The saga of 'Pizzagate': The fake story that shows how conspiracy theories spread

The day that CBS News became literally ‘fake news’ for America | Will Bunch

An unverified, unlikely story about the Minneapolis ICE shooter exposes the new CBS News team as Trump's state media.

The Conspiracy Theory About Wayfair Is Spreading Quickly Among Lifestyle Influencers On Instagram

The theory plays into the bigger QAnon conspiracy theory, which baselessly claims that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of pedophiles that President Trump is actively fighting against.

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The Media Can't Stop Propping Up Elon Musk's Phony Supergenius Engineer Mythology

"CEO said a thing!" journalism is now utterly pervasive, and includes parroting billionaire and CEO claims with a total disregard for whether or not anything being said is actually true.

The spreading of misinformation online

Significance The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven percolation model of rumor spreading that demonstrates that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size. , The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15––where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., “echo chambers.” Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.

Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it.

Researchers study fake news the same way they study the spread of disease. When misinformation “goes viral”, it is not just a metaphor. It is what’s actually happening. via @straits_times str.sg/viz-misinformation

Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago

A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake. It’s ridiculous, but possibly not that ridiculous?

Conspiracy Brokers: Understanding the Monetization of YouTube Conspiracy Theories

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512142 WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022, Virtual Event, Lyon, France, April 2022

Elon Musk's Grok AI Is Pushing Misinformation and Legitimizing Conspiracies

Grok's selling point is real-time access to news, but Motherboard found that it generated inaccurate information about Israel-Palestine and lent credence to conspiracy theories.

Fact-Checking False Claims about our Gender Identity Coverage | The New York Times Company

A recent post from Trans News Network included numerous falsehoods about New York Times stories on gender identity and maligned some of the journalists involved in the work. Our coverage is guided by…

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

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Instagram Is Full of Conspiracy Theories and Extremism

As other social networks wage a very public war against misinformation, it’s thriving on Instagram.

Capturing our Attention

What are the harms of misinformation? It’s widely believed that it causes false belief, including false beliefs in quite bizarre claims. I argue that this threat is greatly exaggerated: while plaus...