Massive Spike in Fake Referrals from Real Sites?

[OakleyForum]

A few days out of the last week, I had major spikes in traffic (100%+ increases). At first I thought a piece of material went viral on social media, where I had some new campaigns running. Then This morning I noticed an hourly change of 400% and began to dig deeper. As I went to the referral area of Google Analytics, I expected to see Instagram/Facebook but instead got real names such as fox news, marvel etc. (see screenshot). All have a site duration of 1 second or less, meaning they are just pinging the site. I understand these are fake referrals - my question is why/what is going on? I have no increase in bandwidth, no deteriorated server performance.

Any thoughts?

 

[indepth]

I've also noticed the fake referrals increase on some of my sites lately.

Here's an older but pretty informative article about what is most likely the cause / motive behind this practice:
https://www.optimizesmart.com/geek-guide-removing-referrer-spam-google-analytics/