Every presidential election renews our enthusiasm for fact-checking. In the 2016 race, we set off another explosion of interest: in "fake news" — as illustrated by the Google search-term trends above.
The first question to ask is when evaluating the credibility of a news story is: Can you trust the source?
That's why we built our compendium of untrustworthy sources: "Reveal's list of fake-news, clickbait, and hate sites". We made our list by merging the major curated fake-news site lists, then purging those sites no longer active.
That's when we found out how quickly fake-news sites come and go. Of the 1,115 fake-news domains in our list, most compiled in 2016—2017, barely half (629 or 56 percent) are still publishing today. Their owners play domain-name whack-a-mole, taking down one fraud site only to spin up another.
This churn rate has made some tips in many of the how-to spot fake news guides less useful. For instance, BuzzFeed, and many others, advise you avoid URLs that "pretend to be a real news site, like ABCNews.com.co." A year ago, many fake-news sites used network-imitation domain names. Of those, only these three still operate: abcnews-us.com, cnn-business-news.ga, cnnnext.com. (Note: We're not linking to these sites to prevent promoting them.)
Another common tip is to beware of sites that sound like local newspapers, but aren't. Again, there were dozens but, currntly, all we found are: DC Gazette, Denver Inquirer, St. George Gazette, and The Seattle Tribune.
One newer trend to watch out for is fake-news site names that seem like legit broadcast stations: 24newsflash.co, channel18.news, kcst7.com, krbcnews.com.
Fake-news name and shame
Common words in fake-news site domain names (WordClouds.com)
| word | use |
|---|---|
| news | 100 |
| daily | 29 |
| post | 15 |
| conservative | 14 |
| report | 14 |
| american | 12 |
| liberty | 10 |
| usa | 10 |
| media | 9 |
| world | 9 |
| times | 9 |
| info | 9 |
| patriot | 8 |
| today | 8 |
| truth | 8 |
So what names do fake-news sites use? The word cloud above shows the common terms. The table to the right show the number of uses (by the 622 sites in out list).
Some proclaim their bias: AmmoLand.com and WhitePower.com. But most blend in, choosing media favorites like "news" or "daily". A few use flag-waving terms like "american" and "patriot". The prize for the most popular fake-news site-name words goes to: The American Patriot Daily News Network.
Fraud news sites are agile and, occasionally, inventive. We at Reveal believe we can help fight fake news by monitoring their trends, their funding, and their advertisers, and reporting on their inventions.
