The Times

Modern version of the rumour, fake news is present on the Internet. It took such a scale during the 2016 presidential election in the United States that the giants of the Web have set up devices to penalize the media vehic2017, Faulant these lies. Thus, in the context of the presidential elections in the United States, Facebook closed 80,000 accounts. For its part, Twitter has identified more than 50,000 bots linked to the Russian government who were trying to influence the 2016 US presidential elections.

It can be a oriented publication aimed at influencing public debate by distilling certain conspiracy or extremist theses, for example. The strategy of fake news then consists in establishing a distrust of traditional media. In addition, a story can be invented from scratch to obtain maximum clicks and obtain advertising revenue. In this landscape, humorous sites have also appeared, publishing only false information for satirical purposes.

Fake news as it developed during the American campaign belongs to the second register, that of deception. Through the visual codes, the tone and the presentation, many sites have sought to pass themselves off as real press organs, and have abused the trust of Internet users. Thus the famous hoax of the Pope's support for Donald Trump, published on the fake news site WTOE 5 News (now inactive), and shared more than a million times on Facebook.

Fake news at the heart of our daily lives !

Clara Le Goff