Fake News and its Implications Social Sciences Coursework (Coursework Sample)

Fake News and its Implications
Introduction
This exploration of fake news represents a look into a phenomenon that is a type of yellow journalism as it seeks to deliberately spread misinformation (Amarasingam, 2011). It utilises all forms of media as its distribution channel and can represent including some elements of actual facts that are distorted to reflect the desired ends of those seeking to utilise fake news for their own ends (Amarasingam, 2011). 
The exploration of fake news in differing forms will help to clarify this broad term and will aid in understanding that addressing fake news in today’s digital age represents a formidable challenge. This is due to the fact that the volume of new pages generated on a daily basis means that readers are exposed to a fake news overload. Thus has created a situation where the media and recognised sources have been strained in terms of providing corrective content to counter fake news misinformation.
 
Digital content can be scanned and checked before it is uploaded. This represents a control point to use specialised programmes where information can be compared against creditable sources to counter fake news. This is exactly the solution that Google and Facebook have devised as they have both just announced new software approaches to identify fake news (Winfield and Isaac, 2016). This digitally based software solution scans web pages against established statistical and other sources to check facts and indicate through a notification at the beginning of the posted page the site has passed or not passed a fact check. Given the potential to overwhelm the Internet with misinformation, the only viable solution represents a software based approach that scans sites for figures and key words.