According to a new Study, internet users navigate to Fake news website through Facebook, than other social media platforms. The Study also showed that majority do not check out the authenticity of what is read.
The Study was carried out by three political analysts; Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College, Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. It analyzed web traffic data gathered by monitoring online activities of 2,525 Americans consensually, on the basis of anonymity.
Findings from the study showed that Facebook was by far the social media handle through which people navigated to a Fake News site. In response, last year, Facebook began flagging stories on its site, that third-party fact-checkers found to make false claims, with a red label saying “disputed”.
Although most people in the study encountered some of the labels, Dr Nyhan expressed displeasure with the result.
“We saw no instances of people reading a Fake News article and a fact-check of that specific article. The fact-checking websites have a targeting problem”.
In December, Facebook announced a change in its monitoring approach, from labelling false stories to surfacing the fact-checks, along with the fake story in the user’s News Feed.
The research did not rule out the effect of Fake News to electioneering process, but most who become victims of Fake News were already sympathetic towards a particular political party.
It also argued that the reach of Fake News was wide, but with little impact. For example, One in four Americans saw at least one false story, but even the most eager Fake News enthusiast (deeply conservative supporters of President Donald Trump) consumed far more of the real kind, from newspaper and network websites and other digital sources.
Fake News is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media, with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often with sensationalist, exaggerated, or patently false headlines that grab attention (click baits).
