Extra clicks may increase truthiness

With a wide variety of publications at our fingertips, it is really hard sometimes to identify current and not exaggerated sources for information. However, there are some clues we can use to help us recognize sources which tolerate biases or have agendas which are not purely informative. Some sites, such as right leaning Infowars and left leaning Newslo, may appear like a typical news websites at first glance because the formats of the home pages are very similar to creditable news sources such as, the New York Times and Washington Post.

In order to understand if a website may be more likely to contain fake news, one clue is to look at the titles of the news articles. If they seem sensational, it may be news site that is susceptible to publishing fake news. For example, on February 24, 2017, Infowars published an article written by Jon Bowne titled “The Democratic Party: Chock-Full of Scumbags.” Although, this article should have been at minimum presented as an opinion article on the Democratic Party candidates running for election to become the party’s chairman, it was presented as fact-based news. In contrast, the New York Times published an article by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns that included the same topic of the election of the Democratic party’s chairman, on February 23, 2017 titled, “Weakened Democrats Bow to Voters, Opting for Total War on Trump.” The New York Times article reflected the turmoil and weaknesses within the Democratic party based on numerous sources that could be verified and did not rely on name-calling to tell the story. Although, this may seem obvious that this Infowars story was not real news, many of the articles on Infowars do appear to be real news stories which may make it easier to trick some readers into believing such articles to represent unbiased journalism.

Conservative readers are not unique in their vulnerability to misinformation. More liberal readers can also be fooled by websites appearing to present real news. For example, the website Newslo looks like a typical news website. However, if you scroll to very bottom of the homepage and click on the “about” link, a page will come up that reads “JUST ENOUGH NEWS… Newslo is the first hybrid News/Satire platform on the web. Readers come to us for a unique brand of entertainment and information that is enhanced by features like our fact-button, which allows readers to find what is fact and what is satire.” Unfortunately, as evidenced by an article written by Alex Stevan and published July 17, 2016 titled, “Mike Pence: ‘Allowing Rape Victims To Have Abortions Will Lead To Women Trying To Get Raped’,” the distinction the site claim to try to draw between satire and news, does not seem clear to all readers. In this particular example, there are two buttons near the top of the page, one is marked, “show facts” and the other is marked “hide facts.” When “show facts” is clicked it highlights the first paragraph of the article in yellow. When “hide facts” is clicked the highlight on the first paragraph disappears.  However, the title comes from the portion after the first paragraph so unless readers click on the article and then understand most of the article including the title is meant as satire, it is completely misleading information. The 165 comments about the article make it clear that many readers do not understand the misinformation is intended as entertainment and Newslo did not weigh-in to set the record straight.