When going on Facebook, there is no doubt that your newsfeed will be ridden with a variety of different articles. The big question is: what is the truth? When I look at Facebook articles, I usually look at the sources. Washington Post, The New York Times, Business Insider, and other reputable news sources always get a further glance from me. On the contrary, if the article doesn’t show me any reputable sources then I don’t continue looking at it.
My search continues to check if the link is actually authentic instead of a proxy site that has the same name but is not the actual publication. If I check the link and it isn’t a normal link from the publication and write it off as fake news. International news is a bit more difficult, but I usually stick with sites that end in .org. What’s bad is that not many people take as much care to make sure that their news is real because Facebook is the land of contrived authenticity.
People use Facebook to create a perception of their life that they’d like others to think they have rather than the life they do have. If that contrived authenticity is used in their personal life and people don’t notice the farce about their own friends, then how can people distinguish real news from fake news? It’s hard to distinguish actual news from fake news as a voracious consumer myself. So, what about people who solely get their news from Facebook?
Hopefully this fake news phenomenon will slowly ween it’s way off Facebook and away from the susceptible public. To stop the fake news there has to be more reality on a platform whose biggest takeaway is that you can be whoever you want even if that person isn’t you at all. Read more about Facebook’s problem with authenticity here: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-is-killing-your-authenticity-2011-3
Read more "Authenticity: Is it Achievable on Facebook?"