Fake news whirl around us every day, attempting to pull us into a vortex of false assumptions. Its spread can cause chaos and global conflicts. To combat this escalating issue, social media giants and newspaper agencies have devised strategies that allow readers to filter out false stories.
Facebook has allowed its users to be the primary regulator in the first line of defense against fake news circulation. They have enlisted the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), an extension of the journalism think tank Poynter. Facebook users in the US and Germany can flag articles that they believe to be false, which will then be passed to third-party fact checkers working with IFCN. These fact checkers originate from media organizations such as the Washington Post and websites such as Snopes.com. IFCN director Alexios Mantzarlis states that they "look at the stories that users have flagged as fake and if they fact check them and tag them as false, these stories then get a disputed tag that stays with them across the social network." If users attempt to share these fake stories, the "fake" tag will prevent the widespread circulation on Facebook.
Alternatively, Le Monde, one of the leading French newspapers, created a fact-checking unit named Les Decodeurs, French for "The Decoders." Samuel Laurent, editor of Les Decodeurs, explains, "You just put it on your browser and then when you come to a fake news site you get a pop up appearing saying 'warning this is a fake news site'. If you click on the tools you will have access to a little paper describing the website and saying why we think it's not trustworthy." However, the successful operation of this software is entirely dependent on users' awareness of the prevalent issue of fake news stories and their proactive involvement in regulating its circulation. "We know that we won't convince everyone and we know that fake news readers already think we are the fake news. Our goal is to just provide this tool for people who are really skeptical or who just don't know who to trust," asserts Laurent.
Algorithms are essentially the motors behind the dissemination of fake news. Some programmers believe that in order to tame these software, we need to employ more computer code. "From an algorithmic perspective it's possible for social media sites to recognize that website was only created two weeks ago, therefore it's probably likely that this is a less trustworthy site," states Claire Wardle of First Draft News. First Draft is working alongside Google and Facebook to devise new computer code that could potentially end the spread of fake news. Wardle likens their strategy to a simple email inbox, "I'm talking about a bit like a spam folder in your email, those emails still sit there, but you have to go to your spam folder to look for it." Needless to say, agencies and organizations are working tirelessly to definitively stop the spread of fake news.
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