Countering Fake News and ‘Alternative Facts’

It’s the digital age and we’re drowning in information, but starving for truth. Every day, millions of people scroll through news feeds packed with headlines designed not just to inform but to provoke. Some of it is harmless nonsense like celebrity gossip that turns out to be fabricated or miracle cures that don’t work. But some of it’s also quite dangerous and this is where the real problem lies.

Fake news about elections, health crises, or social unrest doesn’t just misinform, it destabilises. Countering this sort of thing cannot be the sole responsibility of tech platforms or governments. It should be on all of us, as uncomfortable as that might sound.

It’s a common trap to fall into thinking this should be someone else’s responsibility. Surely Meta or TikTok or whoever should just take down the lies on their platforms. We think they should filter out the garbage before it reaches us. But that’s trickier than it sounds. Who decides what’s fake and what’s legitimate but controversial? The moment we haWe all know what happened the last time this was attempted.

Censorship always starts with good intentions like protecting people from harm, stopping dangerous misinformation. But it rarely stops there. Give someone the authority to decide what’s true, and eventually they’ll use it to silence inconvenient truths too.

So if we can’t just outsource this to the media platforms or the state, what’s left? Us. Regular people making better choices about what we believe and share. That sounds weak, I know. Almost like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. But the alternative is waiting for some benevolent authority to save us from ourselves. That is almost as naive as it’s dangerous too.

A civilised society isn’t one where truth is handed down from above. It’s one where people collectively value truth enough to seek it out, question what they’re told, and hold each other accountable. That means doing the boring work: checking sources before sharing, reading past headlines, being skeptical of things that feel designed to make us angry. It means recognising that the stuff that confirms what we already believe is often the stuff we should scrutinise the hardest.

This isn’t about being smarter than everyone else. It’s about acknowledging that we’re all vulnerable to manipulation. Our brains are wired to believe stories that fit our worldview and reject ones that don’t. Fake news exploits that. It’s engineered to slip past our defences by triggering the strongest emotions: outrage, fear, tribal loyalty.

The one effective  counter we have is a conscious effort to pause and reflect before sharing. We should be asking whether something sounds too convenient or too perfectly aligned with what we perhaps want to be true and then checking if reputable sources are reporting the same too. That can be tedious but it’s necessary in the kind of world we live in today.

We also need to get comfortable with having uncertainty. One of the key reasons that fake news spreads so easily is that it offers a semblance of clarity in a complicated world. Simple villains, obvious solutions, clear battle lines. The ugly truth, however, is that real life is messier. Sometimes the answer is “we don’t know yet” or “it’s complicated.” A society that can tolerate ambiguity without immediately filling the void with conspiracy theories is a society that’s also harder to easily manipulate.

Fake news corrodes trust in institutions and also in each other and once trust’s gone, everything else falls apart. We can’t have functioning democracies or effective public health responses or even basic social cohesion when people can’t agree on what’s real. We’ve seen glimpses of that breakdown already in some parts of the world and it’s not pretty which makes this a duty for us all in self-preservation. 

So yes, tech companies should do better. Governments should invest in media literacy. Journalists should hold themselves to higher standards. But ultimately, the responsibility sits with each of us, individually and collectively. A civilised society isn’t one where fake news doesn’t exist. It’s one where people care enough about truth to fight for it, however inconvenient it might be. Even when sometimes that means admitting we were wrong before. Even more so when the lie is more satisfying than the reality. We can outsource a lot of things, but this shouldn’t be one of them.