Posted on 06/22/2016 8:13:23 PM PDT by Lorianne
Facebook (FB) has become a place where people get their news. According to Chartbeat, Facebook is the No. 1 referral source for publishers, ahead of Google Search (GOOGL), Twitter (TWTR) and Google News.
There’s just one glaring problem: the site hosts fake news, too.
Maybe you’ve noticed some of these spammy articles peppering your Facebook feed. In case you haven’t, here’s an example:
A page called “Flex News” posted a piece called “Clay Matthews Suspended For 2016 Season?” Tagged as “ESPN Football” and written “by GoPro,” (GPRO) the article appears like any other legitimate piece of content...until you click it. The post lived on Facebook for a full week before the article was taken down Friday afternoon.
A Facebook spokesperson told Yahoo Finance via email that it “usually only takes a couple of hours” to pull a fraudulent post down after it’s flagged either internally or by a Facebook user.
The onus, however, is on readers to flag any and all suspicious posts. “Anyone on Facebook can report an account for our team to investigate by clicking on the "…." button on the cover photos of the Page or Profile,” the spokesperson said.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Now I know why I never got a Facebook page, although to be honest, I knew all along. Not a joiner!
FR hosts a lot fake news, as well.
;-)
I ran a BBS for the decade of the 90’s. Much better than facebook slumlords. I’ll laugh my bottom off when they get fully hacked.
Ha, me too. Good times!
Of course. We’ve always had to sort things out for ourselves. There are countries in which the government sorts out the news for you.
Those were good times. Running a BBS taught me more about PC’s, hardware, networking, multitasking, programming, etc than anything else. I literally LOVED running a BBS. Then in about 2000-2001 the call numbers dropped to 1-2/day from the 35-40 that I had in the boom years. I experimented with telnet BBS’s and various internet enabled things like EleBBS, but the writing was on the wall with internet based forums and the like.
Now it’s all one big Eternal September. :(
I hear you. Wrote and maintained my own BBS software for a while, and spent some time writing client software for one of the biggest Internet brands in the early ‘00s (Citadel/UX). It’s all December now, ha. :)
In the 1950s newspapers would have outrageous bogus headlines on the frontpage. The lead paragraph would be filled with disturbing lies. Then “More on page 13” where the ads are, of course. Reading the details was more factual than the headline. Of course, most people only read the headlines.
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