“News” on Facebook

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of “news” on Facebook that displays a great deal of bias. In one memorable bit of news, a website claimed that Michelle Obama is actually a man. The interesting thing is, people seem take these news articles very seriously when they pop up in their news feeds. They are frequently (maybe almost always) shared with friends or networks without proper due diligence being performed to determine whether or not the news in question is true or false.

In most cases, news being shared in this manner comes from an obviously fake or biased source. For example, “Spinzon” was the site that shared the news about Michelle Obama being a man. If a news source is called “The Conservative News Agenda”, you can probably guess what their bias is going to be. If it’s “The Liberal Daily Digest”, same thing.

If you’re going to share news on Facebook, be sure you know what the bias of the news is, if any, and if it looks suspect, do your research before sharing the news to your Facebook page. Sharing interesting, relevant news about politics is helpful, but sharing fake, heavily biased news is not helping anyone.

To help propagate this idea I created this meme. And as an added bonus, I now know what fonts Facebook uses in its news feed!