As with many regular journalists, fake news creators search the web looking for trending topics to drive traffic to their websites.
Posts are copied from other fake news websites, or from mainstream media organizations before adding invented details.
Most of this content is published on websites created to look like NBC News, Fox News, the Huffington Post and others. The goal is always to generate viral content as those clicks equal cash.
Patricia deWinter
Battling Fake News with Media Literacy Instruction
TLA Presentation April 5, 2018
“The technology used to generate fake news is advancing rapidly as well. Artists and computer researchers are experimenting with machine-learning algorithms to generate still images, audio, and video clips of people that do not exist or to mimic the movements or speech of real figures. As these technologies improve, it will likely become increasingly difficult to verify whether a source is real or fake, as it becomes easier than ever to generate ‘evidence’ to support any claim dreamed up by fake news creators.”
DiLascio-Martinuk, Tracey M. "Fake News: Overview." Points of View: Fake News, Nov. 2017, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com