Thanks to the rise of social media, we finally have a better way to disseminate helpful information, no matter where your friends and family are located. In just one click or tap, you can share news articles online that you believe are important for the public to know about. Unfortunately, due to the capability of social media to make any news go viral, some people with selfish interest take advantage of this by creating fabricating information then passing them off as real news.
At this point in time, you may already be aware that fake news has already plagued the online realm. While you might have read a bunch of fake news related to political propagandas, there are those types of fake news that are made solely to attract attention. Be it about science, health, or technology, fake news can victimize anyone and feed the public with wrong info, which can be harmful when a person accepts this as the truth.
How Can You Tell If Something You Are About To Share Online Is Fake News?
A prime characteristic of fake news is that every info listed in it cannot be traced back to a legitimate source as noted by Big Data or data science engineers (qualified through Data Science Skills Testing). This is because the details provided by fake news are nothing but mere fabrications of the writer. Thus, the first thing you can do is to verify the information in an article and see if there are other articles online that would confirm the claims of a suspected fake news write-up.
If you notice that a certain news website has way too many pop-up ads that you almost cannot handle, it is likely that the news articles there are fake. Because fake news peddlers are only after a wider reach or bigger audience, they would take advantage of this and fill their articles with a load of advertisements, so that every click made by an unfortunate site visitor would equate to a handful of dollars.
For the parents and guardians, it is also advised to keep the children’s activity in the social media supervised. This way, you can also monitor if the kids are already reading fake news articles that will feed them with dangerous ideas.