Trusting the source

I’M SURE by now, most of you are aware of many fake stuff on the Internet. For the nth time, I see images or even videos of huge anacondas, giant skeletons, or megalodon sharks. Or reports of another celebrity who was found dead.

I spent some time in school learning Confucius, and all I can say that more than half of what they attribute come from Confucius did not come from him at all. As what one site said in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “Half of what you read on the Internet is not true.” That can’t be true either. Abraham Lincoln died about 130 years before the Internet or the world wide web was even started.

I know I wrote about it last week, but fake news is now a big story, with the debate that it might have influenced the outcome of the US elections (and probably the Philippine election and popular opinions too). Certainly, there was a deluge of fake news favoring Trump nearing election, and one Buzzfeed story said that many of them (over hundreds of fake news sites) were traced to Macedonia. In the Philippines, dozens of fake news sites were identified. The important thing to recognize is that the pro-Trump sites spreading false news were not really political in their objective. It was just to make money off the clicks. Similarly, for many of the proDuterte websites here in Philippines, it is hard to say that this were done by Duterte fanatics. It could simply be to make money.

The first way to counter this was started by Facebook and Google, when both announced that fake news sites will not be allowed to sell their advertisements. Facebook agrees that if it is just a satire, an opinion or a wild tale, it should be labeled as such, but not news.

A movement called the Trust Project shares some of the ways you can help. First is to be aware most sites now allow you to report malicious news. It also helps to check your facts, and to verify the persons who have posted it. A person who has been a Facebook user for five years, and who posts many other things are unlikely to be malicious posters, but a new member for only a few days, and whose posts are overwhelmingly sensational may not be a candidate whose posts you want to like or share.

One gem I read is that there are ways to verify a photo, and whether it’s original, Photoshopped, or has come from other sources. If you see a compelling photo, you may want to either take a screenshot, then crop out the non controversial parts, and submit it to Google Images. Google will tell you its best guess as to who or what is pictured or where the image originated or posted.

Of course, the safest is just to not follow the adage, “If its on Facebook, it must be true.”. And the same advice when fake brands proliferate – get your supply from trusted sources only, or certified sites, or stores.