Fake News Sites Are Changing Their Domain Name To Get Around Facebook Fact-Checkers (mashable.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mashable: In order to avoid Facebook's fact checking system, the site formerly known as YourNewsWire, one of the most well-known purveyors of fake news online, has simply rebranded. The site now goes by News Punch and posts fake news content similar to what it published under their former name, according to a report by Poynter. YourNewsWire co-founders Sinclair Treadway and Sean Adl-Tabatabai, who reside in California, founded the site in 2014. The two completely migrated the website from the "yournewswire.com" domain name to "newspunch.com" in November 2018. Treadway told Bloomberg at the time that they move was made due to declining revenue thanks to Facebook's fact-checking system. Under this program, fact-checking outlets like Snopes are able to mark content posted on Facebook as false, which in turn decreases the site's reach on Facebook. According to the investigation, the workaround has been a success. Content that Poynter itself had found to be previously marked false on "yournewswire.com" was ported over to the "newspunch.com" domain. When shared on Facebook, that same fake news content that now lived on "newspunch.com" was not marked as false under the fact-checking program. Facebook is reportedly rolling out features to thwart the site's workaround.

Comments

Re:What did CNN change it's name to?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably by being more honest and trustworthy than the actual frauds and liars to the point they offer a product that isn't dependent on being a low-rent internet outfit with no real operations.

Yeah, I get it, you want us to hate CNN and swear by your own partisan devotional, but when your devoted leader is barely stringing two coherent sentences together, you don't actually have much appeal.

Working on the wrong problem.

[davmoo]

Fake news is a problem. But the bigger problem is a whole lot of Americans are too effing stupid to figure it out for themselves that it's fake.