Facebook Faker

A group of researchers at the University of Nottingham set up a fake Facebook account to show what types of news one might encounter on social media accounts like Facebook. They wanted to do this to show “the difficulties in combating the spread of fake news, because of the way we access news when it is presented in social media.” It was head up by doctors in the departments of Sociology, Social Policy, and Computer Science. While they included both real and fake stories in their experiment, they found that many people do not feel confident in their ability to detect fake news. [1 link, 1 picture, 1 quotation, 103 words]