Some of the biggest fake news stories of the year. Source: Snopes.com

Method Selected most-spread stories. Focussed on political stories. Filtered out death hoaxes, tales of perverse titillation, made-up celebrity gossip and stuff that was plainly bonkers.

Tried to clean up the searches as much as possible to remove noise from the signals. A lot of hits for individual fake news stories actually came from wide-spread stories debunking the story. Inflammation?

» updated 31st Jan 2019 Added 2018 stories. Renamed to junk news. New themes this year include George Soros and lots of stories about pedophiles.

» 2018 data: bit.ly/IIB-FakeNews2018

» 2017 data: bit.ly/IIB-FakeNews2017

» Latest: Fake News Has A Wide Reach, But Little Impact

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