ABSTRACT
The spread of misinformation has become a standard practice in today’s communicative scene. Both individual users and organizations disseminate false content in order to get economic or political benefit. The response to these strategies has been the development of initiatives whose objectives are both the verification of false information and the prevention of its spreading. This chapter will review the advance of the spread of misinformation in the past few years for advancing as much as possible what will be the possibilities for stopping it by using fact-checking mechanisms. Professors Rúas-Araújo, Pérez-Curiel, and López-López will foresee the role that journalists will play in carrying out with the exigencies of information verification in a context dominated by a constant enlargement of fake news flow through spaces like the Internet or social media platforms. Although misinformation and information verification have had presence over the history of communication, these terms seem to be more important now than ever. Fake news has become a weapon that organizations use for their own benefit. Hence, journalism and fact-checking are now more important than ever for fighting that advance.
