Learning Objectives
- Understand how important it is to question a source of information before considering a news item to be true and reliable.
- Develop skills and strategies to analyse the source of information effectively.
Resources needed
- Internet connection.
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Exercise 1: Checking out the website
Visit the website (used in Activity 1, Exercise 1) from which the article on the weather event in the United States is taken (https://archive.is/H9KIn) and answer the following questions:
What kind of news does the website offer? Where did you find this information?
What are the purposes of the website?
Who are the target readers?
- According to the website, “Most works presented in this website are satire, parody, spoof and are completely fictitious. The website and social media content uses only fictional names, except in cases of public figures and celebrity parody or satirization. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental”. (https://empirenews.net/terms-and-conditions/)
- “Empire News is intended for entertainment purposes only”. (https://archive.is/fKF3l)
- “Empire News and the Empire News social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, etc) are not intended for people under 18 years of age”. (https://archive.is/fKF3l)
Exercise 2: Additional clues of fake news
Did you find any additional clues in the website that you might be dealing with fake news? What were they?
When reading an article in an online newspaper, it might be useful to read the comments and feedback of the other readers who may have already checked the website and found out that the source of information is not reliable.
On the website “Empire News” there are plenty of them, check it out!