Fake News? How to fight them

Article by Materahub

The general definition of the Fake news refers to false or misleading information presented as news.

It often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.

 

6 tips to fight with fake news

Nowadays there are several ways to fight Fake news, here six tips and advices:

 

Identify Fake news

Beware of odd or unfamiliar URLs, if you see strange domain names, watch out for additional text after the “.com.”

 

Find the original article

If you are looking at a news outlet that aggregates news from a variety of sources, it is important to try to find the location where an article was first posted. Follow links in the article that lead back to the reporting source, and evaluate that source.

 

Plug key phrases from the story into search engines

If there are elements of the article that seem far-fetched, pull out key sentences or ideas and plug them into Google, or another search engine. If the phrase is true and newsworthy, it should be reported by other sources. If not, you came across into a Fake news!

 

Check the date of the story

Sometimes an old story makes the rounds as if it’s new information, read the original posting date of a particular article. Check the dates for statistics and other data, as well.

 

Look carefully at images

Check to see if the images in the article match up with the article’s details. For instance, make sure the photos were taken at night if the article’s incident happened at night time.

 

Use online fact checking services

Numerous websites, such as Snopes, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org, are dedicated to trying to fact checking news articles.

 

Conclusions

Fighting fake news is important because trust matters, it is necessary combatting online abuse, disinformation and misinformation through media and information literacy. This is essential for all of us, journalism educators, as well as practicing journalists and editors who are interested in information, how we share it and how we use it.