Due to the evolution of the media, as well as the appearance of the Internet in people’s lives, it is safe to say that the problem of information hunger for the average person as a whole has been solved. However, this raises a new problem: there is so much information and it is constantly being updated including by people who are obviously incompetent or deliberately misinforming society. That makes it difficult for the user to understand the reliability of the information received.
The news, colored in bright emotional tones, published without links to reliable sources and not confirmed by photographs or filming, most likely contain propaganda. It should be remembered that news that does not have a video report has less chance of reliability than news that is equipped with not only photographs. This is due to the fact that it is much easier to fake photos than to edit a video (Burles & Bally, 2018). Therefore, questionable photos should be checked using a picture search in the Google system.
State research associations and institutes can be considered the sources of true information. Data on the conducted scientific research can be obtained from the press service of these organizations or on official websites (Lenaerts et al., 2021). Those sites that link to the information of these organizations, which can be confirmed during fact-checking, should be regarded as evidence-based internet sources. News analytics with links to reliable sources of this kind should be perceived as reliable.
It should always be remembered that not all sources of information can be equally trustworthy. In order to understand whether the information is true or not, when searching on the Internet, it is necessary to constantly use fact-checking.
References
Burles, M. C., & Bally, M. (2018). Ethical, practical, and methodological considerations for unobtrusive qualitative research about personal narratives shared on the internet. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17(7), 1-9.
Lenaerts, G., Bekkering, G. E., Goossens, M., Coninck, L. D., Delvaux, N., Cordyn, S., Adriaenssens, J., Aertgeert, B. & Vankrunkelsven, P. (2021). A tool to assess the trustworthiness of evidence-based point-of-care information for health care professionals (CAPOCI): Design and validation study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(10), 123-126.