Here's one possible response:

World News Daily report is a satire site that by its own admission does not publish true stories. It's is also the source or a lot of hateful content. I found this out from Wikipedia — the Wikipedia article cited a large range of sources, from Buzzfeed to the Washington Post.

How do we get there? We start by doing our "just add wikipedia" trick. Let's show the ABC one first:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/cf2ec0a4-6114-44e1-9664-56b4ef5ce498/volcano1.gif

We search the URL or domain and add our bare keyword wikipedia. Selecting the most relevant search result we find it is a known satire site.

A note about Buzzfeed

One thing you'll notice in the Wikipedia article is that Buzzfeed News is cited as source. Students are often confused by this, since they are most used to Buzzfeed being primarily a source of videos such as "I tried to eat five popular candies from Romania and this is what happened."

That Buzzfeed site isn't good news source for very much. It's not "fake", but it's not very serious. Years ago, however, Buzzfeed spun off a reliable, award winning news publication under the name "Buzzfeed News" (domain: www.buzzfeednews.com). And harkening back to our "contextual authority" discussion earlier, it turns out that Buzzfeed News has two of the top experts in the world on the "fake news" phenomenon. So when you see a link to Buzzfeed News on question about the trustworthiness of a site, it's well worth following.

The Problem of Fauxtire

One problem — larger in the past, but still an issue — is the problem of "fauxtire". Experts on disinformation use the term fauxtire to describe sites such as World News Daily Report which claim to be a satire site (like the Onion), but in practice are shared not because people think they are funny, but because people were fooled into thinking the stories were real.

This presents an interesting problem — if you run a site that is supposedly a humor site, but in reality it is convincing people of awful things, are you responsible for that? What if you intentionally tweak satirical headlines so they are more likely to deceive people (and hence make you more money from ads)?

Next up: Conclusion of lesson two