Is it time to change the way we get our news from the Internet?

The 2016 US presidential election was both surprising and unpredictable. In many different ways.

But what was neither surprising nor unpredictable was the increase in fake news headlines that the race triggered.

Was Clinton having an affair with Yoko Ono? Did George Soros own and subsequently rig the voting ballot machines? Did certain US states omit Trump from the ballot papers altogether? This is but only a small selection of fake headlines that have circulated the Web, and with many accusing such headlines of even potentially shaping the presidential election results, is it time we asked ourselves if we all need to change the way we get our news from the Internet?

Originating largely from ‘entertainment’ websites looking to entice cheap traffic with misleading or ‘clickbaity’ content (i.e. fauxtire) or the ever-increasing mish-mash of low quality aggregator websites or politically-biased blogs out there, thousands of fake headlines have spread online, targeting both the Clinton and Trump camps throughout 2016.

Fake headlines continue to spread on social media.

These headlines, combined with the ever-increasing number of fake headlines already enjoying viral success across cyberspace, are leaving sites like Facebook with a big problem. How can this type of fake content be suppressed, or at the very least, labelled as fake.

Facebook, for one, has been struggling. A number of fake news headlines have appeared in their Trending Topics section since they removed their human editing team amidst allegations of censorship. This, pooled with the staggeringly high number of fake news already posted onto Facebook by their users, is seriously tarnishing the social networking websites reputation.

And without a tangible solution in sight, and the number of fake news websites only continuing to rise, it may be down to the end user – you – to change their online news habits.

One possible change we all should consider making it using a whitelisting approach, not a blacklisting one. This essentially means “guilty, until proven innocent”, instead of the more traditional “innocent until proven guilty.”

This means assuming all sites are unreliable until we can ascertain their legitimacy. It means sticking with reputable media outlets, and adding new sites to our “whitelist” when we know they can be trusted, before we consider sharing their content.

Of course the problem runs deeper than this. Numerous studies have indicated that many social media users simply don’t bother to even read past the headlines before they choose to share their content. Not only does the user not check the legitimacy of the website they’re sharing, they likely don’t even know what the website is.

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So, a few tips to spotting these fake news headlines that we should all considering getting on board with…

– Whitelist, not Blacklist. As we said above, consider the sources. If you don’t trust the site, make that site earn your trust before you share or trust their content. Can other reputable websites verify what they’re saying? Or can you verify their content any other way?

– Research the website. What other stories are they posting? Are they believable? Does the site have a disclaimer outing it as “entertainment” or “satire”? Does the site have a clear bias or agenda?

– Research the story. Use Google, use other websites. Can you find anything to back up the claims made in the story?

– Don’t rely on the headlines! Never share information if you’ve merely skimmed the headline. Most fake news articles can be dismissed with the critical read of the actual content.

– We know it’s hard, but heavily skewed or biased websites rarely give the whole picture. Confirmation bias is a real thing. We are simply more willing to trust and share articles if they conform to our pre-conceived ideologies. The problem, however, is that such websites rarely provide the whole picture, and are often simply wrong. Don’t live in a bubble – get both sides of a story.

It may be all too easy to point the finger of blame at sites like Facebook and Google, but it can be argued that we all play a part in the dissemination of fake news. We all need to take responsibility for the information we choose to share online, and given that the majority of fake headlines can be dismissed as such with comparatively little effort, there really is little excuse for anyone.