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Seek Information beyond Your Filter Bubble We can avoid fake news by leaving our filter bubbles and seeking out opinions that do not agree with our own. Comparing sources is always a good idea. Com- paring sources that illustrate different points of view can often give some context to the interpretation of the information being […]

Experience and education do not always result in unbiased reporting. The reputation of the organiza- tion that supports (employs) a reporter also serves as a means of evaluating a source. Publishers that have been in the news business for a while get a reputation based on the accuracy, reliability, and slant of the sto- ries

Learn about Search Engine Ranking A first strategy to foiling the purveyors of fake news is to educate ourselves about how fake news is created and how it spreads. For example, when people search for information, they often use a search engine. The amount of information that is retrieved is always overwhelming. The vast majority

Google and Facebook Anti–Fake News Efforts The social media platforms and search engines them- selves have made some efforts to help detect and flag fake news. Facebook created an “immune system” to Combating Fake News in the Digital Age Joanna M. Burkhardt help protect itself from infection by bots.40 Google announced that it will increase

Experiments in Bot and Botnet Detection A variety of experiments have been conducted using multiple processes to create a score for information credibility.29 Research groups are prepared to supply researchers with data harvested from social media sites. Indiana University has launched a project called Truthy.30 As part of that project, researchers have developed an “Observatory

Linguistic Approaches to the Identification of Fake News The following four linguistic approaches are being tested by researchers: In the Bag of Words approach, each word in a sen- tence or paragraph or article is considered as a sepa- rate unit with equal importance when compared to every other word. Frequencies of individual words and

Experiments in Fake News Detection Researchers have studied how well humans can detect lies. Bond and DePaulo analyzed the results of more than 200 lie detection experiments and found that humans can detect lies in text only slightly better than by random chance.17 This means that if a bot supplies a social media user with

Can Technology Save Us? Technology of Fake News Fake news sites target the filter bubbles of groups most aligned with that news. They use the power of social media to do so. Initially fake news of the social media era was relatively easy to spot. The claims of early social media fake news purveyors were

How Fake News Spreads Word of Mouth News has always been disseminated by word of mouth. Early humans lived in small groups, moving from place to place as needs required. As the human population grew, there was greater need for communication. Con- tact between groups became more common, and the connections between groups became more

Global Reach of Fake News Initial forays into the world of fake news fall into the category of entertainment, satire, and parody. They are meant to amuse or to instruct the unwary. Canards and other news that fall into the category of misinfor- mation and misdirection, like the Martin Luther King website, often have more