Vernon Kay: When I was a kid, we used to get our news at 6pm every evening on the telly, or “on the hour every hour” on the radio. Back then we didn’t really question whether our news was true or fake because we kind of trusted the source of our news. These days though there are so many far-fetched stories floating around on social media which are easily accessible to our kids. You know the stories I’m talking about. Stories like this:
Student: The Queen is a lizard.
Student: Bat soup started the Coronavirus.
Student: Michael Jackson’s a shape shifter.
Vernon Kay: Latest research shows that just 2 percent of young people can spot fake news. My two daughters are the exactly the same, they’re genuinely confused by all stories that pop up on their social media and really struggle to tell fact from fake. So how can we help them spot the difference?
Vernon Kay: Claire Milne works for Full Fact. They’re an independent service that spends their days fact checking. They’ve recently landed the job of fact checking all the videos, pictures and stories that appear on Facebook, which has two and a half billion users. That’s a lot of content.
Claire Milne: Hi Vernon, welcome to Full Fact.
Vernon Kay: Hi Claire, thank you very much, nice to meet you.
Vernon Kay: Alright Claire, I’ve got two daughters, Phoebe fifteen, Amber who’s ten. They always ask us about stories that they’ve read, every now and again, on the internet. How can we filter fake news?
Claire Milne: First thing to talk about is thinking about how the stories are making them feel, are they reacting really strongly to something they’re seeing. Is it making them feel really happy, really sad, or really angry? That kind of thing is usually a clue that you should stop, pause, have a deeper look, see what’s going on behind the story, before you just believe it.
Vernon Kay: So any story that’s triggered an instant reaction could be a tell-tale sign of fake news?
Claire Milne: Usually yes, there’s something in there that’s going to make you go, right I need to share this with people, I’m going to hit that share button and tell everyone else about it.
Claire Milne: So this example here is a classic one, that is designed to make you have a strong emotional reaction to the story that it’s trying to tell, so it’s two pictures, one of a climate protest and the second picture is of what is claimed to be the aftermath of that protest, all of this rubbish left in Hyde Park. That is a real picture, completely genuine, that rubbish was left in the park. It just wasn’t after this particular climate protest.
Vernon Kay: And this story would be put out to taint the reputation of the protesters?
Claire Milne: That is, that is generally what the claim is that it’s attached to yeah.
Vernon Kay: So there’s a picture associated with a story, how can I check that that picture is actually related to that story?
Claire Milne: You could use reverse image searching to see if you can find out where exactly these pictures have come from, that’s really quite simple to do. You just right click on the image and then chose to google reverse image search and it’ll bring up a lot of sites that use the same pictures. You can try and trace back where it originally came from. And you’re seeing here there are other similar images, so images of the rubbish left behind, and that will tell you what’s actually happening in that picture and that it’s not actually to do with this climate protest at all, so it’s a really easy way you can find out what’s going on behind images that you come across.
Vernon Kay: I never knew you could do that. But Claire, my favourite celebrity has just tweeted a story – how do I find out whether it’s real or fake?
Claire Milne: So the first thing to do is to try and work out where the story originally came from, where the celebrity that you’ve seen sharing a story, got the information from in the first place. And then once you’re there, try and find out how trustworthy you think that original story is. So if you’re on or a website or social media you can look into the author, find out a bit more about them, what else have they written, have they posted on this topic before.
Vernon Kay: Is there anything else?
Claire Milne: So the next thing to think about is, what might this story be about, so is it something that is trying to sell you something, is it an advert, is it something that is supposed to be a joke, is it supposed to be funny and maybe you’ve just missed that.
Vernon Kay: Basically, we do research, on the research, that someone has freely posted, which may have not been researched?
Claire Milne: Yes.
Vernon Kay: Now it might seem like a lot to take in but I’ve learnt that giving my kids just a few tips on how to look at online stories and online videos may help them spot the facts from the fakes. Good luck!