After a lot of discussions on Fake news,I am adding some input on how to stop fake news involving all stakeholders.
Measures to Combat Fake News
- Surveillance: Robust surveillance and compliance mechanism to ensure healthy accessible content to people. Source of news should be verified.
- Reporting: People should have the opportunity to report illicit content through flagging, and definite steps should be taken to see its credibility. Also people involved in this should be scrutinized
- Awareness: Social media can also be used to increase the awareness in people to ensure equality, end of discrimination on any grounds and ensure harmony
- Working with Authority/Sharing info: It should be the ethical responsibility to work in close connection with the concerned authority and share data at times of crisis for reasons of National security and public order.
Legal tools may face challenges to curb fake news propagation due to following reasons:
- They are generated from several sources
- Hard to know the source from which news is generated
- Territorial coverage of fake news. For example,during recent US election, some news was suspected being generated from Russia.
Measures need to be taken by various stakeholders
- Internet Giant: Google rolled out a set of features and updates that allow users to flag potentially false stories as “disputed,” triggering a review for validity by independent organizations. Facebook also recently updated its algorithms to preemptively spot potential fake stories.
- Government: Compulsory and online registration of details of any page or institution etc. should be applied, so that after report of abuse against them, respective government machinery can take legal action against them.
- Vigilance: Various security forces must monitor the online content especially during riot, calamity period so that rumors will not spread.
- Citizens: People themselves must cross check any news before reacting over it. If this happens effectively then it will definitely reduce the effect of fake news on society.
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