artbytes26
The social media, especially Facebook has become a major highway for news and other information. Users frequently share stories, news, memes and all sorts of other information. However, it has also become a major medium of false and unverified ‘news’ or information. In other words, FAKE NEWS!
Some are obvious and may be posted as pranks. Some, however, are quite close to the true news but with added information that is not true.
Here in the Philippines, politicians seem to more than willing to spend (or waste, rather) a lot of money just to spread false information against their political opponents is quite the trend.
What is sad, so many people would tend to believe these fake news and willingly ‘share’ the false information.
Frankly speaking, I’m tired of seeing these Fake news or news containing some distorted truth.
Yesterday, when I saw a ‘news’ that is related to a recent event here in the Philippines, I suspected that the information is a bit twisted. So I Googled the headline to check if other mainstream news media have similar headlines. The results lead only to one site. The same site that was shared on Facebook.
I checked the other news from that site, although some of their news titles are true, many are twisted and false. One result leads me to a site called Vera Files Fact Check.
I posted that information as part of my comment on the fake news that appeared on my Facebook wall.
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Question of
Do you often read ‘news’ that was shared on your social media?
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Yes
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Question of
Do you always share ‘interesting’ news and information (from unknown news media) on your social media without verifying them?
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Yes
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No
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Question of
Do you verify suspicious news before sharing them?
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Yes
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Question of
Do you know a site or sites that checks the news or information whether they are true or not? (please share the link on the comment section)
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Yes
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I am a snopes.com man, have been ever since college…
I will include this site in my list of fact-check sites. Thanks for sharing
not saying they’re the best, but they’ve been around for ever
I didn’t know about fake news until there was once I encountered it. It was a news about a celebrity died. I was shocked and told my friend about it. He verified and told me it’s a fake news, and also told me there are a lot of fake news like this, so I have to verify the news first. I was glad I didn’t really share the news to others, but only to this friend.
Yeah, they posted that Rowan Atkinson and Jackie Chan died a few years ago. But they are very much alive to date. 😀
https://www.factcheck.org
There are others as well. But, some that claim to check facts have a checkered history and are also suspect.
The problem with false and biased “news” outlets is that eventually you can’t believe anything.
You cannot believe hardly anything you read these days.
So true. Even the mainstream news media these days tend to “stretch” the truth to make the news more attractive.