Why “Banning” Fake News Sites From Ad Networks Won’t Work

Less than 0.1% of their traffic comes from paid display and search advertising

Here’s a comparative traffic breakdown of a sample of five leading “fake news sites” according to Fake News Watch:

These five sites alone accounted for close to 30 million website visits in the three months leading up to the election. The number of impression through Facebook, Twitter, emails, messaging apps and other mobile visits is probably five to ten times this number.

While Facebook does appear to account for 50% of the fake news group’s traffic (See “Category Breakdown” chart, above), what is not known is the ratio of content from these sites that was “promoted” vs. organically-driven within Facebook’s platform. However, after doing a search for why Brexit won, I found this #Truthfeed article ranked eighth in my organic Facebook (“top public post”) search results:

Similarly, I found this #Infowar article at the top of both Google’s and Facebook’s search results for why Brexit won:

These results suggest that much of the “fake” and hyper-biased political news content is organically “seeded” — fitting with the idea that “data-driven” public relations and strategic behavioral audience “micro-targeting” was the primary force behind the intentional spreading of this type of misinformation during #Election2016.

The data here suggests that a good portion of the fake news (misinformation) is entering Facebook, Twitter, etc. through "old school" mechanisms—emails, email newsletters, organic search results—and by audiences going directly to these fake news websites.

Bottom line: There’s no magical “algorithmic” solution to the fake news problem; It’s the real #Infowars — a component of the new data-driven election PR strategy (or election “PsyOps,” if you like).

This article was originally published on Medium. Read the original article.