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Fake News Sites Are Changing Their Domain Name To Get Around Facebook Fact-Checkers (mashable.com) 197

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mashable: In order to avoid Facebook's fact checking system, the site formerly known as YourNewsWire, one of the most well-known purveyors of fake news online, has simply rebranded. The site now goes by News Punch and posts fake news content similar to what it published under their former name, according to a report by Poynter. YourNewsWire co-founders Sinclair Treadway and Sean Adl-Tabatabai, who reside in California, founded the site in 2014. The two completely migrated the website from the "yournewswire.com" domain name to "newspunch.com" in November 2018. Treadway told Bloomberg at the time that they move was made due to declining revenue thanks to Facebook's fact-checking system. Under this program, fact-checking outlets like Snopes are able to mark content posted on Facebook as false, which in turn decreases the site's reach on Facebook. According to the investigation, the workaround has been a success. Content that Poynter itself had found to be previously marked false on "yournewswire.com" was ported over to the "newspunch.com" domain. When shared on Facebook, that same fake news content that now lived on "newspunch.com" was not marked as false under the fact-checking program. Facebook is reportedly rolling out features to thwart the site's workaround.
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Fake News Sites Are Changing Their Domain Name To Get Around Facebook Fact-Checkers

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  • From now on, slashdot will be known as digg.com. Please update your bookmarks and muscle memory.
  • This is all the internet has devolved into, for pretty much everything on the internet.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by davmoo ( 63521 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @06:55PM (#58052838)

    Fake news is a problem. But the bigger problem is a whole lot of Americans are too effing stupid to figure it out for themselves that it's fake.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Not at all. They did not let Clinton win, after all. That already shows a lot of common sense on part of the American people.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Fake news is a problem. But the bigger problem is a whole lot of Americans are too effing stupid to figure it out for themselves that it's fake.

      Yeah, but Fb couldn't do anything about that if it wanted to. And it doesn't; smart people wouldn't give them all their info, tag people in photos, etc.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I don't think it's as simple as that, propaganda has been effective since the dawn of humanity, and it's naive to believe there's just some magic switch we can flip to suddenly make it ineffective.

      What's really needed is for today's intelligence agencies to be much more dynamic; they weren't ready for 9/11 and the level of terrorist threat, it took them a decade to get to a position where they can tackle that kind of threat, only in that decade we've seen resurgence of Russian intelligence operations in the

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm not sure being smarter is the solution. In the past we saw that the fake news sites upped their game, creating entire fake news networks and brands to add credibility. People who post intelligent technical comments on Slashdot also push fake news too, so it doesn't seem to be a universal cure anyway.

      It's probably going to be like spam and phishing emails - we will eventually get on top of it, but it will take time and be a constant battle.

      • I wonder if the Gutenberg press was the beginning of propaganda papers, and if there was a time when people believed that it was true only because it was printed. Certainly there was a time when people regarded everything on the internet as accurate. Did such a time exist for the TV?

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I'm not sure being smarter is the solution. In the past we saw that the fake news sites upped their game, creating entire fake news networks and brands to add credibility. People who post intelligent technical comments on Slashdot also push fake news too, so it doesn't seem to be a universal cure anyway.

        Exactly. It's too easy to push fake news even inadvertently. It's usually not the fault of the person, just incomplete knowledge.

        Even worse, once someone believes in something, it's very difficult to actuall

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @07:35PM (#58052988)

    ... on the source domain? Not a really sound test IMO.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Facebook has a simple blacklist of known fake news sites where they automatically label anything from those domains as suspect when posted. So just like spam blacklists, the work-around is to change domains.

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