LIES, DAMN LIES, AND VIRAL CONTENT

How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation.

Project Leader:

• Craig Silverman

Craig Silverman‘s new report, Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, is a must-read for any journalist or editor who works with fast-moving news. You can download it here (pdf).

At the end of last year, Gawker editor Max Read published a memo outlining the strategy and priorities for the site in 2015.
“Already ankle-deep in smarmy bullshit and fake ‘viral’garbage, we are now standing at the edge of a gurgling swamp of it,”he wrote.
Read’s direction to staff was to avoid being yet another site rushing to post viral stories. The goal, he said, was to be “a trusted guide to the overwhelming new Internet, your escort through and over the bog of Facebook and Twitter, your calibration tool for the cycle of incident and outrage and parody social-media account. What’s actually happening here? Is this story news? Is that photo real?”
This strategy runs counter to the approach many news websites currently take when it comes to viral content, online rumors and unverified claims. They scour the web and social media for anything that might generate traffic, and work to get it up and promoted as a fast as possible. Verification and context are someone else’s job, should they choose to do it.

Story and paper here
http://towcenter.org/research/lies-damn-lies-and-viral-content/

Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_term=.yo61Nv5XQ#.hjyRGBlPM

Hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed News. The review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected from the right and from the left also found that the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook — far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison.

The rapid growth of these pages combines with BuzzFeed News’ findings to suggest a troubling conclusion: The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear. This approach has precursors in partisan print and television media, but has gained a new scale of distribution on Facebook. And while it isn’t a solely American phenomenon — the British Labour party found powerful support from a similar voice — these pages are central to understanding a profoundly polarized moment in American life.

Art of the Lie

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-have-always-lied-does-it-matter-if-they-leave-truth-behind-entirely-art?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/artofthelie

Post Truth – Post Fact and "Truthiness" 

• Barack Obama’s birth certificate was faked, 
• the president founded Islamic State (IS),  
• the Clintons are killers  
• and the father of a rival [Ted Cruz] was with Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot John F. Kennedy.   

“Mr Trump is the leading exponent of “post-truth” politics—a reliance on assertions that “feel true” but have no basis in fact. His brazenness is not punished, but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to elite power.” Economist September 10 2016 

The Economist goes on to argue:  

But post-truth politics is more than just an invention of whingeing elites who have been outflanked. The term picks out the heart of what is new: that truth is not falsified, or contested, but of secondary importance. Once, the purpose of political lying was to create a false view of the world. The lies of men like Mr Trump do not work like that. They are not intended to convince the elites, whom their target voters neither trust nor like, but to reinforce prejudices.  

Feelings, not facts, are what matter in this sort of campaigning. Their opponents’ disbelief validates the us-versus-them mindset that outsider candidates thrive on. And if your opponents focus on trying to show your facts are wrong, they have to fight on the ground you have chosen. The more Remain campaigners attacked the Leave campaign’s exaggerated claim that EU membership cost Britain £350m ($468m) a week, the longer they kept the magnitude of those costs in the spotlight. 

  

Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content

More

Craig Silverman‘s new report, Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, is a must-read for any journalist or editor who works with fast-moving news. You can download it here (pdf).

At the end of last year, Gawker editor Max Read published a memo outlining the strategy and priorities for the site in 2015.
“Already ankle-deep in smarmy bullshit and fake ‘viral’garbage, we are now standing at the edge of a gurgling swamp of it,”he wrote.
Read’s direction to staff was to avoid being yet another site rushing to post viral stories. The goal, he said, was to be “a trusted guide to the overwhelming new Internet, your escort through and over the bog of Facebook and Twitter, your calibration tool for the cycle of incident and outrage and parody social-media account. What’s actually happening here? Is this story news? Is that photo real?”
This strategy runs counter to the approach many news websites currently take when it comes to viral content, online rumors and unverified claims. They scour the web and social media for anything that might generate traffic, and work to get it up and promoted as a fast as possible. Verification and context are someone else’s job, should they choose to do it.