While some of the blame for the surge in fake news belongs with organisations such as Facebook; it seems unfair to put it all on them. It’s up to us to do something as well. Mainly educating those around you who may inadvertently share such material.
Over the last few months I’ve come across a few articles to trigger this post. I don’t post much to Facebook, but tend to scroll through my feed several times a week. And with the amount of messed up stuff happening around the world, it’s making it harder and harder to discern what’s fake and what’s real. For whatever reason, it seems to be on Facebook where I notice most of these articles. Whether it’s just because of the number of ‘friends’ I have, or another reason, I see less such posts on other sites I frequent.
The first article I came across had the headline: “Your baby in you can also get pregnant if you have sex while you are pregnant – Minister of Health warns SA women on women’s day”. Now are ministers take a lot of flack for a lot of reasons. Often warranted. But some statements are too unbelievable to be true, which is generally my first indication.
The article is published by a website called “News at Last”. If you really want to check them out, their current domain is newsatlastsa(dot)online. Not believing this could be true, I checked out the website, and did some googling and searching of other news websites. No one else was reporting this. Based on this information, and the lack of any credibility or supporting evidence on the News At Last’s website, I deemed this fake news. Their only contact details are an email address on a domain that WebAfrica have listed as suspended.
More recently was an article published last week by HIN News – hinnews(dot)com. Apparently it stands for Happenings In Nigeria, but their logo looks like someone tried to poorly Photoshop the BBC News logo. Their Facebook page has a concerning million+ followers and likes.
I googled BBC news, and saved the first image. The HIN logo is a pixel for pixel copy of the BBC logo, besides the off-centred and off-colour text edit.
The article in question was titled “Breaking!!FARM MURDERS: US President Threatens To Intervene If South Africa Does Not Come Up With A Solution To Farm Murders.” Ignoring the two exclamation marks, the article was brief and ended with the author’s personal opinion on the matter. Odd for what one would suppose is an unbiased objective report on something that happened.
But it didn’t happen. Well not as far as I can tell. Nor can I find any reputable news site reporting anything related. While I’m about this, I’m going to throw Gossip Mill Msanzi, gossipmillsa(dot)com into this boat as well. They seem to be offering up the same garbage as the others, and whether intentionally or not, no credible news site should be posting articles without verifying the source.
The biggest problem, is these sites intersperse these fake articles with hoards of actual articles which they lift from larger news organisations, attempting to give them a credible appearance on first glance.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I implore everyone to take an extra look at those news articles. Especially the ones with the lovely clickbait titles. It’s hard to know for sure, but if you can’t verify it’s legit, rather don’t share it until you have reason to believe it’s true. On the same note, if you have friends and family posting articles which you know to be false, call them out on it. It doesn’t have to blatant and rude. Send them an email or PM, telling them you think an article they shared isn’t real and the reasons you think this.
I like to think that most of the people I know wouldn’t intentionally post false information, and approach them with that attitude. I want them to think twice next time a similar article comes up.