A survey of adults in the U.S. showed that 75 percent thought fake news headlines they had encountered were accurate. Those using Facebook as a major source of news were particularly vulnerable to news scams. Republicans were also likely to misread the news with 84 percent rating fake news headlines as accurate compared to 71 percent of Democrats. (BuzzFeed News, December 6, 2016, by Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine)
The Guardian reports that fake news is a world-wide problem. Guardian reporters looked at Germany, France, Myanmar, Italy, China, Brazil, Australia, and India and found instances of fake news stories or at the least evidence of lies spreading on Facebook. (The Guardian, December 2, 2016, by Kate Connolly, Angelique Chrisafis, Poppy McPherson, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Benjamin Haas, Dominic Phillips Elle Hunt and Michael Safi)
One of the most egregious instances of the threat posed by fake news ended badly for a father and former firefighter who believed a fake story that Hillary Clinton was running a secret child sex ring in a pizza place in Washington, D.C. The man drove from North Carolina to investigate and found nothing but got himself arrested for terrorizing customers and employees with an assault rifle. (The Washington Post, December 6, 2016, by Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox and Peter Hermann)
Facebook has applied for a patent of a tool it hopes to use to identify objectionable content and stop the flood of bogus information online. “The system described in the application is largely consistent with Facebook’s own descriptions of how it currently handles objectionable content. But it also adds a layer of machine learning to make reporting bad posts more efficient, and to help the system learn common markers of objectionable content over time — tools that sound similar to the anticipatory flagging that Zuckerberg says is needed to combat fake news,” writes Casey Newton in The Verge, December 7, 2016.