"Buzzfeed is coming under fire for the methodology of its Facebook exposé.
The presidential election proved to be fertile ground for the growth of fake news stories.
As people became annoyed by tall tales such as “Pope Francis Endorses Donald Trump for President” popping up in their Facebook feeds, the mainstream media decided it was time to fight back.
As calls for action from Facebook grew louder, Buzzfeed released a bombshell report:
Fake news outperformed real news on Facebook in the final months of the election.
This was then widely taken as fact, but it turned out to be, well, untrue. As Tim Carney reports at the Washington Examiner, Buzzfeed’s research methodology was a mess: ...Buzzfeed narrowly defined “real news” to exclude widely read sources such as Yahoo News, Reuters, the Daily Mail, Associated Press, and all newspapers outside New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
...No one should dismiss the spread of fake news, which is a very real problem.
But the media have their own problems to confront at the moment.
...As Erick Erickson pointed out, the mainstream media have an ugly history of peddling fake news that suits their own agenda: I could spend days documenting all the crap, lies, and outright errors pushed on Vox, but the Left would not believe it.
A Vox writer, you will recall, actually wrote about a bridge between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which does not exist.
And that Vox writer has now been hired by the New York Times, a newspaper that to this day has never apologized for misreporting on then President George H. W. Bush’s experience with a supermarket scanner.
...It may indeed be reasonable for Facebook to restrict Macedonian sites that peddle falsifiable stories, but reporting will still be full of convenient falsehoods that serve certain agendas.
Will liberals call on Facebook to punish Buzzfeed for its misleading statistics about Trump-related news?
Don’t hold your breath."
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