Fake news on Facebook becomes increasingly domestic in origin

In the run-up to the 2018 US mid-term elections, researchers found that the dissemination of fake news on Facebook was increasingly a domestic American phenomenon rather than, as in the 2016 presidential election, an effort driven by state-backed Russian operatives. Removing such accounts (Twitter) and pages (Facebook) is tricky in the US, where the boundary between free speech and disinformation is particularly sensitive. In addition, domestic disinformation is harder to distinguish. One of these efforts is led by the website Right Wing News, which used a series of Facebook pages and accounts it had created over the previous year to post false stories about Christine Blasey Ford after she testified against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-online-disinformation.html

Writer: Sheera Frenkel
Publication: New York Times
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