giving you some facts about fake news.

WHAT IS FAKE NEWS?

Fake news is not new, and phony stories made up for political reasons have been around since the country was founded. What’s new about fake news is that in the age of social media it’s been easy to make, easy to spread and profitable.

Two examples

It doesn’t take long to create a fake news site. A report by The New York Times found that a site calling itself ChristianTimesNewspaper.com was started with a $5 domain name purchase and a clever college graduate looking to pay off student loans. The site collected thousands of dollars in ad revenue in a few months from Google as its fabricated stories began to be widely shared.

A story from a site called denverguardian.com included the headline “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder-suicide.” At one point the tale was being shared on Facebook at a rate of 100 shares per minute. When the Denver Post looked into the story, it found the “Denver Guardian” and the story were fabrications. Google announced it permanently banned nearly 200 publishers from its AdSense network in December. AdSense has about 2 million publishers.

THE SPIKE IN FAKE NEWS

The chart below shows the search interest on Google for fake news. There was relatively no interest until a month before the election. The scale shows the highest peak interest over time.

WHAT IS REAL?

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted after the election, the majority of Americans are at least somewhat confident they can recognize fake news when they see it.

DOES IT HAVE ANIMPACT?

After the term fake news became regularly used by Democrats and Republicans in the 2016 election, economists Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford and Hunt Allcott of New York University conducted a study of the role fake news played in the election, particularly in social media. Here’s a look at some of their findings:

Trump stories got attention

The study calculated that fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared more than 30 million times, and fabricated stories favoring Hillary Clinton were shared about 8 million times within

30 days of the election. Did it matter?

The study calculated the impact of social media vs. TV and how many people believed and remembered the fake stories. The results said each fake story share would have needed the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads to have changed the outcome of the election. In short, fake news had an impact but was not extremely influential.

FOOL-PROOFING

The International Federation of Libraries has an eight-step guide to help spot fake news.

Since the election President Donald Trump has continued to use the term “fake news” in his Twitter feed regularly. President Trump’s claims are mostly critical of reports he perceives as biased reporting.

Sources: Pew Research Center, International Federation of Libraries, Stanford University, University of Western Ontario, Google Trends, The New York Times, The Denver Post Check the author: Do a quick search on authors to see if they are credible and real.

Mass confusion The majority of Americans say completely made up news has caused a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current events. Some confusion 24% Not much or no confusion 11% A great deal of confusion 64%

Spreading around 23 percent of U.S. adults say they had shared an online story that they later found out was made up or knew at the time was made up.

Not very/at all confident 15% Somewhat confident 45% Don’t know 1% Very confident 39%

Is it a joke? If it’s too outlandish it might be satire. Research the author and site to be sure.

Check the sources: Click on the links to the supporting sources to determine if the information given supports the story.

Ask an expert Ask a librarian, or consult a fact-checking site: mediabiasfactcheck.com snopes.com Politifact.com

Check your biases Consider if your own beliefs could affect your judgment.

Read beyond: Headlines can be outrageous in an effort to get clicks. What’s the whole story?

Consider the source: Click away from the story to investigate the site, its mission and its contact information.

Check the date: Reposting old news stories doesn’t mean they’re relevant to current events.