As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. “I’m not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended,” one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. But the observation that Facebook periodically trends fake news still stands — if anything, we’ve underestimated how often it occurs. When Facebook selectively injects fake news into those highly personalized news diets, Quattrociocchi said, it risks further polarizing and alienating its more conspiracy-minded users.

Source: Washington Post October 12, 2016 13:47 UTC