For the past few months, fake news have been spreading throughout social media platforms. Evidently so on topics regarding the US elections, war on drugs, and the Philippine government. Some argue that they are satirical, some claim they are true. Now, this is where the feud begins. Real, fake, or gag?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, satire is a humorous way of criticizing people or ideas to show that they have faults, whereas fake means anything that is intended to deceive. Putting these definitions into the context of the status quo, satire articles are meant to entertain; more importantly, they are aimed to have apparent humor factor conspicuous to the readers. Meanwhile, fake articles try to trick readers into believing that the articles are legitimate, which can cause confusion among readers. Also, fake news have the potential for high shareability. More shares mean that the source website attracts traffic, which is converted into money by sponsored pay-per-click advertisements.

The problem now is this: satirical post or not, these posts are still being treated as fake news; people still believe in them -- even more now than the previous years since more people are connected to the internet and have their own social networking account. Because most people spend a lot of time browsing through their feeds, social media has been a potent source of falsities; they spread like wildfire through its wide network of users.

Since false information is more likely to be popular to a crowd of people, other users tend to believe that to be true. This is backed up by an experiment on 2,000 US residents, where they were presented with climate change facts and popular beliefs consecutively. The result of this experiment showed that the residents believed the popular myths over the lesser known facts.

This notion not only affects citizen of neighboring countries, but also the Filipinos. News headlines such as “Billionaire John Gokongwei buys Duterte a customized Bullet-proof 2016 BMW M2” from aljazeera-tv.com has been spreading online. Readers become confused, and in some cases, they believe these claims to the point that they become hostile towards counter arguments presented to them.

Fake news cause distress to people. Just recently, a senator of the Philippines raised a concern to make Facebook liable for the spread of fake news amongst its users. One response of a user compared “punishing fake news from punishing people for writing fiction”. This statement caused a riot on Twitter which made the tag #MagkaibaYan trend.

It is not entirely a person’s fault if he/she believes in fake news. According to Dannagal Young, a communications psychologist, “blaming readers for spreading fake news from a cognitive perspective is somewhat equivalent to blaming a baby for soiling itself; they can’t help it.” He said that satire, being a popular type of fake news, depends on the interaction with its readers. Humans value humor more than any information, so information based on humor is more likely to be remembered by the human brain, even when evidences say otherwise.

Luckily, a lot of institutions have suggested and implemented solutions to this problem. Facebook, for instance, hired political news veteran Campbell Brown, to fill in the position of Head of News Partnerships. The job posting was posted on Facebook in December 2016, and she assumed the position just last January. According to Brown, her role would focus on working with media organizations, as well as ensuring that there is ongoing feedback from publishers as the social network develops new products advertisement tools for news organizations. This means that they will make sure that legitimate news organizations will be the major source of information, eclipsing the sources of fake news.

The Researchers of the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) and the School of Informatics and Computing’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) also created a search engine that shows how stories spread online and their related fact-checking. This system, however, does not directly check the credibility of a post or a site. Their app is called Hoaxy, which can be visited at hoaxy.iuni.iu.edu.

It is evident that social networking platforms should be responsible for filtering out the information shared among its users. But the users should also be responsible in their own way. Bill Dodd, a politician serving in the California State Senate, even proposed to incorporate digital literacy into school curriculums. Users should be critical enough to determine whether a post is genuine or not.

Nevertheless, no matter how much improvement companies make to their sites, or how digitally literate some people might be, this problem will still persist unless the root is removed. So, in order to prevent fake news from spreading, users must take on the task to report any falsities, or just stop sharing fake news in the first place.