Article - Fake News
Fake News is one of the many arising problems of the contemporary society, in a
world always developing from a technological point of view and increasingly
affected by the presence of Internet, it’s obvious that getting things under control may
be harder than what we could possibly imagine. The fast and bondless
communication social networks allow has affected our lives in all its aspects and has
brought to the table a new and resilient enemy of journalists and newspapers. Fake
news is regarded as false and misleading information which has the objective to
shock the population and is spread deliberately, usually for political or commercial
purposes, by an individual or an organised corporation. Now, we do not need a
degree in journalism to understand the absurd and astronomical harmfulness that this
has the potential to channel. The gap between creating false beliefs for fun or money
and brainwashing an entire population and causing riots is not that wide. In the
current virtual online reality, dominated by algorithms and programs, which rely on
binary codes and cold machines, the human side appears progressively downgraded.
A consequence of this is the degradation of the truth, which is nothing but a human
concept and, as such, can only be verified by us. This process, however, can at times
be so challenging to the point that a source of news may need to go through a range
of different tests before it can be confirmed, leading to a slow-down in the
distribution of trustworthy and useful news.
Now that we have explained the main effects of fake news, we need to understand
how to navigate between them, to effectively pinpoint them in order for us to find the
answers we are looking for. This is where the REAL check comes in handy. It
consists of 4 steps:
1. Always doubt of what you read or hear and ask yourself “Is this real?”
2. Find out every piece of evidence you can about the source and test its
accountability.
3. Add your knowledge and any type of info you get from other people or the
internet to give it more details and see whether the bigger picture makes
sense or not.
4. Look for other sources spreading the same story. Is there many of them?
Are any of them trustworthy based on your knowledge?
Thankfully, the advancing technology which makes it difficult to filter news it’s the
same that provides free access tools to help define them. Some notable mentions are
Spokeo, Wolfram Alpha or even Google Maps. Therefore, although one could have
some problems trying to confirm any type of news, it’s actually possible. This
possibility shines brightly in the sea of fake news, which gets thicker with each tick
of the clock, and is indeed vital for anyone who wishes to jump in this field. To prove
this, we could just take any of the speeches from the previous American President
