1. Football parade or Trump rally?
'News' websites reported that a parade for the Cleveland Cavaliers was a Trump rally, and it caught on and spread like wildfire
2. Scaremongering with an old hurricane
Panicked people bracing for a hurricane are likely to latch on to whatever they read, if it looks plausible. Sometimes it's hard to know what is and isn't fake news – why would there be any doubt about this? Article from Buzzfeed.
3. Fake News as a joke
Twitter comedian Jonny Sun doctored screenshots of Google Search to show that the middle names of a famous celebrity couple were the names of their children. It was a harmless social experiment that he admitted to soon after, but tens of thousands of people ran with it as fact and carried it on, and will likely never know that what they believe to be a cool fact isn't true. People even responded with things like "I've known this fact for forever, why has it taken everybody else this long!??". The experiment was well summed up here.
4. How Fake News influences elections
A video interview from Newshub on how fake news can manipulate voters and sway them to vote a certain way, as 'cyber propaganda'. Finding a way to stop it's spread can have a physical, global impact on the futures of nations, and even as far as the planet.
5. Human-Centered Machine LearningCould we fight fake news with it?
"Machine learning (ML) is the science of helping computers discover patterns and relationships in data instead of being manually programmed." writes Jess Holbrook for Medium. He goes on to describe the ways in which machine learning is advancing and will interact with our online environments in the future. I'm interested in what it can do for inhibiting the spread of fake news.
