Reboot Foundation talks about identifying fake news online
FOX 2 - There's so much information out there and so much of it is either false or it's misinformation being funded by lobbyists and it's packaged to look like legit news.
Helen Bouygues is with The Reboot Foundation which studies "fake news" and how to tell the difference. She joined us from Paris, France to help break it all down.
FOX 2: "What have you found in terms of how many people are actually looking at information and fact-checking?"
"Unfortunately, the majority of the American population at least from the report foundation study showed that less than 1 percent of the people that actually were surveyed, practiced true fact check-in, media literacy skills when they were gathering information."
FOX 2: "Help people at home. How can they begin the process of fact-checking?"
"One is just even when you're gathering information, not to fall on the habit of clicking on the first article that appears," she said."For example, if you're going on Internet explore may be going onto the second page because obviously the search engine naturally lists above those sites that you have already been to before so it already creates a tunnel vision in itself. And then, the second thing is making a habit of checking the sources, the author come out to make sure that it's not some private interest group that's actually publishing the information but it's actually coming from true institutional sources."
FOX 2: "The Reboot foundation did a study on the people who basically live on social media. What did you find?
"Regardless of political affiliation, income or age, heavier users of social media were more prey to becoming susceptible to fake news than those who were less users of social media," she said.
FOX 2: "So what's the advice? Don't just sit on social media?"
"You're definitely missing out because part of the challenge as it goes back to the tunnel vision. Deliberately, the social media sites are affectively pronouncing more polarizing confused because they prey on our emotions so we can stay on their platforms longer," Bouygues said. "So that's why it's really important to take a step back and actually even if you're gathering information online, cannot do it via social media platforms but for example go on websites directly as your studio rather than going via Twitter or via Facebook."