Fake news: consequences and some solutions

Fake news is a current phenomenon, though it dates back hundreds of years ago.

In the earliest days of printing, newspapers published articles about monstrous beasts or unusual occurrences. The discovery of a monster with "goat's legs, a human body, seven arms and seven hands" was published in a pamphlet in 1657 in Catalonia. In 1611, an English pamphlet also published a story of a Dutch woman who lived 14 years without consuming any food or water. These articles were very similar to today's fake news.

From the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the term "fake news' became more popular. It even was chosen as the word of the year for 2017 by the Collins Dictionary.

People are depending more on social media to get information than before. In the United States, 66 percent of people actively use social media while 81 percent of people have a social media profile.

Is all news on social media accurate and objective? Hardly. There are some people who use social media and blogs to create and spread fake news as those media have enormous power to spread fake news based on algorithms. Social media algorithms tend to show the most-viewed or engaged content first without checking whether it is true, false, or fabricated. As a...