With the height of the use of social media, information sharing becomes so easy and accessible. Anyone can share information across various social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok. Be it true or not anyone can share it. Have you ever seen some of your family members sharing misinformation?

Our access to information has become so easy that can happen at the touch of our hands. But the problem arises when people don’t know how to discriminate information. Have you been a victim of disinformation and misinformation? Share your experience below.

What is fake news?

We probably have heard a lot of this lately. This term refers to a story or information presented that is not true. This could also be a story or information that has some truth in it but are not 100 percent accurate.

Disinformation vs. Misinformation

Disinformation is the deliberate or intentional creation of false and misleading information with the intention to mislead the reader.

Misinformation is unintentional spread of information thinking its factual and true. Misinformation is usually found with people sharing false content unknowingly. Misreported news can be considered as misinformation.

How to spot a fake news?

Have a critical mindset

We have to check ourselves if we are too biased on the information presented especially if we come across with information targeting the people we are fond with. We have to be open and consider if our own beliefs affect our judgements.

Consider the Source

We have to check the sites who posted those information if they are reliable sites. If the site is not familiar we can do further search through with the site info presented and investigate its reliability.

Read Beyond

This is very common mistakes among everyone. Sometimes we only read the title of the article without reading its content and go around sharing without fact-checking that information. It’s important to actually read and even search further information about a certain information before sharing it.

Check the Author

To fact-check an information it is important that we know who wrote such story or information if they are real or if they are credible.

Examine the evidence

A credible story would present plenty of credible data such as survey data, official statistics and various media such as photo and videos as evidence to support their story. It is also important to check on dates if they are recent or recycled just to back up their viewpoint. Photoshop is very common these days and we can use Google Reverse Image Search to check where an image originated and whether it has been altered.

Thank you for reading my article. If you have more tips to share in spotting fake news, feel free to share it below.

References:

• https://guides.library.cornell.edu/evaluate_news/infographic

• https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/fake-news.html