MERI Mirror, April' 2020

Informative webinar on fake
news of COVID-19
-By Abhay Binwal
A very informative webinar was
hosted by Google News Initiative on
fake news the webinar was conducted
in various languages. On 4th April
they conducted this in Hindi and Prof.
Umesh Arya was the trainer of this
lecture w h o is P rofessor a nd
chairman, Faculty of Media studies,
Guru Jambheshwar University of
Science and Technology, Hisar,
Haryana. The webinar is basically
based on finding out fake news of
COVID-19.
Prof. Umesh told us about various
things which lead to a fake news. Like
- Misinformation, Manipulated
content and factually incorrect news.
He quoted one thumb rule to deal with
fake news "If the information is so
good that it looks correct - then it is
probably not true."
He stated that fake news can be in
four different formats like image,
video, text and sound. He also
mentioned the ways to tackle down or
verify all this format of fake news.
For verification of image he suggested
Google image or Reverse image search
to verify the image.
Similarly, for video he suggested
InVid which is a web - based application
which also provide analysis of
any video. It's hard to verify the sound
whether it's fake or not, to verify this
he suggested some websites for cross
checking sound facts related to
COVID -19 like - http://www.who.int/ ,
http://www.cdc.gov/ at last he
suggested the way to verify the text
message which is very important
because most of the fake news float in
text format. For verification of that he
suggested to pick random words from
message and search in Google with
double quotes.
He suggested some ways to stop fake
news. Like - "Do not forward the news
without checking its' source, Do not
believe in every information you
read."
At the end he ended up by answering
the queries of the anonymous
audience across the country.
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