Children are wise to fake news say experts

Older children are less trusting of news on social media than from other sources and employ a range of measures to separate fact from fiction, a report has claimed.

More than half of 12 to 15-year-olds use social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to access online news, making it the second most popular source of news after television, according to the study from Ofcom.

Almost nine in ten say they would make at least one practical attempt to check whether a social media news story is true or false, such as seeing if a story appears elsewhere, reading comments after the news report in a bid to verify its authenticity, checking whether the organisation behind it is one they trust and assessing the professional quality of the article.