How Memes Stir Up Fake News

During Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony, he vowed to fix Facebook’s fake news problem and to help stop the spread of misinformation shared by bots and foreign sources. While this is all well and good, Newhouse assistant professor of communications Jennifer Grygiel says he is missing something in his target – memes. The satirical photos and videos are posted with the intention of going viral, and can slip by algorithms out to stop the spreading of fake news.

“Political memes are not something like a nude body part. It can be mashed up in a way that’s creating a visual rhetoric. A machine isn’t smart enough to pick up on that,” Grygiel told CNET.