Viral “Fake News” Lists and the Limitations of Labeling and Fact-Checking

___0 ___+1 During the 2016 presidential primary season, I gleefully shared an article on Facebook alleging that Aaron Rodgers, who is the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, attended a rally for presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. The article spread like wildfire among my online friends group, many of whom are also overlapping fans of both the Packers and Bernie Sanders Unfortunately, this article turned out to be from a fake news website, United Media Publishing. I was fooled by fake news. I implicitly trusted my many friends on social media sharing the story. The headline made me excited and hopeful about the primary election, and it did a good job of confirming what I wanted to believe as true about Rodgers: that he’s a cool dude who shares my political views. I share this anecdote to demonstrate just how easy it is to be “duped” by fake news. I have a Ph.D. in communication studies and I am a critical scholar, so you might think I would have been more careful. However, I do not (or at least did not) analyze each and every bit of information I come across online, especially on platforms I use for “fun,” and I don’t think I’m alone in this habit. Some evidence suggests many of us share or retweet without actually reading what we are sharing or retweeting, which is definitely true in my instance of sharing fake news. The fact that I’m highly educated in the ways of critically analyzing media— and the fact that I see other highly educated people share similarly questionable sources— points to online misinformation as being more complicated than a lack of education, critical thinking skills, or digital media literacy. Despite fake news being part of a complex problem involving the production, distribution, and reception of various kinds of information, the majority of current “solutions” to fake news deal primarily with reception and with individuals. Viral “fake news” lists, any one of the dozens of fake 29 Viral “Fake News” Lists and the Limitations of Labeling and FactChecking