A lot of these fake news sites aren’t even owned by people who are ideological. The site owners create a website — write up a bunch of fake, incendiary opinion pieces and then post a clip of the article with a link from what appears to be a personal facebook page, as if they have just come across this incredible breaking news.
The post goes viral on their (fake) personal facebook page and people click over to the (fake) news website.
Why do they do it? Money. These sites are usually plastered with advertising — so fake articles draw in tons of people — some click on the ads — site owner gets a big fat check in the mail at the end of their pay period.
If you want to target fake news then target the companies they advertise on their sites.
An example of one of these websites is LibertyWritersNews (dot) com
There’s a WAPO story about them.
Go to their site, check out the stories, then look at the ads. Next follow the links to their advertisers and scream at them for allowing the site to promote their products with outrageous lies. If the advertisers get enough negative press then things will change.
You can’t stop the average idiot with a twitter account whose BS tweet happens to go viral, but you can hit these fake news sites where it hurts.
You can also target the company who is hosting their website. Take the website name and go to whois.icann.org/... — type in the name of the website in LOOKUP — once you get past the spam part look for the Registrar — the company hosting the site along with phone numbers and email address will be listed there.
A whois of the site above give this result:
Domain Name: LIBERTYWRITERSNEWS.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 146
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: www.godaddy.com
Name Server: BAYAN.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: LUCY.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Status: ok icann.org/...
Updated Date: 27-jul-2016
Creation Date: 01-jun-2016
Expiration Date: 01-jun-2017
In this instance, Godaddy.com is the host.
Google adsense is one of the culprits that feeds these sites, but I have read articles that Google and even Facebook are attempting to solve this problem.
Another is www.content.ad which does pretty much the same thing as adsense, bundling together advertisers for their affiliates to place on their websites. The more clicks — the more cash in their affiliates pockets and thus the more incendiary the fake news story.
And BTW, as I am sure those of you without Adblock have noticed. Dailykos supplements this site in the same fashion. However, there does seem to be attempts to reign in the more outrageous stuff at least.
I also have to say, so long as there is money to be made these sites are going to pop up like weeds everywhere. It’s sad to say, but I think the fight is a losing battle. As traditional MSM fades, it will be replaced more and more by online media that distorts the truth or outright lies just to make a buck.
It will really end up in the hands of each individual to decide if what they are reading is fake or real.