How to Spot and Report Fake News on Social Media

I've written a number of times about fake news including this post on how to recognize fake news on social media. It's an important subject because there's so much of it.

The first rule is to be sure information comes from a trustworthy site. Well-known sites are one thing, but there are many sites today reporting interesting news that individuals may not be personally familiar with. I use a browser extension called NewsGuard. It maintains a list of trusted sites and shows a green check by search results for those sites. Users can submit other sites for consideration. The important caveat is that it evaluates the site, not the individual news item. It is helpful, but certainly not a complete answer. Users still have to be on the alert.

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/12/video-spotting-fake-news/

So here are some resources. FactCheck.org is run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center; the site owner is one of the keys to trustworthiness. It has a video as shown in the graphic. The site's post on the subject is a couple of years old, but all its points are still valid. FactCheck.org is one of the fact checkers working with Facebook to identify false news. I wish them luck, but without a lot of optimism.

It would certainly help if users themselves pointed out suspect content. Here are three sites you might want to consider using:

Facebook:  Users can check the validity of a post before they share it. How often that is helpful depends on the success of Facebook's own attempts to identify fake content. Users can ask Facebook to investigate content. Facebook says users can check the status of their request.

Google: The help page says the user can see fact checks in search results. It also says that the fact checks are conducted by publishers and it sounds as if that means a site fact-checking its own content. That doesn't seem to be the meaning. The fact-checked search results I can find have been checked by one of the established fact checking sites. That means the fact checks are credible but it also means that only s small set of politically-oriented content is included. Try some searches for statements that are frequently presented as fact and see what you find.

The Poynter Institute points out that Google is building a search engine for fact checks. It is still in beta and I doubt if anyone except a journalist is going to get access at present. If it works and is opened to the public it would be a step forward.

YouTube: The site has been adding encyclopedia links to videos that seem to promote conspiracy theories. Slate has an article that explains pros and cons and shows an example. I can't find anything recent on how that's going or whether it plans to add other topics.

That's a short and not very inspiring look at the current status of fact-checking, especially on social media sites. Much remains to be done before users should share with any degree of confidence unless they have other sources to validate social media posts.

If you have any experience using any of these tools and sites, your comments would be welcome.

Stay Safe!