Beautiful Minds: Shutting Down the Fake News Sites

Beautiful Minds:  Shutting Down the Fake News Sites!

By: Sandra M. Speed

While it has always been a problem, the fake news site have proliferated during this past election cycle.  Regardless of your political ideology, I would suspect you want your news feeds to be accurate and truthful!

I have a number of friends that are newscasters, journalists, television and radio personalities, you would think that the posts they share would be from a credible news source, think again!  Today so many of us, myself included, rely on our Smartphones and social media sites for our news.  Since we are scrolling through our Smartphones constantly, we want to ensure that we can rely on the news that we read.

Why do people post fake news?  One reason is that it can generate money, if you click through there are advertising dollars that can be made.

While several Social Media sites initially shrugged off this phenomena it is now looking at ways to control and eliminate those fake news sites.  Facebook, Google and Twitter are looking at ways to stop the madness.   While they are working on it, I will provide the 6 C’s to keep you from sharing fake news sites:

1. Check which news outlet published the content
2. Check the URL names on the pages
3. Check the published date and time
4. Check out the author
5. Check out suspected quotes and photos
6. Check your bias at the door, just because you want to believe something doesn’t mean it’s true!

Beautiful Minds

Recently, some young students at Princeton came up with a way to detect fake news site.  They met at a “Hackathon” contest and were successful in creating “FiB.”

Here is the video of one of the students, Anant Goel being interviewed by CBS News, explaining how it works!