Internet hoaxes within social media feeds dupe millions

I guess it started back in the 1960's with the "Paul is dead" hoax surrounding Paul McCartney's death. Probably earlier frankly, but the concept of a hoax was tougher and more isolated pre-internet days.

Today, the internet hoax is a daily occurrence. In fact in the past week, I've seen fake death announcements for both Willie Nelson and James Earl Jones. Both are alive and well as of my writing this post. It is such a regular occurrence now that The Washington Post has a digital culture critic, Caitlin Dewey that does a weekly column titled "What was fake on the Internet this week". I highly recommend the column, as it keeps me up to speed on just how gullible people are plus it is pretty clever and well written. 

The scary thing about these scams and hoaxes is the alarming amount of people that get their news solely from their social media feeds, especially Facebook. Real news outlets, such as the Washington Post fact check and sift through the garbage to report on the facts. Online outlets like the Business Standard News (B-S News) continue to hook people on these fake news stories and make money. 

The James Earl Jones story is a great example. The Facebook feed, if anyone would bother to click on it links to a display that reads "you got owned!" Problem is, thousands (millions?) of people never click. They just go about their day thinking that the voice of Darth Vadar, Mufassah and CNN is dead. 

Legit news sites have to do a better job of marketing themselves as the reliable, trustworthy source for news and information. Fighting the social media feed of 'news' is the next battle for consumer's time, and it is a battle that most news outlets are losing.

Social media outlets, especially Facebook have been given by default an extremely important task of informing the population. I would say that they are failing so far, allowing bogus claims to seemingly dominate the platform because of the share-ability factor and click through rates these often get. It is a fine line, trying not to sensor information, but there has to be a responsibility to promote factual and reliable content. 

In the meantime, news outlets online need to work on creating confidence in their product by the general public. Educating the general public on what to look for in terms of if the source is leg it or not needs to also happen. Facebook can help on that if they wish, and hopefully they will.