One key difference between the top-performing politics and crime hoaxes is that the crime stories were published earlier in the year, with many coming in March and April.
They accounted for 34% of total Facebook engagement for the top 50 fake news articles politics hoaxes generated 49% of the total engagement. Fake Crime News Hit Big in 2016Īfter US politics, hoaxes about shocking or ridiculous crimes were the second biggest category of fake news identified in the analysis.
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A survey from YouGov and The Economist released this week also found that 17% of Clinton voters and 46% of Trump voters believe elements of the false Pizzagate conspiracy theory are true.Īfter outcry about the spread of misinformation, Facebook recently announced a series of initiatives, and Google has also begun altering search results and removing fake news sites from its lucrative AdSense program. However, a recent survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs and BuzzFeed News found that fake news headlines about the election fooled American adults about 75% of the time.
It’s difficult to know how many people who interacted with these stories on Facebook believed them to be true.
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In order to examine the performance of pure fake news on Facebook in 2016, this analysis focused exclusively on stories that were 100% false and that originated on fake news websites - it did not include misreported news or partisan misrepresentations of real events.Īlong with the Obama pledge ban hoax, other fake news about US politics that hit big on Facebook this year included “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement," "Trump Offering Free One-Way Tickets to Africa & Mexico for Those Who Wanna Leave America," “ISIS Leader Calls for American Muslim Voters to Support Hillary Clinton," and "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide." Click here to view the top 50 hoaxes, and to see the list of fake news sites. This list of English-language fake sites has been built up over the past two years of covering this topic, and was compared to this chart from the creators of Hoaxy to compile a more comprehensive list of pure fake news sites. (A counter on the article page suggests the story has been viewed more than 110,000 times.)īuzzFeed News used BuzzSumo to identify the top-performing Facebook content from 96 fake news websites, including the network of more than 40 sites exposed in a recent investigation. The Obama hoax generated more than 2.1 million shares, comments, and reactions on Facebook in just two months. It was published by, a fake site made to look like ABC News that scored six hits in the top 50. The top-performing fake news story identified in the analysis is a hoax from October that claimed President Obama had banned reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. Overall, fake news about US politics accounted for 10.6 million of the 21.5 million total shares, reactions, and comments these English-language stories generated on Facebook this year, according to the analysis. Twenty-three of the 50 top-performing fake news hoaxes we found on Facebook were focused on US politics. Hoaxes about US politics were among the top-performing fake news content on Facebook in 2016, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed News.
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