How do we take up the fight against fake news?
- showmethereality
- Oct 27, 2020
- 2 min read
Because of the internet becoming so widespread and the social media usage increasing, we encounter news and even fake news on a daily basis. In this article, we’re going to focus on giving tips and tricks on debunking fake news.
If we are reading anything on a website, which we are not familiar with, it is very important to check the source of the information with a critical point of view. What kind of content appears on the website, are the creators of these contents mentioned after them, what are the topics that they are preoccupied with and also we have to check the quality of their articles. If a website is full of advertisements and tabloid topics, we need to be skeptical about the authenticity of these information. If the source seems to be trustworthy, but the article we are reading does not seem real, it is recommended to google it and read about the topic from a different point of view.
Thanks to the digitalization the consumption of news has also transformed. Back in the days people used to read their daily news in a print format, nowadays most of the people read online newsportals. In the past, fact checking was much harder than it is nowadays. If you wanted to check the authenticity of an article, you had to buy another newspaper, which meant spending more money, adding to the daily expenses, thus people were satisfied with reading news only from a source. The internet made everything faster and more effective.
Another proven method is looking up information about the journalist who wrote the article. Most competitive newspapers have information about their publicist on their website. If the person has experience in the topic, the information becomes likely true. In the articles that appear in the New York Times have their author specified at the end. For example:
After consulting multiple sources the news still seems confusing, you should try searching on a fact checking webpage. These pages are usually nonprofit and the goal of their operation is to check the authenticity of the most important facts. Here are some examples for such websites:
It happens that we don’t have enough time to take all these steps, because checking every information that we read on the internet is really time consuming. We can always use a browser extension, that checks everything for you. It can tell you how trustworthy the newsportal is and also what political principles it represents.
Trusted News : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trusted-news/nkkghpncidknplmlkgemdoekpckjmlok/related
This plug-in rates every article on a scale of 1 to 5, based on how objective or subjective it’s content is.
The Factual – News Evaluator : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-factual-news-evaluato/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp/related
This extension checks the article from 4 different standpoints and rates all of them separately: quality of the newsportal, quality of the source, style of the article and the journalist itself.
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I like how you mentioned 👏 that in the era of digitisation it's much easier to fact check information yet it seems as though many people don't do that. Facebook is the number one spreader of fake news. I am thankful that you are using this platform to help combat and education people on this subject.