Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin freely allow its users throughout the world to publish and share stories and thoughts. However, information shared on the sites may not always be real and therefore, leading to the sharing of fake news. Separating real and fake news shared in social media can seem daunting but always worth the effort. To determine whether the information is real or fake one has to develop a critical mind and always check the source of the news ( Tandoc Jr, Lim & Ling, 2018) . One also has to check if a similar story is shared by other well-known news publishers like Reuters, BBC, and CNN. If the news has images, verify if the images are real or are edited then make a conclusion whether the news is real or fake.
Characteristics of Fake News
The most common characteristics of fake news or stories are their design to make a person believe something or take a specific viewpoint. They also originate from sources that are not credible or are not the mainstream news sources or may be exaggerated stories of news correctly reported by mainstream and credible sources ( Shu, Sliva, Wang, Tang & Liu, 2017) . For example, the mainstream sources may report that the president attended a conference. The fake news may exaggerate the news and report the president criticized the existing financial policies in a conference. For fake news with picture images, they use picture editing software to make fake pictures look real but may show inconsistency.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Online Fact-Finding Tools
There are some online facts checking tools that can be used to determine whether the information is real or fake. First is the reference of the information to mainstream publishers and the use of trusted online tools like Snopes the former Urban Legends Reference Pages that sorts rumors, myths, and facts on the internet (Lazer, Baum, Benkler, Berinsky, Greenhill, Menczer & Schudson, 2018) . In instances where images have been used, online fact-finding tools like the Google Reverse Image Search are effective in establishing whether the picture is true, or is altered or used in the wrong context.
ssss
Reference
Lazer, D. M., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F. & Schudson, M. (2018). The science of fake news. Science , 359 (6380), 1094-1096.
Shu, K., Sliva, A., Wang, S., Tang, J., & Liu, H. (2017). Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter , 19 (1), 22-36.
Tandoc Jr, E. C., Lim, Z. W., & Ling, R. (2018). Defining “fake news” A typology of scholarly definitions. Digital Journalism , 6 (2), 137-153.
