How hoax news reaches your social media feed: Exhibit A

[Tommy_Carcetti]

It’s laid out nicely (and yet sadly) here in this Snopes piece:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/green-new-deal-recycle-urine/

In sum:

1. “Green New Deal” legislation is proposed
2. Conspiracy hoaxer/professional asshole Mark Dice creates a fake document claiming the legislation encourages people to recycle their own urine as drinking water, encourages users to post it without letting users know it is false, says media will be forced to fact check information
3. Fake document is reposted by conservative “news” pages on social media and by other professional asshole Jack Probesiac without context
4. Document is then reposted virally including by your friendly neighborhood social media “friend”
5. Any attempt to fact check your friend is roundly rejected because fact checkers are all evil liberals who can’t be trusted.

[brooklynite]

1. Maybe you need different friends...

I've never gotten material like this in my feeds.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

3. Usually it's friends of friends, actually. Nt

[dalton99a]

2. Kick

[Hugin]

4. Yep, I've seen exactly this process on a daily basis on my news feed.

The propaganda is then always forwarded by either the most hateful or the most gullible of those who see it in their feeds.

[csziggy]

5. This is why I don't get my news from social media

Unless I trust the poster and the source. I post stories from verified news sources to Facebook, mostly so my husband can see them. Many of those stories come from posts here, but I always go to the original source (even if the post here is from a news aggregator) and use that to post to FB.

My husband sometimes shares stories he sees on FB but I don't trust those without going to the original source and checking them out. If I find that they are not reliable, I call him out on the post.

Of course it helps that I only have three friends on FB - my husband, my sister, and my niece. So I get few things on my feed from friends (my niece does not post much on FB since most of the time she is in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh and has no access to internet). Unfortunately, FB has started to flood my FB page with irrelevant and often unreliable posts. I spend more time marking those to hide them than reading real posts from real people.

[msongs]

6. then it goes on twitter to get posted on sites like DU