Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup call
much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse. I spoke to Craig Silverman yesterday.
Well, Craig Silverman, welcome to FRESH AIR. You did an analysis comparing how stories done by, you know, mainstream major news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post did it in terms of engagement on Facebook. You compared those stories to other stories done by essentially fake w
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're talking about fake news in the presidential campaign with BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman. When we left off, we were talking about BuzzFeed's analysis of how false, highly partisan content did better on Facebook than stories reported by mainstream media.
I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're speaking with BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman about the spread of fake news in the presidential campaign. Silverman spent a lot of this year investigating fake news, reporting that a torrent of false web stories came from a small town in Macedonia and