Abstract:

In the world of global media, both traditional and social, the phenomenon of spreading fake news is one of the greatest threats and challenges.

Fake news are spreading faster than news. Fake news reach many times more people than their - even immediate - corrections. Media recipients believe in fake news more readily than in real news. At the same time, people are very afraid of fake news and are advocates of the development of effective techniques for their prevention and eradication. These four statements give the unpleasant truth about the seriousness of this threat.

Counteracting fake news in practice is actually becoming more and more difficult, but there is always a whole repertoire of techniques to recognize fake news and anticipate their distribution. The article presents a catalog of easy to use anti-fake tools. It includes all sorts of parametric analyses, studies of the topology of relations in the network, various features of big data files, reverse searching, collaborative verification, and other. Construction and selection of the set of tools was based on critical analysis of documents from the perspective of educational plausibility.

On the basis of selected set of tools, a media education program was developed, aimed at teaching media recipients how to recognize fake news and defend themselves against manipulation and misrepresentation in the media. Syllabus for the educational program was formulated, as well as the list of learning effects (knowledge, skills, social competences) obtained by the participants. Such an educational program is universal and can be a teaching aid in every age group and at every level of advancement in media and information literacy.

Keywords:

Fake news, educational program, media education, tools.