Ah, the good old days when you could read a newspaper or watch the news on tv to find out what was going on in the world. you didn’t have to question what was reported. But things aren't so easy now. With online news and social media being very popular sometimes we don’t know if the news we read is true or not. That article you may have just read about McDonalds making McNuggets from pink goo might not be the real deal. Fake news can change history usually for the worst and can really negatively affect future generations. We make important decisions based on information. We form an idea about people or a situation by obtaining information. So if the information we saw on the Web is invented, false, exaggerated or distorted, we won’t make good decisions.
Here are some ways you can find out if the news you see is fake. Consider the source Check the domain name of the site the story is coming from. If the web site address is a slight variation of a real news organization, this is typically a red flag. Who’s behind the About Us? You should be able to learn more about the news agency (including their address and staff list) by reading the About Us section of their website. Legitimate sites will give you complete contact information. Double check the information Search the title of the article and you should be able to find more information about the writer. If the information you find doesn’t match what it says on the news site, you’ve likely stumbled onto a nice piece of click bait/fake news. Use common sense If it looks crazy and has a really weird source it probably is fake. But you can always search up the article in google to double check. But things are getting better introducing independent fact checkers. Fact checkers job is to verify factual information, in order to promote the veracity and correctness of reporting. With these fact checkers showing up to help decipher real from fake news we can rest easy knowing that once it is fact checked it is the real deal. Here is a quiz to see if you can decipher fake news from real news. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/fake-news-quiz-nov-18 Callum A
17 Comments
|
Categories
|