One of the latest issues that has raised concern among intermediaries, governments, and end users, are the fake news in the digital era. Fake news is any information that is deliberately or accidentally misinformative or untrue, often published with the intention of misleading the public, damaging an entity, or gaining financially. Although ‘fake news’ was not a new phenomenon, the digital age has caused fake news to spread with greater ease through social media platforms, leading to disastrous effects for organisations and nations around the world, such as causing corporations to lose profit, deepening social divisions along racial or religious lines, and hampering the democratic process.
The negative impact of fake news in creating prejudices and stereotypical images of vulnerable social groups, is more than evident. Consequently, youth workers have to know how to recognize and break down key terms and ideas for understanding fake news with media literacy principles. They need to incorporate media literacy skills into their daily work and to explore the phenomenon of fake news, both in deconstructing the fake and comprehending the true. Young people should also be trained from an early age in media literacy so they can become their own fact-checkers. Digital literacy and informed citizenship go hand- in-hand. Prior knowledge is one of the main defences against lies and disinformation.
Disinformation is a phenomenon which has infiltrated and grown within the cyberworld. People are affected by misleading content online and this is proven not only by social research but basic statistics with data analytics quantifying just how many thousands of people are liking, sharing and reading false or misleading content. Just like hate speech, disinformation needs to be countered but counter-narratives alone cannot lessen the influence ‘false news’ has on audiences. Instead people need to be educated and social media companies have to be made accountable for validating misleading or uncredible content which has been allowed on many occasions to appear on ‘trending lists’ – making the problem even worse.
