There may be some signature that identifies real-world fakes, in the same way that the Onion, well smells like an onion. But, I have a general criticism about this area of research, which seems to conflate the semantic truth. value of content with the content itself, for example in statements like "fake news spreads faster" (veracity is an extrinsic property of data, and not one that is cognitively accessible to its…
"A lie will go around the world before the truth has got it's boots on."
-Mark Twain, 1919
He said that way before "fake news". How did he recognize this?
He saw that it's trivial to make a lie people want to tell, and that truth is by comparison less often compelling.
This seems so obvious, but it's so little known. At this point when I read a story online that makes me want to tell somebody else, where I feel "why doesn't everybody know about this", I start fact-checking.
That's all accuracy takes. Just that little bit of skepticism. For example, that Mark Twain quote I gave is total bull. Twain died in 1910 and the quote is actually a distorted version of this:
"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it;" -Johnathan Swift, 1787
Why do I know this? Am I that conversant in satirical literature?
Nope. The shape of my desire to include that well-known misquotation in my reply signaled me that it might not be real. I'm not kidding. It was too much fun.
So I looked it up, saw the irony, and left the misquotation in to make a point.
That's the force we have to fight. Anything that feels Snopesish is suspicious.
Is it true that Obama was doing the same thing to asylum-seekers that Trump is? No. Is it true that Trump started the whole asylum detention program because he hates immigrants? No.
Is it true that the asylum program has a decades-long and complicated history, that the current administration has focused attention on the border to deflect from a dozen other issues its facing, thereby highlighting the detention program, and that a series of inhumane missteps have been made in managing that program, demonstrably causing a new level of suffering, because the people currently in charge tend to view that suffering as a form of justice for what they believe is a threatening criminal act?
Yeah. That's mostly true. It's also not very much fun to say.