The Oxford 2016 word of the year is post-truth. Post-truth is basically believing something even though it is not true and there is no evidence to back up the claim. There are claims that Trump won because of the fake news that did its rounds on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg denies these claims. But we can’t deny that fake news is a real problem in a post truth world.
SEE ALSO: Orange is the new black (US Election 2016)
In the US, 44% of Americans say they get their news from Facebook. The problem with this is that the Facebook news feed is making us dumb. Why? Because the algorithm is designed to give us more of what we already like.
News is now one of the three things we get from social media. The other being our entire self-worth and pictures of shaved alpacas – John Oliver
We’ve all got that Facebook friend who shares a post that is obviously fake and then goes on a rant exclaiming how outraged they are. Depending on their settings, friends of friends of friends see the post and instead of checking the story, we just see an image and a headline and our minds are made up.
How to stop fake news
- Only read news from a variety of trusted sources.
- Use this Chrome extension to spot fake news.
- Or this Chrome extension that spots fake news on Facebook.
- On Sunday Zuckerberg wrote a post detailing how Facebook intends to stop fake news, and a big part of this relies on the Facebook user. If you suspect a post is from a fake news site, then report it.
- Also don’t be part of the problem. You can create your own fake news story very easily and yes ads are still served.
The good news is that both Facebook and Google are disrupting fake news economies in order to stop the creation of fake news sites.
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