It's on Facebook, so it must be true

Paige Zsebik
pz862718@ohio.edu


     Today's generation is in love with their social media accounts. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, I can promise more than half the population have at least one account. Unfortunately, with the growth of real people's accounts, there also seems to be a growth of "fake" accounts, sometimes considered ghost accounts. These ghost accounts are typically the contributors to the tons of spam a person gets popping up on their homepages, or the ones who generate and start the share of falsified news stories.

     It seems like it has become a more recent trend that while scrolling down my Facebook account that I have myself, I am seeing tons of stories from websites I have never heard of, and thousands of shares! What is funny, is some of these articles have spelling errors, format issues, and have no traceability from any credible sources. Yet, people are still sharing and believing them!

    So what would it take for all of it to stop? No more twisting the details of a story, no more photo video manipulation, and no more deep fakes. The most important thing a consumer can do is fact check, fact check, and then fact check again. The BBC actually says the number 1 rule to fact check these false stories, is to type it into Google and see what comes up! The BBC

   Another way consumers can stop the fake news from gaining popularity across social media, is to stop reacting to it and stop sharing it. Even by reacting to a Facebook fake story with an angry face, or commenting, "This is not real", is showing Facebook that story is getting attention. Any type of feedback, Facebook sees it as positive feedback. We also need to make sure to read the entire story and check it for any spelling errors. Multiple spelling and format errors should throw consumers a big red flag as to the realness of the article.

     So how easy is it for people to come up with these fake articles? Easier than you would think. By simply googling, "fake news", this website was one of the first few to come up. The Fake News Generator . This website gives users the ability to create their own articles! It took me not even 5 minutes to find out how these fake news stories are being created. And there is no censoring these websites and what its users are writing in them.

source: https://www.pcmag.com/commentary/363350/how-do-you-fight-fake-news-ask-the-kids