What is fake news and how to recognize it?
Let’s start by defining what we mean by fake news, at least in the context of this piece. Fake news is news that deliberately aims to misinform the reader about a certain issue. For example, someone reporting about, “New research showing that the world is flat after all!”. Unfortunately, and this is where the real problem lies, it is not always as easy to tell fake news apart from the real news as it was in the example.
So why should we care about this phenomena? Because reading and believing in fake news can skew your perspective of the world, causing confusion about otherwise important issues. Say, during an election, it is important that you are truthfully informed about all candidates. This will help you to vote on the right person for you. In a Eurobarometer survey done in 2018, the results showed that 83% of the participants believed that fake news was “a danger to democracy” (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/final-results-eurobarometer-fake-news-and-online-disinformation). Fake news can also seriously hurt people. There is a lot of false information circling about medical issues. These can be very harmful, because it can often be hard to distinguish the fake from not fake as medical issues can be quite complex. One example of this, is the news that was spread around in Russia claiming that AIDS did not actually exist (https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/fake-news-helped-spread-hivaids-russia-has-it-stopped).
Luckily, there are plenty of ways to fight against fake news. The first, and probably most important one, is to learn how to recognize fake news. Even though recognizing them is not always easy at a glance, there are numerous checks that we can do before trusting a news article. Many of these points have been picked up from a guide made by the The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174). Firstly, is of course examining the source of the article. You might want to check the front page of the source and see if it has any political agenda for example. The next step would be to do the same source examination to any sources that the article sites. Other things you can research are, for example, the authors other texts and background. Finding other unrelated sources that report the same news also helps verify the validity of an article. Things that you can check from the article itself include grammar and punctuation. Finding several errors in those is a strong warning sign. Lastly, often the pictures included in fake news are not actually related to the news article. To find out the origin of the photo, you can actually do a Google search with that photo. This will show you all other websites that have used the same photo.
Once we successfully recognize fake news, there are a few things that we can do to try and prevent the spread of them. Fake news often thrives on social media, so always be mindful of what you share. Before you react to posts, make sure you do the checks explained in the previous paragraph. In addition to you knowing about this phenomena, awareness of others is also important. Getting schools to recognize the importance of the phenomena is very useful for raising this awareness. Luckily, this is something that is already happening (see for example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/fake-news-schools-education-online-risks-confirmation-bias-damian-hinds-government-a9004516.html).
YLE has also recently taken a stand against fake news, and created a game in which the player can attempt to manipulate and radicalize people with different methods. This game educates people in these ways of manipulating people and hopefully makes them more observant to the same methods used on them in the future (https://trollitehdas.yle.fi).
