https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/20/barack-obama-facebook-fake-news-problem
The article talks about in question the recent uproar in the way Facebook's algorithms work on it's newsfeeds. It talks about how during the recent US elections, many of the content shared by users on the website was in fact actually fake news. Since then, a lot of websites such as Facebook and Google have decided to crack down on the amount of fake user generated content which tends to spread quicker than legitimately sourced and cited content. This controversy is notable with the articles by the "Denver Guardian" a fake news website which aimed to piggy bank on the notoriety of the regional "Denver Post" to the point where the latter had to write a disclaimer that the former was a fake website.
- 62% of US adults now turn to social media for some or all of their news, according to the Pew Research Centre
- "Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic"
Personally, it's a very interesting controversy to keep track of in the rapidly expanding industry of the media. The way news has worked has always been varied on the internet, we've always been told never to believe what we are told on the internet yet we as a society have completely disregarded this rule that our parents told us growing up and have ultimately put the same people in power that fed us these lies. Or have we not? It can be argued that the people that put these in lie upholding politicians into power are not the digital natives that grew up not trusting whatever they read on the internet, but the millennials and baby boomers, who, for most of their adulthood didn't experience the internet until the last decade, and have yet to experience that what they read on the internet cannot be trusted. Perhaps the fact that electing someone like Trump or voting for Brexit will be their crude awakening to that cold fact.
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