Week 4: Facebook's fight against fake news

Original CNN post

Facebook is currently dealing with a loophole for a problem that they had thought they squared away back in 2018. Scammers are creating misleading fake news thumbnails for real articles that they are passing on as real. Before the feature was taken down two years ago, people were able to create their own title and cover photo for any links that they wanted to share on facebook. Unfortunately a smaller group of people had to ruin this feature for the rest of us by spreading fake news through these headlines. It only takes a click to realize that these headlines are fake but unfortunately, most people were sharing these articles without even reading them, causing the posts to snowball and spread to the masses. This problem was completely ended in 2018 when facebook completely took away the editing feature, but recently a loophole has been found and a small group of people are once again spamming and spreading fake news all over facebook. This is even more dangerous now because people must assume that seeing fake headlines would be impossible without a feature to edit them, so I'm sure that these fake posts are being shared at a much higher rate this time around.

Edited version of the same link (pictured above) exploiting the loophole

Pictured on the right is an example of one of these fake headlines but it was actually made by the author of the article that I am getting my information from. He made this as a test and sure enough you would never know that his article was fake unless you went into the link. In his example he used a real CNN article that was about Howard Shultz backing out of the presidential race and turned it into an article that looks like it is about Howard Shultz beating out Trump in the presidential race. It just goes to show how easy it is for these spammers especially with the presidential race that will be happening throughout the next few months.

This whole thing has a much bigger message and that is to not believe everything you see on the internet. Even when things look super official, you have to remember that anyone who really wants to trick people is going to try to outsmart you, so you can't just take things at face value anymore, you have to do your research.

Original Article Link