Columbia Journalism Review: “Since the 2016 presidential election, an increasingly familiar narrative has emerged concerning the unexpected victory of Donald Trump. Fake news, much of it produced by Russian sources, was amplified on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, generating millions of views among a segment of the electorate eager to hear stories about Hillary Clinton’s untrustworthiness, unlikeability, and possibly even criminality. “Alt-right” news sites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller supplemented the outright manufactured information with highly slanted and misleading coverage of their own. The continuing fragmentation of the media and the increasing ability of Americans to self-select into like-minded “filter bubbles” exacerbated both phenomena, generating a toxic brew of political polarization and skepticism toward traditional sources of authority. Alarmed by these threats to their legitimacy, and energized by the election of a president hostile to their very existence, the mainstream media has vigorously shouldered the mantle of truth-tellers. The Washington Post changed its motto to “Democracy Dies in Darkness” one month into the Trump presidency, and The New York Times launched a major ad campaign reflecting the nuanced and multifaceted nature of truth during the Oscars broadcast in February. Headline writers now explicitly spell out falsehoods rather than leaving it to the ensuing text. And journalists are quick to call out false equivalence, as when President Trump compared Antifa protesters to Nazis and heavily armed white supremacists following the violence in Charlottesville. At the same time, journalists have stepped up their already vigorous critiques of technology companies—Facebook in particular, but also Google and Twitter—highlighting the potential ways in which algorithms and social sharing have merged to spread misinformation…”

See also this paper – Related Fact Checks: a tool for combating fake news, Sreya Guha, Castilleja High School, Palo Alto, California. “The emergence of ”Fake News” and misinformation via on-line news and social media has spurred an interest in computational tools to combat this phenomenon. In this paper we present a new ”Related Fact Checks” service, which can help a reader critically evaluate an article and make a judgment on its veracity by bringing up fact checks that are relevant to the article. We describe the core technical problems that need to be solved in building a ”Related Fact Checks” service, and present results from an evaluation of an implementation.”