The plague of fake news is getting worse -- here's how to protect yourself

Note there is a hoax ABC news site. The real one is http://abcnews.go.com/

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/30/media/facebook-fake-news-plague/index.html?sr=fbCNN103116facebook-fake-news-plague1059AMVODtopLink&linkId=30517144

The plague of fake news is getting worse -- here's how to protect yourself
by Brian Stelter @brianstelter October 31, 2016

It's time for a new rule on the web: Double, no, triple check before you share. Especially if it seems too good to be true.

Why? Look no further than Donald Trump's Twitter account. Trump claimed Sunday morning that "Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton."

Not only was there no proof of this, but it was pretty easy to disprove. The FBI email inquiry was at the top of Google News; FBI director James Comey's name was at the top of Facebook's "trending" box; and Twitter's "moments" section had a prominent story about the controversy.

Nevertheless, Trump's wrong-headed "burying" claim was his most popular tweet of the day. About 25,000 accounts retweeted it and almost 50,000 "liked" it, helping the falsehood spread far and wide.

The rise of social media has had many upsides, but one downside has been the spread of misinformation. Fake news has become a plague on the Web, especially on social networks like Facebook. As I said on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" on CNN, unreliable sources about this election have become too numerous to count.

So that's what I recommended a "triple check before you share" rule.

New web sites designed to trick and mislead people seem to pop up every single day. For their creators, the incentives are clear: more social shares mean more page views mean more ad dollars.

But the B.S. stories hurt the people who read and share them over and over again. Many of these fakes reinforce the views of conservative or liberal voters and insulate them from the truth. The stories prey on people who want to believe the worst about the opposition.

A recent BuzzFeed study of "hyperpartisan Facebook pages" found that these pages "are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information."

The less truthful the content, the more frequently it was shared -- which does not bode well for the nation's news literacy during a long, bitter election season.

"Right-wing pages were more prone to sharing false or misleading information than left-wing pages," the BuzzFeed reporting team said.

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