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"Facebook will rely on users to report fake news despite evidence that suggests users have a difficult time assessing or identifying fake news. Teens seem to be especially vulnerable to fake news. A recent study by researchers at Stanford found that middle and high school students have a difficult time detecting fake news from real news, or detecting bias in tweets and Facebook statuses."

"Shoppers are being deceived because social media platforms and messaging apps are not doing enough to prevent a "cottage industry of fraudsters" soliciting fake reviews, according to Amazon. Fake reviews have become one of the most persistent scourges of online retailers, and some analysts think that about one in seven reviews in the UK are not the real deal, with blame often directed at groups that proliferate on Facebook. Last year Amazon alone blocked 200m fake reviews. Dharmesh Mehta, head of the company's customer trust team, said this avalanche of misinformation was harming consumers, who were being "deceived about what products they should or shouldn't be buying"."

"he foresees fake text being used "for the production of [literal] 'fake news', or to potentially impersonate people who had produced a lot of text online, or simply to generate troll-grade propaganda for social n"

"At first glance, the Twitter user "Canaelan" looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread "propaganda". Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation at scale and at speed. It is sold by "Team Jorge", a unit of disinformation operatives based in Israel."

"Pornbots create fake accounts that are designed to mimic real people. They steal photos from public social media accounts, and follow the real profile's friends. They tack on suggestive captions and post links to external paid adult sites. The fake accounts choose @usernames that are deceptively similar to those they impersonate. And for good measure, the fake accounts block the person they're copying, making it difficult for the victim to see or interact with them."

"German government officials have said they are investigating an unprecedented proliferation of fake news items amid reports of Russian efforts to influence the country's election later this year."

"The researchers, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, came up with a new way of constructing a generative adversarial network, or GAN. GANs employ two dueling neural networks to train a computer to learn the nature of a data set well enough to generate convincing fakes. When applied to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic fakery. The same Nvidia researchers have previously used the technique to create artificial celebrities (read our profile of the inventor of GANs, Ian Goodfellow)."

"Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was "bots masquerading as people," a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube's systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event "the Inversion.""

"A picture may say a thousand words, but what if the photograph has been fabricated? There are ways to spot a fake - you just have to look closely enough."

"Inoculating people from misinformation and tackling the "infodemic" are key to fighting the coronavirus. Tang, Taiwan's first transgender government minister and a self-described "civic hacker", has done this by fostering digital democracy: using technology to encourage civic participation and build consensus. Tang has also quashed faked news by implementing a 2-2-2 "humour over rumour" strategy. A response to misinformation is provided within 20 minutes, in 200 words or fewer, alongside two fun images. Early in the pandemic, for example, people were panic-buying toilet paper because of a rumour that it was being used to manufacture face masks; supplies were running out. So, the Taiwanese premier, Su Tseng-chang, released a cartoon of him wiggling his bum, with a caption saying: "We only have one pair of buttocks." It sounds silly, but it went viral. Humour can be far more effective than serious fact-checking."

"Rival French and Russian disinformation campaigns have sought to deceive and influence internet users in the Central African Republic ahead of an election later this month, Facebook said on Tuesday. Facebook said it was the first time it had seen foreign influence operations directly engage on its platforms, with fake accounts denouncing each other as "fake news"."

"The BBC has warned that a video carrying its branding in which it is claimed that a missile attack on a railway station that killed dozens of people was carried out by Ukraine is fake."

"It was a trick as audacious as it was ingenious. When police or regulators opened the Uber app, they would see exactly what the public saw: dozens of cars crawling around the city, waiting to be summoned. But there was one crucial difference: these cars were fake. Uber had built a dummy version of its own app, a secret tool known as Greyball, designed to throw regulators off the scent and help its unlicensed cab drivers evade the law."

""As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints."

You see these awesome, first ever up-close images of Pluto and its moon? Yeah, they're all fake. Every last one of them. According to conspiracy theorists, that is.

"There are some things that you can do to protect yourself from falling for a hoax. As the author of the upcoming book "Fake Photos," to be published in August, I'd like to offer a few tips to protect yourself from falling for a hoax."

" If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless observations harvested about people like you, how could your universe not collapse into the partial depiction of reality that people like you also enjoy? How could empathy and respect for difference thrive in this environment? Where's the incentive to stamp out fake accounts, fake news, paid troll armies, dyspeptic bots?"

"The first thing that came into my mind when I first heard about Deep Fakes, is what would happen if we could create DeepFakes in realtime and not just for existing videos or photos? Suppose we can go online with someone else's face, would this be funny or would this push the ethical boundaries even further? I decided to see how much effort it would be to try it out."

"As such, there are certainly some sinister ways technology like this could be used-and the faces don't need to be attractive, they just need to look real. Any circumstances where it would be useful to have fake people-like profile photos for dummy social media accounts used to manipulate online discourse-are a ready target for technological treachery."

"It has led to a proliferation of fake news and clickbait. It has fuelled surveillance capitalism and normalised pervasive tracking and data-mining. If we want to do something about the proliferation of misinformation and erosion of trust in traditional institutions, it is not enough to regulate or factcheck political adverts. We need to crack down on the use of personal information for all targeted advertising. Otherwise democracy will continue to erode, one highly optimised click at a time."