Locals learn how to detect fake news

The term “fake news” has been gaining in popularity, used regularly by current President Donald Trump.

So what constitutes fake news, and how can people discern what is fact and what is fiction?

Julie Chapman, supervisor of library instruction at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, gave local residents some tips on how to detect fake news reports during a presentation Wednesday at the Shawano City-County Library.

She noted that there is no definitive list of trustworthy sites, as things keep changing in a world where information is instantly transmitted.

“From what I’ve found through my research … there isn’t one perfect list that will tell you, ‘These are the resources that you should trust,’” Chapman said. “Then you would have to ask, ‘Well, who decided that they should be trusted?’ and then the cycle starts over again.”

Chapman noted there are some telltale signs that reports are fake. Stories that have all capital letters or where pictures have been altered are probably fake, she said, and sites where there are lots of pop-up ads and that have web addresses such as “.co” are usually fake sites.

Chapman recommended verifying a story that seems unlikely by finding a reputable outlet that is reporting on the same thing. She urged checking multiple sources, and if there are not multiple outlets reporting on a national or international story, the story could be fake.

Social media is infamous for resurrecting outdated stories, Chapman said, so she recommended checking the date of the story. She noted that there were some recent fake stories on school shootings that were using quotes from legitimate news stories about incidents several years earlier.

“I’ve seen quotes pulled from news stories about the Columbine massacre, which was in 1999, but have been used in stories about current school shootings,” Chapman said. “The quotes themselves are not fake, but they’re used in a way that’s not truthful.”

News in the initial hours after something has happened might be fast, but it might not be accurate, Chapman said, so articles that come out several days or weeks later tend to paint a more accurate picture.

Analyzing sources can help determine whether a story is true. Chapman noted that fake news articles tend to cite anonymous sources, unreliable sources or no sources at all.

Chapman uses a website called AllSides.org, which looks at stories from multiple news outlets and posts headlines and initial blurbs side by side to show which stories are biased toward the right, the left or the center. She noted it served as an example of how, while stories might be true, they tend to be slanted one way or another because it’s human nature to be biased.

She also recommended using fact-checking websites like factcheck.org and politifact.com to see if a story is fact or fiction.

“After the election and everything that has followed after that, we’ve been sort of overwhelmed by the term ‘fake news,’” Chapman said. “If somebody is upset about the information they’re given or they’ve heard, they say, ‘Well, that’s fake news.’ If you say that, you don’t have to address it. It’s lazy thinking.”