Hello everyone my name is Andrea Sgobba and today I will tell you a danger that lurks on the internet and threatens not only us as persons,but also the society in general:the "Fake news"

Fake news, along with misinformation, have been a part of our life since the birth of society, but now it spreads much more freely and it's much harder to distinguish from the real news.

Nowadays we often are deceived by a story that sounds so unrealistic and shocking that we make sure to spread the word to everyone we know, but many of us unconsciously spread these hoaxes around the world.

Luckily there are many ways to detect these lies and I will give some advice to help you develop your critical thinking.

The most important thing in my opinion is to read the whole story and not only the title especially if you are going to share that later, because often even in well-known newspapers the headline doesn't tell the whole story and it can be used to trick you into believing something that's false or it can be used to make you click their sites so they can earn money thanks to the ad revenue they make from their sponsors.

That brings me to the second advice which is to always check the author.

Specifically check the source to find out if it's a reliable source or not and if you don't know anything about it check other stories or search for people's opinion of that source.

The third one is a little bit harder because it involves being able to differentiate the various types of news that you can find on the Internet.

In fact it's very important to be able to understand the news as they are, because it can be biased, so not truly reliable, or can represent someone else's opinion or can even be "satire" which means that it's made to make people laugh and not to inform them.

The next advice is to check if the sources mentioned in the article actually back up the story.

In fact many times the data are modified from the original source for their purpose or they may not even exist.

A small detail that can still help a lot in this field is to check the date of the article's publication, because it could be outdated.

If you have any doubts on the article, it would be wise to search for the same topic on the internet so that you can compare the results with the one you found earlier.

The last advice I want to give you is to always be aware because if you come across something that is too strange or too good to be true, then chances are that it is fake .

So when you search the internet for news be always self aware and always double check what you find and if you want to post something which is meant only to make people laugh and not to inform them make sure that everyone can see that it's not a real story.

That's all from today's podcast and remember "Check the news if you want the truth"