Monday, November 19, 2018

How Can We Stop Fake News?


In recent years, governments around the world have been concerned with fake news.  Although the fear of fake news starting out as political, fake news has spread across the web over different social media sites and outlets.  Fake news is defined as news articles or other items that are deliberately false and intended to manipulate the viewer.  Fake news can be anything from political to trying to sell a product or services for financial gain.



In recent years, fake news has been of concern to many individuals, organizations, and governments.  The question now becomes how to deal with such matters.  Governments and their agencies have taken countermeasures to try to reduce the spread of fake news by setting up services to debunk stories that are false.  There is also talks about regulating social media sites by imposing punishments for companies who do not actively seek out and destroy fake news sources.    The other emphasis to combating fake news is placed on the user.  Many argue that it is up to users to be responsible and to be aware of stories you receive either on social media or elsewhere on the internet.  There are multiple strategies users can use to try and identify and combat fakes news across the web.  Some of these strategies include looking at the website to see if it has a standard domain and URL, such as .com or .edu.  When reading a story, see if it includes enough experts that can cover a wide array of perspectives on the given story.  Think critically, as if a news story sounds too good or too bad to be true, it most likely is false. 

So what are your thoughts?  Should governments and companies be responsible for going after fake news, or should it be solely of us users to think responsibility?  And what else can be done by users to combat fake news? 

1 comment:

  1. Fake news has been something that is really present today. Fake news was a big topic during the past election. Also, now there isn’t just fake news there are also fake accounts that are putting this out there also. Which is where you brought up the point that now there are punishments for companies who do not destroy these accounts. I know that there has been in the news that Facebook and Instagram are really going hard on the fake accounts and taking them down. I think that there is some part that the user needs to take to make sure that they know what is real and what is fake. It is important to look at both sides either way. I think that users and the government should help to get the fake news gone. It is important to work together for something like this so it can be done sooner. If someone sees something that is fake they should be able to flag it and so the government can get rid of the page or article and then keep looking for other accounts. I think that users need to be aware that this is out there and use the techniques that were given to make sure that they are getting something that is tr

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