Fake News - Discussion & Detection

Besides road accidents and pollution, a huge menace to the general public in recent past is Fake News. As such, this has become a hot topic for debates. Especially, with increase in the number of mobile devices with internet connection, they spread like a spark in the bush. Fake news not only had resulted in several cases of communal violence but also made a huge portion of general public feel insecure. Hereafter, I have tried to present a small discussion on the topic as well as some steps to detect authenticity of a news.

From where do they originate?

Fake news may originate from individuals that are looking forward to cause unrest among the communities. Also, a person in a pursuit of fame may project something which might not be true, in another way thus succeeding in manipulating thoughts of a certain group of people. 

Some pseudo-doctors (self-proclaimed doctors) spread fake news and advice citing the names of reputed doctors in form of text messages which has misled people to a large extent.

Fake news is also used as a way to gain advocacy by various political parties while remaining behind the curtains. It will not be a matter of surprise if these become a cause of government being overthrown in years to come as they are extremely efficient in generating public outrage.

What has been done till date to curb this menace?

Due to irreversible technological advancements, controlling and sensoring contents on the internet has become increasingly difficult. Cyber-crime laws too need a major revamp to prevent these from spreading. Technical experts are blaming social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc. for not co-operating with the government of the region. They are of the opinion that platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook scrap the metadata of an uploaded content (viz. an image) owing to safeguard privacy of the uploader. Doing that removes key information about the user and devices that he used to upload the content. The technocrats suggest that storing metadata in servers can help law enforcement agencies use this data to find out the culprit.

This demand has increased manifolds recently. Thus, the tech-giants have now started incorporating various changes in their platforms. For instance, newer versions of WhatsApp included within it a feature which tells a receiver whether a message was originally created by the sender or was just forwarded. Facebook has reportedly started monitoring the uploaded contents by making use of Novel tool.

What can we do to detect a fake news?

We are equipped with two things - common-sense and logic. They are enough to make decisions when we come across these types of news. Also, Google provides us with a huge amount of information about anything in the world. Thus, a simple google search about the viral news will reveal a major part about its authenticity. 

Okay, but what about the fake news in form of images?

Many a times, manipulated images of political interests or other general things starts circulating on the internet. As such, it is very hard to check for their authenticity.

But here is a good news. In the recent versions of Chrome (I personally tested on them), we can reverse search an image. This means that we can search for similar looking images available all over the internet. Thus, an image that we see in Facebook or any other website can be searched on Google for its availability on the internet. The process is simple - Click and hold the image until a popup shows up. Within many options, you will see: "Search Google for this image". Click on it and you will see a whole lot of images and links associated with the image. Here is a proof: 

For computer users, it is even more simple. Right clicking any image that you want to reverse search will show the same option.

Technology is a boon to the mankind. But we are the one who have an absolute right to choose between the devil and the angel. Just like a coin has two faces, we too have two choices to decide from. The choice is ours. Choosing the right one will certainly lead us to somewhere very beautiful.

Thank you for reading.