Obama is in fact right and the rise of fake news with clickbait images and headlines has convinced large amounts of people in to believing them; the American presidential election is an example of an event which generated a lot of fake news, especially on Facebook advertisement side-bars. Some titles claimed news such as the Pope endorsing Trump, or that Clinton selling weapons to Isis.
Another said claimed that Trump said: "If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.” Which in fact, all of these headlines were fake and obviously created by the party oppositions to increase influence in the election and convince people to vote for the opposed party.
The increase of fake news on Facebook is due to the CEO's decision to discontinue manual workers choosing what trending topics, stories and pages are on Facebook and thus, removing the human instinct by replacing the work to be done by an intelligent algorithm (that obviously can't tell between real and fake). It has been reported that 62% of adults in the US access Facebook to read the news.
In terms of online fake news on websites, this problem is due to the lack of advertisers who can pay top money to be featured on high traffic websites which means Google may reserve this space for multiple small ads that sometimes make their way to related articles even though they are not true at all. There are many variables in this but with the example of fake Trump news, it would only take a few keywords to be matched with a real article.
I certainly have seen many fake news articles but it is quite easy to spot them once you know what to look for and because I have some common sense, I run the headline through Google to see if any reliable sources have reported it to confirm if it is real or not.
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