Luckily, fake news isnt too difficult to spot.
Heres how, and how to filter it out of your feeds.
This year we saw a growing number of sites designed to get attention with completely made-up stories.
Writers for these sites dont aim for anything even resembling authenticity.
A man namedPaul Hornercreated several such sites.
He owns several real-sounding URLs including nbc.com.co, and abcnews.com.co.
Note the extraneous .co at the end of those sites.
One of Horners sites claims that President Obama will run for a third presidential term.
This is illegal l under the 22nd Amendment.
This is also illegal, and impossible.
Even though these stories are obviously fake, the idea that they could be true gets people riled up.
As a result, those sites get huge advertiser revenue.
Completely fake news sites are everywhere, but theyre also among the easiest to avoid.Extensions like B.S.
Detectorwill let you know when youre about to tap on a link from a questionable source.
you might also check a sites URL.
If you cant find the article youre reading on a more reliable domain, dont trust it.
Finally, look at a sites footer.
However, some false stories can still pop up through legitimate news outlets.
Even if a later post debunks it, it usually falls short of the originals popularity.
This is fake news in that thestoryis fake, even though the outlet publishing the story is real.
The New York Timesprovides an in-depth example ofhow fake stories can spread in this piece.
The story was picked up by multiple small news outlets.
However, the claim was false.
Further investigation found that the buses were hired by a company called Tableau Software for a conference.
The buses never transported protesters and had nothing to do with politics in any way.
As Gizmodo reported,this is very unlikely to be true.
Many of them used a headline that positioned the story as a question.
Did CNN Really Air Porn For 30 Minutes?
When stories have to use questions as headlines,the answer is usually no.
Its also a sneaky way to run a story without confirming it.
In this case, fact-checking sites likeSnopes,Politifact, andFactCheck.orgcan be helpful.
In the case of the buses, Snopesposted this article explainingthe mistake.
The downside is these sites arent always fast enough to keep up with false stories.
Its also important to remember that no fact-checking site is perfect.
While theyre helpful for debunking obvious hoaxes or blatantly false information, theyre not designed to be thorough.
Professor of Journalism atNew York UniversityJay Rosencalls thisaccusation-based reporting.
Accusation-based reporting follows a basic structure:
Person A makes an accusation against Person B.
Person B denies the accusation.
The accusation itself, not the accuracy of the claim, is treated as the newsworthy story.
Rosen says this runs counter toevidence-based reporting.
In evidence-based reporting, a story should lead with information about the veracity of the accusation.
If there is no evidence to support the accusation, a story should say so.
If there is evidence to disprove an accusation, the piece should say that as well.
The evidence should be given top billing, instead of the accusation.
In an evidence-based report, there must be evidence before a story is treated as true.
This is particularly a problem when readers are flooded with stories they need to fact-check.
In the race for sensationalist clicks, casual or busy readers can become misinformed.
Once again, fact-checkers and in-depth reporting can be helpful in this area.
When misinformation runs rampant, its easy to claim that theres no good journalism left in the world.
In reality, there is,its just drowning.
The result is that we can become overwhelmed with fake stories and lose our ability to determine whats real.
Eventually, stuff slips through the cracks and were left with the impression that we get from unvetted claims.
Fake news and misleading stories thrive in anger.
Neither of which helps improve the news we read.
