LibGuides: Decoding News Sources: Credible, Fake, or Click-Bait?: Fake News (KC)

What Does Fake News Look Like?

Links to fake news will often have an unfamiliar domain name or an extension on a well known domain. Here a fake news site has attached .co to the well known news network abcnews.go.com. Besides the link, check the quality of the website, article dates, author name, if other media outlets are reporting on the story, and check to see if it is on Snopes or another fact checking website.

Fake News: A Library Resource Round-Up
As librarians everywhere will attest, fake news is not new; fabricated stories have been presented as truth for centuries. But take a divided electorate and add a social media landscape where misinformation is shared with a click, and interest in the topic has soared. Learning to decipher fact from fiction is a key skill for all news consumers, and libraries across the country are stepping up to help patrons gain the information literacy skills they need. With that in mind, Programming Librarian has compiled the following round-up of resources* to help libraries deliver their best programming about fake news.
The Trust Project
The project crafts tangible digital strategies to fulfill journalism’s basic pledge: to serve society with a truthful, intelligent and comprehensive account of ideas and events. We take advantage of our location at the heart of Silicon Valley to imagine technology that can bake the evidence of trustworthy reporting -- accuracy, transparency and inclusion –plainly into news practices, tools and platforms.

Fake News and Its Impact

Videos

How to Factcheck Fake News Sites

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Scholarly Articles About Fake News

Polage, D. C. (2012). Making up history: False memories of fake news stories. Europe's Journal Of Psychology, 8(2), 245-250. doi:10.5964/ejop.v8i2.456
Reid, B., & Gibson, S. (2014). Fake news and the First Amendment: A Developing Standard. Insights To A Changing World Journal, 2014(3), 3-15. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=102429714&site=ehost-live
Reilly, I. (2012). Satirical fake news and/as American political discourse. Journal Of American Culture, 35(3), 258-275. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X.2012.00812.x

Fighting Back: How Facebook and Google Plan to Reverse Course

Google Adds Fact-Check Info to Search Results
The search engine is rolling out a new feature that appends"Fact Check" snippets to news queries.

Facebook adding 'educational tool' to help users spot fake news
Does Facebook really care whether the stories at the top of your news feed are accurate?

The company is trying to convince skeptics that the answer is yes.
Facebook’s Fact Checking Can Make Fake News Spread Even Faster
After acknowledging that it has a problem with fake news, Facebook introduced a feature recently that flags certain posts as "disputed." In some cases, however, this appears to be having the opposite effect to the one Facebook intended.

Politifact's Fake News Site Almanac

Debunking Fake News

Is this news story on...

Snopes
The snopes.com web site is (and always has been) a completely independent, self-sufficient entity wholly owned by its operators and funded through advertising revenues. Neither the site nor its operators has ever received monies from (or been engaged in any business or editorial relationship with), any sponsor, investor, partner, political party, religious group, business organization, government agency, or any other outside group or organization.
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Snopes receives funding from an undisclosed source. The source is undisclosed because Snopes refuses to disclose that source. The Democratic Alliance, a funding channel for uber-Leftist (Marxist) Billionaires (George Soros etc.), direct funds to an "Internet Propaganda Arm" pushing these views. The Democratic Alliance has been reported to instruct Fundees to not disclose their funding source.
FactCheck.org: A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center
We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.
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FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels.
PolitiFact
Pulitzer Prize winning, PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. PolitiFact is run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, an independent newspaper in Florida, as is PunditFact, a site devoted to fact-checking pundits. The PolitiFact state sites are run by news organizations that have partnered with the Times. The state sites and PunditFact follow the same principles as the national site.

An article from National Public Radio (NPR) about determining if news is credible or fake.

Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts
"Fake news stories can have real-life consequences. On Sunday, police said a man with a rifle who claimed to be "self-investigating" a baseless online conspiracy theory entered a Washington, D.C., pizzeria and fired the weapon inside the restaurant.

So, yes, fake news is a big problem.

These stories have gotten a lot of attention, with headlines claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump in November's election and sites like American News sharing misleading stories or taking quotes out of context. And when sites like DC Gazette share stories about people who allegedly investigated the Clinton family being found dead, the stories go viral and some people believe them. Again, these stories are not true in any way.

Stopping the proliferation of fake news isn't just the responsibility of the platforms used to spread it. Those who consume news also need to find ways of determining if what they're reading is true."
PolitiFact's Guide to Fake News Websites and What They Peddle
This web link provides an almanac of known fake news sites and discusses some fake news stories in depth to demonstrate how to analyze their content.

Fake or Satire?

Satirical journalism differs from fake news in that it is presented as comedy and not intended to be believed as actual or credible journalism. The intent is not to deceive but to provide social commentary through exaggerated falsehood.

Decoding News Sources: Credible, Fake, or Click-Bait?: Fake News (KC)