Watch 11:04
Inside Facebook’s race to separate news from junk
At Facebook, there are two competing goals: keep the platform free and open to a broad spectrum of ideas and opinions, while reducing the spread of misinformation. The company says it's not in the business of making editorial judgments, so…
Watch 9:17
Why we love to like junk news that reaffirms our beliefs
Facebook is exquisitely designed to feed our addiction to hyper-partisan content. In this world, fringe players who are apt to be more strident end up at the top of our news feeds, burying the middle ground. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien…
Watch 9:52
Online anger is gold to this junk-news pioneer
Meet one of the Internet's most prolific distributors of hyper-partisan fare. From California, Cyrus Massoumi caters to both liberals and conservatives, serving up political grist through various Facebook pages. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien profiles a leading purveyor of junk news…
Watch 11:20
How Facebook’s news feed can be fooled into spreading misinformation
Facebook’s news feed algorithm learns in great detail what we like, and then strives to give us more of the same -- and it's that technology that can be taken advantage of to spread junk news like a virus. Science…
As the country was reacting to the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, concerns soared about the problems of misinformation or so-called “Fake News” spreading across social media. To understand the scale and shape of a problem that was incredibly…
We reached out to Google to ask about the misinformation we found for the “Antifa civil war” search in “Top stories,” and they declined to comment. However, by the following day, searches for those same terms did not return any…
