I Fell for Facebook Fake News. Here's Why Millions of You Did, Too.

The Facebook video is nuts, but I can't tear my eyes away. A plane, struggling in a huge storm, does a 360-degree flip before safely landing and letting out terrified passengers.

It turns out the video is totally bunk, spliced together from a computer-generated clip and unrelated real news footage. But that didn't stop the Facebook post from arriving in my News Feed via a friend last month. I watched it. Maybe you did, too: It has nearly 14 million views.

Everyone now knows the web is filled with lies. So then how do fake Facebook posts, YouTube videos and tweets keep making suckers of us?

To find out, I conducted a forensic investigation of the fake that fooled my social network. I found the original creator of that CG plane clip. I spoke to the Facebook executive charged with curbing misinformation. And I confronted my friend who shared it.

The motives for a crazy plane report may be different from posts misdirecting American voters or fueling genocide in Myanmar. Yet some of the questions are the same: What makes fake news effective? Why did I end up seeing it? And what can we do about it?

Fake news creators "aren't loyal to any one ideology or geography," said Tessa Lyons, the product manager for Facebook's News Feed tasked with reducing misinformation. "They are seizing on whatever the conversation is" - usually to make money.

This year, Facebook will double the number of humans involved in fighting constantly morphing "integrity" problems on its network, to 20,000. Thanks in part to those efforts, independent fact-checkers and some new technologies, Facebook user interaction with known fake news sites has declined by 50 percent since the 2016 election, according to a study by Stanford and New York University.

But if you think you're immune to this stuff, you're wrong. Detecting what's fake in images and video is only getting harder. Misinformation is part of an online economy that weaponizes social media to profit from our clicks and attention. And with the right tools to stop it still a long ways off, we all need to get smarter about it.

The crazy plane video first appeared September 13 on a Facebook page called Time News International. Its caption reads: "A Capital Airlines Beijing-Macao flight, carrying 166 people's, made an emergency landing in Shenzhen on 28 August 2018, after aborting a landing attempt in Macao due to mechanical failure, the airline said."

No real commercial plane did a 360 roll so close to the ground, but an emergency landing really did happen that August day in Macau.

Four days later, in Los Angeles, film director Aristomenis Tsirbas started getting messages from his friends. A year earlier, the computer graphics whiz had created and posted to YouTube a video he'd made showing a plane doing a 360. Someone had taken his work and used it at the beginning of a fake news report.