Detecting fake news

1. Detecting fake news.
- Does it make you frightened?
- Does it make you angry?
- Does it come from social media?
- Did you see it on a website with lots of adverts?
- Is it sensational?
- Does it agree with your existing biases or prejudices?
If your answer to any of the above is "yes", it could be fake news. If you answer "yes" to most of the above, it is almost certainly fake. The purpose of fake news is to stir up political sentiment or just to spread like a virus, or sometimes to drive you to a commercial site, e.g. a site that spreads fake news and encourages you to buy a product, such as a conspiracy book or a fake medicine.

2. How to verify
Before assuming something is fake news, learn how to verify.
- Take the image and upload it into google image search. You can only do this from a laptop or PC. See what the search returns. If it returns lots of sites with similar content, it is probably fake. If it returns links saying it is fake, then it is probably also fake.
- Look at common "debunking" sites like snopes.com and africacheck.org (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fact-checking_websites)
- If it is about a medication, check www.quackwatch.org
- if it is about a get rich quick solution, check www.mlmwatch.org
- look at a reliable site on the topic.

3. Lists of reliable sites
Reliable websites are as follows:
- Universities: their website addresses end in .ac.za (South African), .ac.uk (British), .ac.nz (New Zealander), .edu (American), and .edu.au (Australian). I mention these website "domains" simply because they are in the english-speaking domain. If you want to consult other academic sites, German and French university sites are also reliable.
- Wikipedia. Speaking as a PhD researcher with published papers, I can tell you for certain that Wikipedia is highly reliable, as it references journal articles (academic research papers)
- Journals. Academic journals vary in quality. You should trust those published by Taylor and Francis, Elsevier, Springer. Avoid journals published by predatory journal publishers (most of which are based in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and similar areas).

A Predatory journal is called such because it tricks academics into submitting papers with promises of publication. When the paper is submitted, it is always accepted, and then the academic is asked to pay "fees". It is a money-making scam. The reason predatory journals are fake, is that they do not do peer-review. Peer review is the process whereby academics "mark" each others' work to check the quality is good enough. Proper journals do peer review, predatory journals do not.