'Fake news city' is currently pumping out odd Facebook videos | GreatestFart

'Fake news city' is currently pumping out odd Facebook videos

Fake news writers are manufacturing strange, static videos that seem designed to spice up pro-Donald Trump Facebook groups.

It was billed because the city of faux news. after the election of Donald Trump, journalists descended on Veles in Macedonia, that hosted a disproportionate variety of faux news websites.

Now it seems that individuals in Veles have developed a brand new plan of action to try to create their Facebook posts go viral and therefore raise the popularity of false stories.

Several are using Facebook's live broadcasting tool to provide long, silent clips. The posts generally raise questions about President Trump or former President Obama and raise users to click "like", "angry", "haha" or another Facebook reaction button so as to register their preferences.

For instance, one of these video polls asked: "Who is the best president in our country America?". The video itself showed still pictures of Trump, Obama and former President George W Bush, along with a running tally of the "votes".

Here's a sample of what the videos look like:

The key to understanding what's going on here is the mechanism by which the posts solicit reactions. Making users click "like" or another reaction button to vote in the "poll" affects the Facebook algorithm and would tend to increase the chances that the video is seen by other people.

But the producers of the videos may be slightly behind trend. In December, Facebook responded to users who complained that process or static videos weren't terribly attention-grabbing.

"Given this feedback, we're currently taking steps to scale back the visibility of Live streams that consist entirely of graphics with vote," the corporate said. "If you post a Live video with graphics-only polls, it should not show up as high in people's News Feeds."