A delicate topic, important to deal with and that especially in recent years has become complex, since the supply of news occurs more and more in the multimedia universe. The Internet has spread enormously and there is an almost spasmodic use of social networks for example, and of the related devices to be able to use them. The case of smartphones is quite emblematic from this point of view.
The data reported to the use of the Internet by Italians demonstrate that most of the time is spent on social media; or looking for news in real time. Two universes that often merge since even within social media themselves we now witness the phenomenon of the diffusion of news. A context in which the user is weaker, has a lower attention threshold and can therefore fall more easily into traps.
It is never easy to distinguish so-called fake news, false news or more commonly 'hoaxes', from real news: what distinguishes the world of the web is precisely the way in which fake news find fertile ground and spread.
What are the most searched news on the net?
The most searched news on the web are gossip, current affairs (in the last year for example, most searches have been for news on Covid), news. The latter are often related to local territories, among the most searched are breaking news from Rome, Naples news, Milan news and other similar keys, always concerning the big cities.
This type of news is the one least at risk of fake news, as a news story is something that happened in the territory that, usually, is accompanied by photos and testimonies. And the web in this can exploit all the advantages of being present in real time, compared for example to traditional paper newspapers that come out once a day.
When a news story happens, online newspapers in various territories are ready to cover it in real time; it is a completely different story for other types of news for which verification is less simple. Complex and delicate issues that generate a large amount of fake news.
The most explanatory case is the one mentioned above, that is Covid: in this first year of the pandemic, everyone will have come across at least once articles created to attract clicks, in which they talked about the possibility of treatments against Covid, shocking statements by doctors and virologists from some other country, etc... in this case the discussion becomes much more complex and hunting for fakes becomes hard. Here, it should be the attention threshold of each individual reader that makes the difference, putting them on alert and going to understand, even by reading the name of the source that proposes them, when a piece of news may have a minimum of foundation.
