How to Counter Fake News? A Taxonomy of Anti-fake News Approaches

Abstract

Fake news is a symptom of deeper structural problems in our societies and media environments. To counter it, policymakers need to take into account the underlying, selfreinforcing mechanisms that make this old phenomenon so pervasive today. Only by taking a step back can we examine the vulnerabilities these fake news narratives exploit. This article provides a first taxonomy of anti-fake news approaches. It argues that proposed anti-fake news laws focus on the trees rather than the forest. As such, they will not only remain irrelevant but also aggravate the root causes fuelling the fake news phenomenon.

Testing Children and Adolescents’ Ability to Identify Fake News: A Combined Design of Quasi-Experiment and Group Discussions

“…Some other recent studies [37,38] propose legislative measures as well as placing more emphasis on truthful alternatives of the fake stories. Nonetheless, all legal measures should be carefully stated, as they could rather easily become a threat to freedom of speech.…”

“…Nonetheless, all legal measures should be carefully stated, as they could rather easily become a threat to freedom of speech. This has been the case of the German Network Enforcement Act [39], critiqued by the UN's Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, which stated that the legal procedure could potentially have greater effects than censorship [37] (p. 3).…”

Africa Current Issues - Online Disinformation and the African Firm

“…Suggestions made about combating online disinformation include state intervention, making social media platforms liable for third-party content, and swamping fake news with the truth. 22 State regulation of social media platforms and making them liable for content on their platforms have yet to produce the desired results. Germany, Italy, Singapore and France are examples of countries that have had limited success in this regard.…”

Influential News and Policy-making

“…Interventions that increase such costs might yield more misreporting and more persuasion, and yet improve the voter's welfare because of the availability of better policies. Therefore, the growing concern that "proposed anti-fake news laws [...] aggravate the root causes fuelling the fake news phenomenon" (Alemanno, 2018) is perhaps exaggerated. This also implies that the empirical task of inferring the efficiency of this kind of interventions from the media's reporting behavior is challenging, if not impossible.…”