Fighting Facebook Fake News

Posted on by Victoria Giannola

Is the Facebook post you just read authentic news? It’s hard to tell. Start with the source it is coming from. According to Zuckerberg himself, “Some hoaxes can be completely debunked, but a greater amount of content, including that from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted”. Sometimes factual stories wrongfully get taken down. It is common for Facebook users to flag content that they disagree with, which hinders even authentic news.

As Facebook users who absorb thousands of different messages a day, we must know when we are being “fed” fake news. Here’s how according to Harvard University:

  • Question the publisher’s credibility. Is the domain credible or is it a “knock off” of a popular news source? What is the publishers point of view? Readers often mistake opinion as fact. Refer to unbiased news sources for authentic news.
  • Look at timely and quality news. Make sure news isn’t being recycled from the past and taken out of context. Grammatical errors are also a major telltale of illegitimate news.
  • Check the Sources and Citations. Was the article promoted to you specifically or did you find it on a mainstream news website? Can you find similar information on other sites? If an article does not have any facts and quotes from other sources, it is probably not reputable.
  • Fact Check. Weed out fiction versus fact by fact checking on websites like factcheck.org, International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and PolitiFact.com.

At a time when the political divide is so wide and the ability to manipulate information is so easy, the stakes are too high not to get the facts straight. By reevaluating news, we must be our own detectives and defend ourselves from fake news.

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