Title: The Danger of Fake News in Inflaming or Suppressing Social Conflict | Center for Information Technology and Society - UC Santa Barbara
Headings: The Danger of Fake News in Inflaming or Suppressing Social Conflict
The Danger of Fake News in Inflaming or Suppressing Social Conflict
Social Conflict, American Style
Pizzagate
Russia’s Internet Research Agency
Cambridge Analytica
Other Political Groups
Fake News and Social Conflict Abroad
Some Take-Aways

Content: These messages were often inflammatory, sensationalistic, sometimes violent, and false. They exploited data that many Americans never agreed to share with advertisers. (We also talk about Cambridge Analytica when we discuss Microtargeting .) Other Political Groups
Another major effort to disrupt American society has been to fuel fires of suspicion and conspiracy in the wake of major social tragedies—mass shootings, in particular. Conspiracy theorists were fed, and quickly reposted content that originated from Russian agents, political campaign operatives, and other fake news sources, which claimed that these shootings were staged (usually, they claimed, as a way to fool people into supporting gun restrictions). People shared these messages quite widely. Professor Kate Starbird at the University of Washington assessed this ripple effect by analyzing the links from tweets to websites and comments that promoted the belief that the mass shootings weren’t real [5]. Her computer program collected tweets with hashtags that included terms like “false flag,” “crisis actor,” and “staged.” Overall, she collected 99,474 tweets from 15,150 users. The tweets referenced 117 websites, 80 of which were “alternative media,” or fake news.