Fake news is still here, despite efforts by Google, Facebook

Nearly a year after Facebook and Google launched offensives against fake news, they're still inadvertently promoting it -- often at the worst possible times.

Online services designed to engross users aren't so easily retooled to promote greater accuracy, it turns out. Especially with online trolls, pranksters and more malicious types scheming to evade new controls as they're rolled out.

In the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, Facebook's "Crisis Response" page for the attack featured a false article misidentifying the gunman and claiming he was a "far left loon." Google promoted a similarly erroneous item from the anonymous prankster site 4chan in its "Top Stories" results.

A day after the attack, a YouTube search on "Las Vegas shooting" yielded a conspiracy-theory video that claimed multiple shooters were involved in the attack as the fifth result. YouTube is owned by Google.

None of these stories were true. Police identified the sole shooter as Stephen Paddock, a Nevada man whose motive remains a mystery. The Oct. 1 attack on a music festival left 58 dead and hundreds wounded.

The companies quickly purged offending links and tweaked their algorithms to favor more authoritative sources. But their work is clearly incomplete -- a different Las Vegas conspiracy video was the eighth result displayed by YouTube in a search Monday.

Why do these highly automated services keep failing to separate truth from fiction? One big factor: most online services systems tend to emphasize posts that engage an audience -- exactly what a lot of fake news is specifically designed to do.

Facebook and Google get caught off guard "because their algorithms just look for signs of popularity and recency at first," without first checking to ensure relevance, sid David Carroll, a professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

That problem is much bigger in the wake of disaster, when facts are still unclear and demand for information runs high.

Malicious actors have learned to take advantage of this, said Mandy Jenkins, head of news at social media and news research agency Storyful.

"They know how the sites work, they know how algorithms work, they know how the media works," she said.

Participants on 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" channel regularly chat about "how to deploy fake news strategies" around major stories, said Dan Leibson, vice president of search at the digital marketing consultancy Local SEO Guide.

One such chat just hours after the Las Vegas urged readers to "push the fact this terrorist was a commie" on social media.

"There were people discussing how to create engagement all night," Leibson said.

Thanks to political polarization, the very notion of what constitutes a "credible" source of news is now a point of contention.

Mainstream journalists routinely make judgments about the credibility of various publications based on their history of accuracy. That's a much more complicated issue for mass-market services like Facebook and Google, given the popularity of many inaccurate sources among political partisans.