Overseas measures
As Trump pointed out during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, fake news is still flying around in the U.S. and other countries, causing all sorts of confusion. What measures are being taken in such foreign countries?
In Europe, ministers and experts from various countries have been meeting and discussing many times. A public consultation on fake news and disinformation, conducted from November 2017 to February 2018 among citizens, organizations and journalists (2,986 cases in total), found that fake news and disinformation is the most common form of misinformation. In a public consultation on fake news and disinformation conducted among citizens, organizations and journalists (2,986 in total) between November 2017 and February 2018, 38% of citizens said they were exposed to fake news every day and 32% at least once a week, suggesting that the threat of fake news lurks in every corner of our lives. Based on the data collected, a report by the HLEG (High Level Expert Group) cited the need to implement media literacy projects in school education, improve fact-checking in news media, and track disinformation by media evaluation NGOs. It was also mentioned that fact-checking functions should be improved in the news media and disinformation should be tracked by media evaluation NGOs. In response to this, the European Commission has decided to treat fake news as a serious problem in European countries with four approaches: increasing transparency, promoting information diversity, improving information reliability, and forming comprehensive solutions, and is now taking various approaches in school education and media.
Practical Approaches
As countermeasures against fake news are being taken in many countries, the Media Literacy Education (Project) is now attracting attention. This is a program that is being implemented mainly in Europe and the United States, and education is being provided to a wide range of people from elementary school to university students. Some classes are held by volunteers, while others are held as "virtual classrooms" using apps, in various forms.
The content is mainly in the form of quizzes, and according to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming ), about 12,000 teachers are using this app in 2018, and the total number of children taking these lessons is about 1.78 million in the US.
As a major company, Google released a white paper on fake news in 2019, stating that "the fight against false information is an extremely difficult one, but we are responding by "strengthening our algorithms with a focus on content quality," "countering malicious actors," and "providing users with more context". To deal with it, we will focus on three main ideas: strengthening our algorithms with an emphasis on content quality, countering malicious actors, and providing more context to users. Specifically, the report mentions the detection and removal of information caused by spam and the elimination of content that is not customized by Google, which will continue in order to protect the safety of users despite the fact that the spam war is still in progress.