Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’; New York Times, 11/25/16

Andrew Higgins, Mike McIntire, Gabriel J.X. Dance, New York Times; Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’ :

"Mr. Latsabidze, who apparently has broken no laws, said that any crackdown on fake news might work in the short term but that “something else will come along to replace it.”

“If they want to, they can control everything,” he said, “but this will stop freedom of speech.”

For now, the postelection period has been bad for business, with a sharp fall in the appetite for incendiary political news favoring Mr. Trump."

We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned; NPR, 11/23/16

Laura Sydell, NPR: We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned:

"Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

"The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it."

I’ve Been Making Viral Fake News for the Last Six Months. It’s Way Too Easy to Dupe the Right on the Internet.; Daily Beast, 11/21/16

Marco Chacon, Daily Beast; I’ve Been Making Viral Fake News for the Last Six Months. It’s Way Too Easy to Dupe the Right on the Internet. :

"For moderates, I think it’s a bit easier to avoid pitfalls: The mainstream news may not always be accurate on everything but there is a lot of it and they get the main points right. For conservatives there is no trusted media. There are only trusted positions.

Breitbart, World Net Daily, even InfoWars now count as on-my-side places where they believe the real truth lies. When the only news you are willing to believe is partisan news, you are susceptible to stories written “in your language” that are complete, obvious, utter fabrications."

How to avoid getting conned by fake news sites; CNet, 11/19/16

Laura Hautala, CNet; How to avoid getting conned by fake news sites:

"How to flag fake news sites

The best tool at your disposal, of course, is common sense. No matter what your political bent, if a story serves only to reinforce your beliefs, it's best to be extra skeptical before sharing it.

If a report is purportedly based on other news stories, find the original source of the information. You might find some of the quotes are correct, but the rest may have been taken out of context or fabricated.

If the potentially false story you're reading doesn't link to an original source, well, that's a bad sign. Use a search engine to look for the keywords in the story to see if that "news" is being reported by any other outlets."