LSU Manship School of Mass Communication professor Len Apcar relaunches a website that aims to help spot fake news and disinformation. The website, detectfakenews.com, is a curated resource guide on the latest developments in fake news. Apcar says the website is full of tips on how to fact check with do-it-yourself tools and information.
“Get a sense of, ‘Could this be fake, could this be somehow manipulated, has anyone else looked at it and checked it for facts and sourcing?'” said Apcar.
Apcar says fake news is all around us, but it’s a small percentage of the overall amount of information out there. However, it is increasing.
“We think the presidential campaign and the divisive political climate we’re in is ripe landscape for more and more fake news,” said Apcar
Apcar says the process of fact-checking is usually a quick one with the website.
“I had my students looking for fake news as an assignment a week or so ago and they managed to find a fake news story in minutes and that was twenty different students with twenty different stories,” said Apcar.
The website was created three years ago to give users advice on how to spot fake news articles, and has since grown into a one-stop aggregator of latest news, research, and analysis of disinformation.
