Information overload fuels 'fake news': U.S. study

come on, everybody likes telling lies if you can get away with it when your an adult. if your a child you get the wooden spoon, but as an adult you can become a successful wealthy politician.

"Fake news" has become a troubling phenomenon

From the fake news, to the fake comment, fake rating to push your sales and lower competitors's one, all are fake nowadays, but only because you can tell lies toward the general public using social networks and get away with it, put the legal responsibility of the social network carrying the lies in the balance and things will start to change but that won't happen.

It's hard to say what could counter the rise; if you ban it you effectively curb free speech by limiting things like satire, etc. I think the education level of the population is the deciding factor here. You barely have any negative effects of fake news in Western EU countries or other developed nations, only America where PISA scores are on par with third world countries is the problem so widespread and disruptive it is likely to end in civil war.

Because anybody with a blog can purport to follow journalism ethics

Always take personal blogs with a grain of salt - particularly those without seasoned editors to check their works

The authors of the new study suggested cutting back on "bots" -- algorithms with fake "profiles" on social media networks. They flood the platform with messages on a certain topic in a bid to marginalise other viewpoints.

Such bot accounts "make up a significant portion of online profiles and many of them flood social media with high volumes of low-quality information to manipulate the public discourse," said the research team.

This happened with the false "Syria Hoax" propaganda that was traced back to a network of bot Russian social media accounts:

https://medium.com/dfrlab/how-the-alt-right-brought-syriahoax-to-america-47745118d1c9

  This latest social media coup comes just months after Russia's attempts to use similar tactics to meddle with the U.S. presidential election, which U.S. officials believe was undertaken by a secretive Russian intelligence operation based in St. Petersberg tasked with manipulating public opinion.

The tweet rapidly went viral, boosting the hashtag into the trending lists. However, much of its initial viral appeal appears to have come from suspiciously hyperactive accounts that tweeted it dozens or hundreds of times in the space of a few hours.

All together, these forty accounts were responsible for just over 3,000 tweets between 16:00 and 22:00 UTC on April 6. The hashtag as a whole generated 20,000 posts over that period: in other words, forty accounts provided 15 per cent of all its traffic.

It is also apparent that, to spread the hashtag, some sleeper bots were activated. For example, @dr_trumpenstein was created in June 2016. In total, by April 7 the account had tweeted 269 times, but it had used #SyriaHoax 155 times, which means almost 60 per cent of its tweets were posted to promote one hashtag. (In the evening of April 7, all but ten of its tweets were deleted.)

No. Information overload might fuel careless readers being unwilling to take the time to carefully distinguish fake news from real, but the fault for fake news lies squarely with media companies that refuse to curate their content with accuracy checks.

Unfortunately the Internet is driven by hack media producers who would rather goose their otherwise lackluster page views with a flame war (and then blame it on their users) than make the most basic efforts to weed out bad actors trying to intentionally spread disinformation.