Post #3122544

@shafik@hachyderm.io Getting most of the8r news from social media covers two things: Posts on social media claiming to be original reporting.News items from existing publications shared on social media. These two cases are often conflated, but the last analysis I read (a few years ago now, might be out of date) suggested that the second was far more common. People moved from buying subscriptions to newspapers to reading the newspaper articles that their friends shared, but the source of the misinformation is still something that looks like a newspaper. The ‘immigrants eat cats’ story began as a social media post, but it wasn’t amplified until a couple of news publications picked it up, failed to bother to check sources, and then a load of people took that as an authoritative source and shared it widely, for example.