Algorithms can be useful in detecting fake news, stopping its spread and countering misinformation

Fake news is a complex problem and can span text, images and video. For written articles in particular, there are several ways of generating fake news. A fake news article could be produced by selectively editing facts, including people's names, dates or statistics. An article could also be completely fabricated with made-up events or people. Fake news articles can also be machine-generated as advances in artificial intelligence make it particularly easy to generate misinformation.