How to decipher fake news from the truth
Digital poison is blurring the lines between truth and lies. Fake news has become a pervasive problem on social media. It’s the newest nomenclature describing false or misleading reporting and it came to life over the past year during the presidential campaign.
The phrase “fake news” is being used everywhere from speeches by politicians, to cable news pundits, to people’s tweets.
It’s a phenomenon born out of online blogs and misleading websites pushing agendas and its purveyors are cashing in on click bait, making thousands of dollars on every article that goes viral.
“There are a lot of scare news stories that are posted and it is very alarmist when that happens and the kids are concerned,” said Dr. Barbette Beck, journalism teacher at Shadow Hills High School in Indio. Beck added fake news to the curriculum for her students who are bombarded with posts and shares from unreliable sources every day.
“Especially on Facebook, a lot of my friends do that and it’s fake stories because the headline is totally different from the feel of the actual story once you start reading,” said Mikaela Ceja, a sophomore at Shadow Hills.
Educators at the school see firsthand how social media users can get suckered in.
“Every article and every song has a hook. And that hook has the power to draw somebody in beyond reading the headline,” said Bradford Wheeler, a paraeducator at Shadow Hills High School.
Further up the education ladder, Laurilie Jackson, professor of journalism at College of the Desert, is also teaching her students to be critical of articles they see shared.
“These people that are putting out this fake news, they are skilled they know what they are doing. They make it look very credible and accurate and they set it up like a traditional news story should look like,” Jackson said.
For a long time fake news went by another name, tabloid journalism. But there is something ingrained in your brain when you pick up a magazine like the National Enquirer that what is printed in that periodical might not be the most accurate. The big difference is the deception of perception.
“We can’t always decipher like we used to that (tabloids) look fake that doesn’t look real. Nowadays everything seems to look real so it is really hard for people to decide what is real and what is not real because it looks the same,” Jackson said.
With all of this emphasis on educating young people, it turns out they might have a leg up on older generations when seeing suspicious content online.
“I think older people are more trusting because they are used to that traditional form of journalism. Younger people I think tend to be a little more critical because they see so much and they are getting so much more information than what the older generation has had in the past,” Jackson said.
How can you make sure what you are looking at online is reputable? There’s a few steps you can take. Check the URL and see if it looks suspicious, strange, or unusual. Search the author of an article and see if they have posted other content or have been caught posting falsehoods before.
For instance, check out Dr. Jimmy Rustling. According to internet bios, he not only reports for an ABC lookalike site, but also for a CNN Doppelganger and for site called SuperOfficialNews.com which turns out to be anything but.
Facebook has started to make changes to its algorithms for trending topics to stop the flood of fake news being shared. But in this ever-changing digital world you can expect fake news to be a part of our reality. The old adage continues to ring true, you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
