By Edward Carter


In the age of the internet, information becomes power and this why many people feel the need to be updated with current issues. Unlike before when the sources of current events are just the newspapers and evening newscasts, the internet can provide you what you need when you need it. The problem there is that information travels so fast even before it is verified. The following are ways on how to protect you from false weekly community news and entertainment being circulated online.

Whenever you would like to know something, go only to your trusted sources of information. Some of these are the medical and education websites and those that are being managed by reputable journalists and broadcast organizations. These entities follow procedures to ensure that what they publish is correct to protect their names and reputation. Journalists also follow standards to ensure balance in presenting their reports.

Reading reports online is the fastest and easiest way to get information. Aside from going only to the pages of trusted organizations, be sure to check the address bar for typographical errors. Some individuals and businesses have learned to capitalize on buying web addresses that differ only by one or a few letters from well-known organizations, expecting that people will not notice the difference.

If you use social media a lot, you can also get information quickly from the official social media accounts of broadcast and print companies. Once they are able to get information about a situation, they post it online without having to write a long report. As they get more information about it and interview related personalities, they post their updates so you will know about the developments.

You can also follow the verified accounts of the journalists, broadcasters and celebrities that you would like to know about. Not everything that they work on will get reported during the newscast, yet they are likely to share about these on their official accounts. Be wary though that if these are popular personalities, there may be fan pages and fake accounts that are easy to mistake for the real ones.

When you find dubious information, one of the ways to check its veracity is to find other sources. If you first learned something from a broadcast company, look for another broadcast organization that reports about it. If this is something newsworthy, other sources will definitely report on it after some time. Double check the information before you share it to your friends and followers.

Sometimes, checking the facts and data yourself can be confusing. What you can do is to look for websites and pages that do fact checking on popular topics and reports. They may have something about the information that you are looking for. If they don't, they may welcome requests for verification. Send them a message and the link to the report that you would like to be checked.

Sharing of information quickly is enabled by the wide and unlimited access to the internet. This could be a problem in determining if something is true since fact checking is much slower than just clicking on the share button. Before deciding to share something, take steps to check the facts and to look for signs of fraud.




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