Be CRITICAL with Fake News

Everybody talks about Fake News nowadays, but... do we really know what they are?

According to Cambridge Dictionary, Fake News are false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.

However, the term Fake News is not considered to be very precise as it is broadly used to refer to an information system that encompasses much more than news, and the word fake does not cover concepts like disinformation, misinformation or mal-information:

Information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organisation or country.

Information that is false but not created with the intention of causing harm.

Information that is based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, social group, organisation or country.

Although former US President Donald Trump definitely popularized this term, Fake News was not coined by him; instead, its origins go back many centuries in history, whether that term was used as such or not. For example, the term misinformation was already used in the 16th century and references to disinformation were already in use in the Cold War.

Nowadays, the concept of Fake News is increasingly being used due to the technological revolution, access to the internet and the use of social media, as it is easier and quicker than ever to give our opinion with a global impact or to share information at a massive scale.

According to Statista, most of Europeans regard Fake News as a problem: Cyprus has the highest share concerned citizens (91%), while Belgium has the least (70%), a very high percentage in any case.  However, the highest levels of media trust worldwide in 2020 were recorded in Europe. 87% of the public believes that Fake News is being made worse by the internet, this is why in a 2020 global survey, only 35% of people said they trusted social media – down from 40% in 2019 and a historical low.

As we have seen, it is more important than ever to be CRITICAL about Fake News.

Learn more about Fake News with the web application created in the CRITICAL project!