Fake New York Times story gets over 50,000 views

Fake New York Times story gets over 50,000 views

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need to teach critical thinking:

A webpage that masqueraded as a New York Times article and claimed that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had endorsed Bernie Sanders for president circulated widely on social media on Monday.

The fake news article, which mimicked The Times’s typefaces and design and included the bylines of two of the newspaper’s political reporters, appeared with the headline “Warren Endorses Sanders, Breaking With Colleagues.”

And by “circulated widely” they mean “50,000 views and 15,000 shares”. We’re so programmed to take something easily mimicked – a site design – as a mark of authority, that we can be fooled.

(I wonder how many hastily-deleted “aggregation” rewrites of it there are?)