fake

Fake refers to anything that is not real, genuine, authentic, or true. Fake can also refer to something that's been forged, counterfeited, or altered, as in fake news.

Historical perspective: Here's a look at fake news as seen in The Week, they asked did fake news really help swing the 2016 election? Bogus articles about Pope Francis endorsing Trump or the Clinton Foundation buying $137 million in illegal guns were shared hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times on Facebook; many originated from shady fringe websites and quickly went viral. In one of the stranger storylines, Macedonian teenagers looking to make a buck on web ads created at least 140 mostly pro-Trump U.S. politics websites, which churned out hundreds of fake news stories shared widely on Facebook. The social network isn’t the only offender when it comes to viral misinformation, but it’s by far the most significant. Forty-four percent of all adults in the U.S. say they get news from their Facebook newsfeed. Access to an audience of that size would seem to demand some kind of civic responsibility.

On Twitter, fake news spreads faster and further than real news, and bots aren’t to blame. MIT examined the spread of thousands of tweets shared by millions of people over a span of 12 years and in March 2018, they found that compared with tweets about verifiably true claims, tweets about claims that were undeniably false were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted. Those tweets also spread faster: The time it took for a false claim to reach 1,500 people on Twitter was six times faster than for true news, and false tweets about politics spread further than those in any other category.

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre in 2017, the world’s two biggest gateways for information, Google and Facebook, repeatedly spread lies about the shooting, steering users toward fake news and conspiracy-laden fringe sites. Google’s Top Stories box linked to a discussion on 4chan, a notoriously noxious online message board frequented by Internet trolls, identifying the wrong assailant and falsely claiming he was an anti-Trump liberal. Google-owned YouTube promoted conspiracy videos suggesting the massacre was a staged “false-flag” operation. Even after family members of those killed complained, YouTube argued that the videos “did not violate its standards.” By March 2018, Google moved to combat the epidemic of fake news on the Internet and pledged $300 million over the next three years to support authoritative journalism. The Google News Initiative will make it easier for Google users to subscribe to news publications and will give publishers new tools to create fast-loading mobile pages. Google will also help create a Disinfo Lab, in partnership with the Harvard Kennedy School’s First Draft, to better identify fake news during critical breaking-news situations.