Baguio joins war on fake news
FACT CHECK Philippines has partnered with the University of the Cordilleras to combat fake news.
The UC Communication Department hosted an Information Literacy Caravan aiming to equip and organize youth netizens to become fact checkers and advocates of truth.
The one day lecture and workshop at the UC discussed topics such as the cyber war-
fare against misinformation and disinformation, and citizen fact checking. In the afternoon, participants are to engage into a workshop on organizing Fact Check Baguio.
Speakers, Jover Laurio of the “Pinoy Ako Blog’, Tiffany Jungco and Von Carlo Yacob Fact Check Philippines led the group of students from UC and other universities to form their own Fact Checking community in the city.
The group said misinformation has been seen in social media, mostly related to political groups and aims to train interested sectors all over the country to cross reference websites to spot fake news.
Fact Check Philippines is working with Rappler and Vera Files to advocate for truth all over the country and is on its 10th leg, visiting and training, students, community volunteers and the religious organizations to form a group of verifiers in the county to check on fake news.
The group has been in Iloilo, Dagupan, Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, Malabon, Naga, Tarlac, Quezon City and HongKong with the advocacy.
Social media platform, Facebook has moved to clean its roster after it was revealed that the accounts of 87 million users worldwide were accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a communications firm accused of harvesting data of millions of Facebook users to help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
In the Philippines, close to 100 pages and nearly 50 with political and entertainment content were removed from the social media found to belong to a spam network.