After Massive Fail Amid Vegas Tragedy, Google and Facebook Must Ensure Honest Information

Victims were still bleeding out below the Vegas sniper's deadly perch when the first noxious lies, disguised as "news," began circulating through the internet.The anonymous message site 4chan, infamous for deliberately disseminating misinformation, falsely pinned the Sunday night massacre on a completely innocent individual — and linked the attack to a made-up Trump-hating liberal agenda.Those falsehoods were picked up by Google's "top stories" module and gained even more traction after other sites republished them. Facebook's official "safety check" page for the shooting prominently displayed a post from Alt-Right News Blogspot, which identified the gunman as a "Trump-hating Rachel Maddox fan."More inaccurate reports followed, among them that the FBI had already linked the shooter to ISIS and that the mainstream media was concealing that he was a recent convert to Islam.As Americans grappled with the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, the internet's hateful troublemakers and trolls were hell bent on using the tragedy to further divide the nation.  Continue reading...