Representative image“Narendra Modi resigns after demonetization fiasco”
“Zuckerberg to give away all his wealth to random FB users”
Sound inconceivable? Well, that’s because they probably are.
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Copied straight out of satire news websites, such as fakingnews, phony news headlines like these increasingly populate social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
And as ridiculous as they seem, such fake stories continue to fool readers around the world into believing its content and thus making online media a minefield for anyone seeking truthful news.
The issue has prompted Melissa Zimdars, a professor of communication at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, to compile a list of unreliable news websites in a Google Doc under the title “False, Misleading, Clickbaity, and Satirical ‘News’ Sources”.
A cheat sheet for media literacy in the age of technology, Zimdars’ list includes websites that are outright fake, ideologically skewed and just clickbaity. According to the professor, she started the project as a media literacy companion for her students. Later, she decided to open-source the list (https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview)
Zimdars says it’s always best to read multiple sources of information to get variety of viewpoints and media frames. Some sources are not yet included in her list, although their practices at times may qualify them for addition.
As of now, more than 130 websites are there in the list and it will be updated every now and then with inputs from various other sources.
(With agency inputs)
