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2. To develop strategies to detect and prevent false news: Librarians of digital age need to be trained
to detect and prevent the false information being circulated on the web. A few methods are enumerated
below:
a) Checking facts from Knowledge bases

b) Checking facts from Crowd sourcing
c) Use of technology in checking the facts
d) Mitigation of false information: educating users against possible manipulation strategies

e) Adversarial creation of false information
f) Fact checking sites
 Snopes: snopes.com/

 PolitiFact: politifact.com
 Fact Check: factcheck.org/

 BBC Reality Check: bbc.com/news/reality-check
 Channel 4 Fact Check: channel4.com/news/factcheck
 Reverse image search from Google: google.com/reverse-image-search
 The News Literacy Project focuses on providing teaching resources and online guides like
The Pew Research Center conducts surveys on how Americans consume media

 The FactCheck.org researches political claims and has published its own comprehensive
guide to spotting “fake news.”

Information handling is the traditional classical forte of the librarians. It is the high time librarians take
up the new role of advocating for policies to control proliferation of false news including infodemic and
assist in development of legal and technical measures to curb the menace. Librarians should train

themselves to be expert in detecting the infodemic/ fake news and provide unbiased, nonpartisan, current
reliable information to its users and potential users.

Prof (Dr) Ravinder Kumar Chadha

Professor LIS and Research
Ex-Additional Secretary
Parliament of India, LSS

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