How to recognise fake news

31 July 2018 4:39 PM

It's been the buzzword of the last couple years - 'fake news'.

Donald Trump has adopted it as his own personal mantra and now here in South Africa Media Monitoring Africa is a holding a panel discussion on the rise of fake news.

The conversation will reflect particularly on the impact of fake news in the run-up to elections taking place next year.

READ: Video exposes how easy it is to create fake news

Founder and Executive Director of AlgorithmWatch, a German non-profit advocacy and research organisation Matthias Spielkamp, says it's hard to pinpoint exactly what fake news is.

The thing is that we are still not really agreeing on what fake news actually is. If you try to define the term, then basically it disintegrates in your hands because what some people say is erroneous reporting, some people say it has to be disinformation that has propaganda approach to it.
— Matthias Spielkamp, Founder and Executive Director of AlgorithmWatch

So it is really hard to measure these things and it is especially hard to measure what effects it has.
— Matthias Spielkamp, Founder and Executive Director of AlgorithmWatch

He adds that it is quite hard to spot a fake news story because you have to really know what you are talking about.

Some people try to approach you through fact-checking, but then you have things like disinformation campaign where people use information in a slightly slandered way that is open to interpretation.
— Matthias Spielkamp, Founder and Executive Director of AlgorithmWatch

Listen below to the full interview...

Written by: Matshepo Sehloho