Some of the posts on the fake news sites’ pages went extremely viral many months after Facebook announced its crackdown. An Empire News story reporting that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sustained serious injuries in prison received 240k likes, 43k shares, and 28k comments on its Facebook page. The incident was pure fiction, but still spread like wildfire on the platform. An even less believable post about a fatal gang war sparked by the “Blood” moon was shared 22k times from the Facebook page of Huzlers, another fake news site.

• Uncategorized