In the war on fake news, school librarians have a huge role to play
Talking to an information sciences professor about the challenges ahead
Concern about the prevalence of fake or
sensationally biased news sources has escalated in the days
following the presidential election, with many citing it as a factor (some even the primary cause) of Donald
Trump’s win.
The central focus of the concern is Facebook, which has grown beyond a
social platform and is now a key information distributor from which 44 percent of Americans get their news.
Though Mark Zuckerberg stated publicly that the idea that fake news on Facebook
influenced the election was “crazy,” a BuzzFeed
News report
uncovered that people within his own company consider this response flippant
and are busy organizing in secret to dig into the data and make recommendations
to senior leadership. This news came out after a Gizmodo report stated that Facebook had
already built a system that could weed out fake news but had chosen not to
deploy it because of the undesirable optics of the tool going after mostly
right-wing “news” sources. Facebook has denied that report, but there’s still a
lot we don’t know about what’s going on behind closed doors.
On top of Facebook’s issues, the first Google search result for
election results for several hours on Monday was a tiny conspiracy blog that
wrongly showed Trump winning the popular vote. Google and Facebook both announced on Monday that they would block fake
news sources from using their ad networks (one of the key ways that small to
moderately sized websites make money), but the issue of fake news creeping up
in search results and news feeds is still an urgent one.
Detailed Information | http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/16/13637294/school-libraries-information-literacy-fake-news-election-2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
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