It is not only media giants like Google or Facebook have to fight false information on the web;
absolutely any Internet user can make a significant contribution to the purification of social media from false information. In the era of the ubiquity of the Internet, it is extremely difficult to prevent the creation of fake news. However, it is possible and necessary to combat the spread of fake news, thereby minimizing the potential harm from such news. The tools described
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below characterize the methods available today for detecting false or questionable information, as well as resources that help in checking the facts for accuracy and reliability.
Any news received from social media may contain changed or completely inaccurate information. And to make sure the message is accurate, experts use a variety of approaches to text analysis in order to identify manipulative and inaccurate information. To prevent fake news from spreading on social media, The Huffington Post has compiled a list of simple rules for recognizing them:
1. Read more than the title. If you look through the news to the end, you may find that the title has nothing to do with the text of the news or that there is no evidence to confirm its veracity.
2. Assess the reliability of the source of the message - unfamiliar sites filled with ads and names written in capslock should cause skepticism. Check the search engines for previously published texts (this will give you an idea of whether the source is reliable), as well as the URLs of pages that look suspicious to make sure it is not a fake disguised as a reliable source.
3. Check the publication date and time. A common element of fake news is to publish old publications as new ones. If the news contains links to other sources, review them, paying attention to when they were published and how they describe the event, especially when it comes to time.
4. Who is the author? Read the author's previous publications - his background will help to understand whether the author is really a journalist, or whether he wrote fake articles before.
Often in fake news, the author is not mentioned at all.
5. Get acquainted with the sources to which the news refers. The lack of references or sources from which these or those statements were taken is an obvious signal that the post is most likely a fake. Any statements or quotations from officials should be supported by reliable sources.
6. Pay attention to questionable quotes and photos. Be skeptical of shocking or suspicious quotes and published photos from the scene.
7. You should not spread the news just because you share the author's point of view or accept one of the parties to the conflict.
8. Find out what other publications are writing about it. If no other reliable source reports these events, most likely the news is fake.
9. Think before you republish. News sites that spread misinformation work with the expectation that readers will spread their news (Robins-Early, 2016).
43 CRAAP test
During the writing of any research paper, it is important to cite relevant and truthful sources.
In the era of the dominance of fake news on the Internet, it becomes more and more difficult to do this, since it is often quite difficult to distinguish reliable information from fictional. One of the ways to check the reliability of a web resource is to check the site using the CRAAP Test. The name of this test is an acronym for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. The task of this test is to make it easier for students and teachers to find reliable information when working with print resources. This test was developed in 2004 by Sarah Blakeslee and librarians at California State University in Chico (Blakeslee, 2004). Later, this test was adapted to work with web resources. The criteria for assessing the reliability of information using the CRAAP test are given in Appendix A.
Each of the categories is rated on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best possible. This score creates a scale of up to 50 points, where a value of 50-45 is excellent, 44-40 is good, 39-35 is average, 34-30 is the minimum acceptable limit, and values below 30 are considered unacceptable for the selected source.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, with the assistance of FactChesk.org, released a summary in which it outlined 8 steps to detect fake news (IFLA, n.d.):
1. Consider the source
Often, fake sites try to look like copies of well-known news sources by copying the style of the main pages or by changing the letter in the site name. Also, some fake sites do not have a valid certificate. By examining a news site carefully, you can determine whether the site is trying to impersonate a serious news outlet or is positioning itself as a site with purely entertainment content.
2. Read not only headlines
If a provocative headline grabs your attention, try to read the entire text underneath it before you decide to share shocking news. Further text may have no connection with the title or be so unreal that there will be no questions about the falsity of the news.
3. Check the authors
A clear sign of fake news is that the article does not have a specific author. If the author is listed, then it will most likely be a fictional character and there will be no way to contact the author directly.
44 4. Assess the supporting sources
When published, fake news does not indicate the original source, which is logical, because the news is invented and does not have a source. Oftentimes, these fake stories will cite official - or sounding official - sources, but once you look at them, the source won't confirm the claim.
5. Check the date of publication
Often fake news does not indicate the date in the article, since the news can
"shoot" today or a month later. In addition, "news sites" may publish news that links to events that happened many months or even years ago, posing as recent events.
6. Ask if it is a joke
Some sites that publish fake news are satirical publications and are not intended to misinform the reader, but to entertain. For example, the line "About us" on the website Worldnewsdailyreport.com says that "World News Daily Report is an American Jewish Zionist newspaper based in Tel Aviv and dedicated on covering biblical archeology news and other mysteries around the Globe"
(World News Daily Report, n.d.).
7. Review your own biases
Often our own beliefs keep us from seeing the truth. The reader whose views coincide with the information in the article is more likely to believe in its reality.
8. Ask experts
If the news is not credible, then you can always check the given news or the entire website for the spread of lies. There are several non-commercial resources on the Internet that do fact-checking. You can trust them.