Importance Of Spot Fake News

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Reza Shrestha Prof. Sherry Sharifian GOVT 2305-73011 30th November, 2017 News Media – How to Spot Fake News? 1 If I had to help somebody spot fake news, I would tell him/her to consider and investigate a number of things in the story. The characteristics of a fake news article include too many exclamation marks, an unnamed author, written in capital letters and misspelled, starts with appeals such as “This is NOT a hoax!”; having links to sources which are a complete contradiction and do not support the statements being made (Kiely & Robertson, 2016). In order to identify news as fake, it is important for the reader to have fact-checking and critical thinking skills. One of the first things to do is to consider the source of the news. This can be done by going through the website/profile of the purported news agency. In many cases, the websites involved in spreading fake news have scanty information about their contacts, physical location, objective, …show more content…

In this story, Pope Francis is alleged to have commented on FBI’s investigation on Hillary Clinton (WTOE 5 News, n.d). The article claims that the pope said that FBI’s failure to prosecute Hillary despite acknowledging that there was a crime had been committed shows that the security agency is corrupted by powerful political forces. This story would easily be classified as fake because the WTOE website on which it was issued owns up as being a fake news agency. This is deduced from its “about” page where it states that it is a fantasy and satire site, thus its news lacks credibility. While the New York Times has sated all its location address and author details, WTOE gives scanty information about itself, has no author or date when the article was published. On the other hand, the article on The New York Times has an author and date of

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