What is that?       

The verification of the facts (also verification of the sources, often indicated with the Anglicism fact-checking), in the lexicon of journalism, is the work of ascertaining the events cited and the data used in a text or in a speech.

In the age of social networks and hyper -connectedness, public opinion is increasingly influenced by everything that passes on the net: true, allegedly, or completely false, information travels at a speed that was unthinkable until a few years ago.

A tweet or a post can spread in a few hours and, often, fake news originates precisely on social networks: starting from false digital identities, they spread thanks to bots, to the point where they are shared by some profiles of well-known personalities.

​

Disinformation is thus served. Verification of facts and sources is certainly not a novelty, but a prerequisite of journalism; the net, however, offers practically every citizen the possibility of becoming, in some way, a reporter, and this has upset the logic of information. In all countries, experts have identified similar dynamics. One of the biggest problems, in addition to the fact that verifying the truthfulness takes time, is that the denial never ends up having the same resonance and visibility as the fake news. The need to stem this phenomenon has pushed the media, especially traditional ones, to engage in a constant work of fact checking, along, p. and made even more difficult by the fact that the various realities often act independently.

HOW TO CHECK THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE NEWS:

- take advantage of fact checking pages (pages like  bufale.net  will allow to ascertain the veracity of the news in question)

​

- check the URL of the site (it may be useful to check the source of the news by looking at the name of the site on the top bar: sites that report unlikely names in the URL such as "reptilians", "conspirators", "against the strong powers", they are clearly sites created specifically to spread fake news and therefore should not be considered reliable)

- view the other news of the same site (if the url appears "normal", it is not certain that it is certainly an accredited site; another way to understand it is to take a look at the other news proposed by that same site. all with a conspiracy trend, it is likely to be a hoax site)

​

- search for the news on Google (it is useful to check the news is to search for them on Google: just write the elements of that news on the search engine and see what comes out. Often there are already articles that deny the news or you can note that the news is actually very old)

​

- check the data (when the news contains data or statistics, it is very useful to go and check those numbers on sites that deal with statistics, first of all that of Istat, so as to verify their truthfulness)

​

- check the date of the news (checking the date of a news is important, because often fake news are periodically recycled and re-proposed to the public)

​

- evaluate the title and text of the news (fake news are disseminated by subjects who are not journalists, and it is therefore possible that the news is poorly written, with incorrect Italian or that they are designed to attract the reader and therefore report sensational headlines such as " incredible scoop! "," alarm! ")

​

- check the sources of the news (when a journalist or a popularizer spreads a news, he necessarily also reports the sources from which he took it and no one who really has proof of the truth of his statements would omit this detail)