Sick of fake news? Here's five tips on how to spot it online.

A growing number of websites are espousing misinformation or flat-out lies, raising concerns that falsehoods are going viral over social media without any mechanism to separate fact from fiction. And there is a legitimate fear that some readers can't tell the difference. A study released by Stanford University found that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn't spot authentic news sources from ads labeled as "sponsored content."

The disconnect between true and false has been a boon for companies trying to turn a quick profit.
There are more of these sites now because there's an awareness that people can create fake news sites and make money from the ads. A few years ago, we were mostly dealing with people who were misinformed, but not malicious.

The rise of scammers has ensnared two of the world's largest internet companies, Facebook and Google, in controversy over their role in giving fake news such an influential platform.

Here are some tips on how to spot fake news:

1. Stay away from sites with suspicious-looking web addresses, like those ending in .tk, .lo or .co.com.
2. Pay attention to the article's author. If there's no byline on a story, or there is only one author for every post on the entire website, watch out. It may be an imposter.
3. Be wary of news sites that host bloggers without any clear editorial or fact-checking process.
4. Check if there's an "about me" section on the website. This makes it easier to spot whether the news source is legitimate.
5. Get your news from a variety of places. The best way to ensure that you're not scammed by fake news is to read from a diverse array of news sources, and not just what pops up on a Facebook feed.

Hi Adblock Plus...lets talk about the word irony.

Adblock Plus is launching a new service that puts more ads on your screen. Yes, you read that correctly. The #1 ad blocker is now selling ads.

Rather than stripping all ads from the internet forever, Adblock Plus is hoping to replace the bad ads — anything it deems too big, too ugly, or too intrusive — with good ads, ones that are smaller, subtler, and theoretically much less annoying.

It’ll begin doing that through an ad marketplace, which will allow blogs and other website operators to pick out so-called “acceptable” ads and place them on their pages. If a visitor using Adblock Plus comes to the page, they’ll be shown those “acceptable ads,” instead of whatever ads the site would normally run.

“It allows you to treat the two different ecosystems completely differently and monetize each one,” says Ben Williams, Adblock Plus’ operations and communications director. “And crucially, monetize the ad blockers on on their own terms.”

The marketplace is a extension of the Acceptable Ads program that Adblock Plus has been running since 2011. Since then, the ad blocker has defaulted to “whitelisting” approved ads, so that they show up even when users have the blocker turned on. But the program has been fairly limited in scope, since publishers and ad networks need to specifically work with (and pay) Adblock Plus to have their ads deemed acceptable. It’s a time-consuming process, Williams emphasized, which limits how many websites can sign up to display ads to would-be blockers.Adblock Plus hopes that, through this new marketplace, there’ll be a big expansion in the usage of Acceptable Ads. Because they’re already picked out and ready to go, any publisher will be able to sign up, plug some code into their website, and start running whitelisted ads. None of the ads are able to track visitors from site to site, and they’ll all be limited to certain dimensions and page locations, as defined by Adblock Plus’ guidelines.

The program is meant to be friendly to publishers — it is, after all, letting them display some ads instead of none whatsoever. But there’s still obvious reason for publishers to be unhappy. Acceptable ads are likely to be less valuable than the ads a publisher could otherwise display, limiting what a website can earn. And in setting up its own marketplace, Adblock Plus continues to position itself as a gatekeeper charging a toll to get through a gate of its own making.

Publishers will get to keep 80 percent of all ad revenue from marketplace ads, with the remaining 20 percent being divided between various other parties involved with serving the ads. Adblock Plus will receive 6 percent of total revenue.

The ad marketplace is launching in beta today and is supposed to launch in full later this year. At the same time, Adblock Plus is working toward setting up a committee of publishers, privacy advocates, and advertisers to figure out the future of what its Acceptable Ad guidelines should look like. That too is supposed to get nailed down sometime later this year, with committee meetings beginning next year.

Source: The Verge