Fact Checking Some of the clearest and most objective cases of "Fake News" include incorrect facts that could be checked. This could include lying about the number of immigrants in a country or clearly exaggerated the cost of the national health service for a country. There are more than 114 fact checking initiatives in almost 50 countries. These include Full Fact, a charity in the UK that among other things, fact checks comments made by politicians in the House of Commons and the Crosscheck project from First Draft News that introduces a framework for fact checking that is being tested in the context of the French elections. These organisations are doing an amazing job making sure people are accountable.

In 2014, the term "fake news" hadn't yet become part of the American lexicon and the 2016 U.S. presidential race was only beginning to make headlines. But in California, a man named Jestin Coler was hard at work creating one of the most divisive media trends in modern history. Dubbed the godfather of the fake news industry, Coler's efforts began with publishing fabricated stories -- including an article about Colorado food stamp recipients using welfare benefits to buy marijuana -- that garnered enough traffic to generate tens of thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue. The idea quickly caught on. Competing sites sprang up around the world as other publishers raced to create fake news masterpieces of outrageous, conspiratorial, and highly partisan news ahead of the election.

Ever since the election, talking heads have discussed how "fake news" could have tipped the election to Donald Trump by disseminating false stories favorable to him or unfavorable to Hillary Clinton. Social media users can spread these fake new stories far and wide, creating an aura of credibility which can make fake stories hard to distinguish from the truth. Social media websites like Facebook have begun to cooperate with human fact checkers to track fake news websites and notify users that a story is likely false, but it is impossible to trace every single news story as they pop up. There is just too much information on the internet for any human mind to process. So maybe an artificial intelligence (AI) can perform better. Facebook along with researchers and hackers are examining whether artificial intelligence and big data can help track down fake news stories faster than humans can.

Autonomous 18-wheelers are now driving the highways. Coffee table gadgets are recognizing spoken English nearly as well as humans. Smartphones apps instantly translate conversations between people speaking as many as nine different languages. But for Dean Pomerleau, none of this is all that surprising. Pomerleau built a self-driving car way back in 1989, when the first George Bush was president, and it navigated private roads using a neural network, the same AI technology that underpins modern gadgetry like the Amazon Echo and Microsoft Translator.