What is Fake News?
The term Fake News usually "refers to journalism or information that either deliberately or unintentionally misleads people and distorts reality by spreading false or distorted information, hoaxes, propaganda, or misrepresentation of facts" (AllSides)
Watch the video bellow about How to Spot Fake News by FactCheck.org
Remember: Distinguishing between facts and opinions is not only about identifying if the information is true or false. A statement can be a fact and still be false.
Fact: you can verify the information and prove if it is true or false.
Opinion: since it expresses someone's feelings, thoughts or beliefs about a topic, it cannot be proven true or false.
What do you know about your preferred news source?
"Everyone is biased, but hidden bias misleads and divides us." (AllSides)
Take a moment to think about where you go to read the daily news. Is your source bias? How much? Take a look at the media bias chart below for a few examples of some media bias.
According to the Merriam-Webster, filter bubble is "an environment and especially an online environment in which people are exposed only to opinions and information that conform to their existing beliefs." Which means, when in this bubble, we are not exposure to things we do not want to see. For instance, internet search engines might filter out content we might not want to see, based on past search. This can be dangerous because we might end up seeing only content that aligns with our beliefs or preferences, which is not necessarily the truth.
Watch the popular TED talk "Beware online "Filter Bubbles" in which Eli Pariser introduces the term.
Confirmation bias
From Encyclopaedia Britannica: "people’s tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with their existing beliefs. ... These beliefs can include a person’s expectations in a given situation and their predictions about a particular outcome."
Check out the posters and infographics below (by News Literacy Project):
In the document First Draft’s Essential Guide to Understanding Information Disorder, Clare Wardle identifies three categories of information: dis-information, misinformation, and mal-information. Together, they are called Information Disorder.
Disinformation: "false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth" (Merriam-Webster)
Misinformation: "incorrect or misleading information" (Merrian-Webster). According to Wardle (2019), it "also describes false content, but the person sharing doesn’t realize that it is false or misleading."
Malinformation. "The term describes genuine information that is shared with an intent to cause harm" (Wardle, 2019).
Some Commonly Used Terms
Adapted from Stony Brook University
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