
We built a Twitter bot that replies to people who share fake news - JanKoenig
https://medium.com/@einkoenig/we-built-a-twitter-bot-that-replies-to-people-who-share-fake-news-d23127c1ed15#.qa3i7xfzd
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ratsmack
This Fake News hysteria seems to be driving a bunch of false concern about
protecting the unsuspecting masses from perceived bad information. The problem
is manyfold though because fake news can be very subjective, and who will be
chosen as the ultimate authority to determine what is fake and what is not.

I believe that there will always be a certain number people that will still
believe falsehoods even after they have been given the correct information. I
believe it is a bad idea which will weaken societies collective ability to
think on their feet and to be able to discern fact from fiction. Let's move
this one into the history books for the sake of everyone.

~~~
JanKoenig
Totally agree with you! This is why we selected only sources that have created
obvious hoaxes in the past. I've been thinking a lot about actually writing
this post, because I didn't want to add _another_ post on fake news. However,
it was interesting for us how people reacted. And that most didn't care at all
about the trustworthiness of the stuff they're spreading

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jrnichols
" So we decided to use 21 sites that were flagged as obviously misleading (not
satire, not opinionated, just fakes and hoaxes) from this list."

"this list" goes to
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/mobilebasic)
which i've seen before, but I can not find any actual list! Just an article
about how to analyze sources. Where's the list?

~~~
JanKoenig
My bad! Here's the link to an article covering the list. The list was updated
a few weeks ago because the creator received death threats
[http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fake-news-sites-list-
facebook...](http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fake-news-sites-list-facebook/)

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CarolineW
From the write up:

 _" Randomly tweeting at people is considered spam by Twitter. However, this
went through so fast that I believe several accounts who spread the news on
purpose didn’t like our bot. And thus reported it ..."_

Yes, oddly enough if you threaten people's income streams they will tend to
react badly, and quickly.

