In the third blog entry of this series fake-news websites will be shown to be compared later on. After doing some research, I found a list of websites, who spread fake or misleading news on wikipedia. Most of them were already taken down by the authorities, but some of them still exist and others are just there to redirect you to another weird news or advertisement website. Here is an overview of some of those pages:
70 News.
The first thing I want to mention about these websites is that there is not only false or misleading information on there. Most of the stories published are true to some extent, but every once in a while you will find misleading content on there. 70 News, for example, published a false news story, stating that Donald Trump had won the popular vote in the 2016 United States presidential election; the fake story rose to the top in searches for “final election results” on Google News.
Before It’s News.
This site claims to be a people-powered news site, which published news way before the mainstream media does, but a lot of the content is misleading or completely bogus information. Before It’s News and InfoWars were described as “unabashedly unhinged ‘news’ sites” in 2014 by The Washington Post following its promotion of conspiracy theories relating to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
InfoWars.
So it does not take long to figure out what this site tries to achieve with the way they present their content. InfoWars is an American far-right, conspiracy theory and fake news website owned by Alex Jones. It was founded in 1999, and operates under Free Speech Systems LLC.
Fake Bild.de
The picture shown above is also a real common way of hoax and false news spreaders (this time in germany). It is really hard to distinguish between the real and the fake news site. This is called mimicing, where they take a real trustworthy website and just recreate the design under another domain. Most of the time you will not get this site in a google result. To get there you enter another seemingly normal news site and get redirected to a certain domain. Here is a picture of the real Bild.de website to make it more clear:
Daily Buzz Live.
This website is dedicated to bringing bizarre stories for the sole purpose of getting traffic to its website. They work with PopUps, as you can see in the picture and these kind of sites create mostly bogus stories and claims. To be fair, if you have some experience with the world wide wed, you will not take this website seriously.
Global Research.
Last but not least, this is the most dangerous form of false information websites, because it mimics other fact-checking sites and creates a common disbelieve in every website there is. Wikipedia states: “Principal website of the Centre for Research on Globalization, which The Economist in April 2017 called “a hub for conspiracy theories and fake stories,” and NATO information warfare specialists in November 2017 linked to a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of mainstream Western media.” Despite this information the website is still online and still spreading misleading content through the world wide web.
So these are just a few examples of what is actually out there and everyday I find something new. This is not a new phenomenon, as I already explained in a prior post, but it is a massively growing industry and it is just there to manipulate people. Next up is a comparison of these pages with real fact-checking sites and how there are differences in their design language, usability and so on.
If you want to know more false information spreading sites, here is a link to a list:
