Lessons from The New York Times Super Tuesday hoax: Five ways to spot fake news by Josh Sterns.
From the post:
On the eve of Super Tuesday, a New York Times article made the rounds on social media reporting that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren had endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. The only problem: It was fake.
The New York Times released a statement and others debunked the fake on Tuesday, as people were headed to the polls, but by that point the fake article “had been viewed more than 50,000 times, with 15,000 shares on Facebook,” the Times reported.
This is just the another in a long line of fake news reports which have swept through social media in recent years. Last year Twitter’s share price spiked after a fake Bloomberg article claimed that Google was considering buying the social media platform. In 2012, Wikileaks created a fake New York Times op-ed from then-Times-editor Bill Keller defending Wikileaks in what appeared to be a change of position from his earlier statements about the group. The fake was so convincing that even New York Times journalists were sharing it on Twitter.
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Josh mixes “fake” news as in being factually false with “fake” news that originates from a fake source.
The “New York Times” (fake source) article about Elizabeth Warren endorsing Bernie Sanders (factually false) is an example of combining the two types of fakes.
Josh’s five steps will help you avoid fake sources, not helpful on avoiding factually false stories.