Digital Smarts - The Trust Project and Fake News
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Still worried about falling into a “fake news” trap by reading or passing along something that isn’t factual? A non partisan effort, by a group hosted at Santa Clara University, called The Trust Project is working to address this situation by helping online users distinguish between reliable journalism and promotional content or misinformation. Recently, Facebook started offering “Trust Indicators” which is a new icon that will appear next to articles in your News Feed. When you click on this icon, you can read information the publisher has shared about their organization’s “ethics and other standards, the journalists’ backgrounds, and how they do their work,” according to an announcement from The Trust Project.
It is a work in progress with Facebook, Google, Bing and Twitter and other international new organizations committing to displaying these indicators, although not all implementations are in place.
The onus to figure out if something is fake though is still on the user. Instead of labeling content as disputed, Trust Indicators allow users to learn more about the organization behind the news and come to their own conclusions about the content. Whether it will actually help in the long-run, of course, remains to be seen.