Not So Funny: Fake News, Real Problems
On July 9, presidential candidate Martin O’Malley published an “open letter” to “Wall Street Megabanks” that outlined his financial reform proposals, with the goal of bringing much needed media attention to the struggling campaign. The letter was, in fact, successful in drawing the media’s attention, however, it was not the attention the campaign was hoping for.
The very first footnote of the letter cited “an off-brand, non-Onion fake news article which said that former attorney general Eric Holder had been hired by JP Morgan Chase at an annual salary of $77 million,” which is blatantly false. Upon noticing the mistake, the campaign team quickly covered their tracks and replaced the fake citation with an authentic one: a reference to an article from The New York Times that discusses Holder’s return to the law firm Covington & Burling. Despite the rapid response of O’Malley’s team, the mistake was noticed, and O’Malley, who is polling at a meager 1% in the Democratic Presidential Primary, did not get the positive press and poll bump he was hoping for.
Fake news made headlines again the following week. On July 14, Twitter share prices spiked 8% midday following an announcement from “Bloomberg” that the company was taking part in acquisition talks. The announcement came from bloomberg.market (which has since been taken down) and contained the byline of a Bloomberg reporter. However, Bloomberg was quick to point out this announcement wasn’t theirs; they never wrote it and it didn’t come from their site, bloomberg.com. Twitter was also quick to deny the report. Soon, word of the announcement’s falseness spread just as quickly as the fake announcement originally did, and the share price fell back to its original price within the hour. Although the stock quickly evened out, Wall Street watchers were amazed by the effect a well-disguised fake source could have.
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As is evidenced by these incidents, confirming information and validating sources is essential to taking successful action and avoiding negative consequences. So you don’t act based on false information, here are four steps you can take to confirm your sources:
1) Verify the source. And the source’s sources
Are you familiar with the source? If you are and trust it, great. If you aren’t, type the name of the source into a search engine. Have other sites or authors referenced it? What do others have to say about it? Also, check what source your source is citing. Often online articles provide links to the original source.
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2) Check the URL
Once you have verified the credibility of source, the next step is to make sure the site you are on is legitimate – something that would have benefited those who trusted the fake Bloomberg piece. To do this, look at the URL. If the URL you are seeing is nighttime.com.co, this is different from nighttime.com.
3) See if others are talking about it
If the news is shocking or surprising to you, others are going to be talking about it. Google the headline and/or conduct a search using the main ideas and subjects of the article as search terms. Check to see if other sources have published stories with similar information. If others have, verify the credibility of those sources as well.
4) Consult the experts
If you’re still not sure what you are looking at, call on the experts. Experienced fact checkers and researchers make careers out of knowing who to trust, or knowing how to know who to trust. The safest and smartest thing to do is to turn to these experts and let them help you make decisions based on reality, not satire.