Description of the Topic
The beginning of fake news was firstly introduced in Ancient Greece when Homer wrote the Odyssey. During the Trojan war, Ulysses and his men played a very important role as they tricked the trojans by leaving a giant wooden horse in the gates of the city. The trojans believed that this was a sacred gift of the gods because Sinon, a commander of Ullyses army, remained outside of the horse to explain and persuade the trojans that the horse was a divine gift from the Gods.Therefore, they allowed the entrance of the horse inside the city. Unfortunately, this decision led to the loss of many soldiers of Troy and a change in the course of the war.
Fake news don’t have any sort of legitimacy, yet if they are well presented by the transmitter: Sinon was able to persuade a small number of people, though nowadays the media has better means to spread news. They can be manipulated in a very precise way through the trafficking of misinformation. Unfortunately, it can influence public opinion on political, economical and even personal related data. The spreaders of fake news could be individuals or even groups acting on their own interest or on behalf of other organizations. Therefore, fake news can gain high visibility in a very short period of time.
In addition, people’s attitude towards new loaded information is crucial when receiving fake news. This is due to the desire to receive compromising facts and situations that are more entertaining than other kinds of notices like technological advancements & research. As a result, people and organizations take advantage.
The ethical obligations that are applied to users and producers of journalism are being ignored and it is causing a threat to the function of a free, open and critical press.
There are three categories identified by the UNESCO Handbook on journalism:
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Mis-information: information that is false but is not created with the intention of causing harm.
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Dis-information: information that is false and created deliberately to harm a person, social group, organization & country.
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Mal-information: Information based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, social group, organization or country. It is the most disruptive as it contains elements of reality but at the same time there is a deep background process. A development of dis-information. of reality but at the same time there is a deep background process.
Future of Technology
Due to technology, any of us at present is exposed to receive different fake news. Indeed, some companies did some studies and forecasted in 2017 that at the end of 2022 the society would see more fake news than real news because of nowadays technology and services. These platforms have generated a huge quantity of fake trending news in order to go viral. And this is because digital sophistication makes it possible to give fake content a greater appearance of veracity. For instance by manipulating images, videos, audios..
Especially in times of crisis and uncertainty, fake news become one of the major issues for the population. Misinformation affects citizens on issues of public interest, such as climate change, among others.
Hoaxes have always existed, and it will be probably impossible to stop the creation of them. Nevertheless, there are actions that can be taken to reduce the damage they cause. For example, by developing tools that can detect falsehoods and generate a better trust between the producers of truthful information and their consumers.
Fake news is not only a problem for consumers, but also for journalists. The Spanish startup, AyGLOO, together with the news agency Europa Press is working on a project to detect fake news with the use of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, XAI. The main objective of the project is to design a simple and effective tool to verify information circulating on the internet, social networks and forums.
Hoaxes and fake news are nowadays a perfect key for going viral. For this reason, the user must keep a critical eye on the data and news received on the Internet.
Having the right tools to verify information, it is possible to limitate the effect of hoaxes. Therefore, the development of technology to combat fake news has encouraged the creation of platforms and applications that seek daily news for hoaxes. These are the so-called fact-checking tools:
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TinEye: reverse image search engine. It searches the internet for matches based on an image. So we can find out if an image has been used without permission.
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Whois: false information can come from single images or texts and also from links. The platform tracks the registration data of a domain to facilitate the review of the veracity of the website.
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Google Fact Check Tools: verificate websites in order to know if the information inside of it is true or not. It is a scanner with a check markup. The platform is based on the Fact Check Explorer and Fact Check Markup Tool.
