How to Deal with Fake News

While discussing the relevance of fake journalism, I had the simple opinion to just forbid it and to take action against it as far as possible. Of course, that is easier said than done and the worst thing is that fake news websites even copy the layout of reliable sources like “Spiegel Online”. Therefore, people might automatically trust the content of a fake website, because they classify the webpage by its appearance as a reliable source. Nonetheless, it is not so hard to identify these articles as fake ones if you are used to the usual layout of these popular news websites.

The reason behind these articles is of course a commercial one: most of them contain an advertisement for a certain product or company, like an online casino. The date of these articles is updated automatically, so that it always seems to be up to date and writers even use pictures without having an official agreement of the owner.

Simply forming the rule to ignore all articles that seem to contain a certain kind of advertisement might not be the right answer to this problem. As the media are concerned with multiple categories nowadays, you can even find similiar articles while scrolling through the content of “Spiegel Online”. For example, one article tries to give you some tips on what kind of presents might be good for runners (although it does not mention certain products).

Finally, the only thing that can be done by us consumers is to be more careful while scrolling through the internet and to double check whether a website really represents a reliable source. But distribution of fake news might just really come to an end when there appears to be another possibility to earn a lot more money.