Digital Factchecking: Beyond the Human Gates to Digital Fortifications Against Misinformation in the Newsrooms

Abstract

Misinformation has become a common news pollutant and a vicious malady that many news professionals and media scholars have become wary of in this digital age. Beyond its likelihood to destroy the validity of any information, it has also been noted to damage the credibility and integrity of any media house found culpable of disseminating misinformation and other information misnomers. This work tried to synthesize existing research to develop its conceptual framework. The gatekeeping theory guided this. The review adopted more of the exploratory and systematic techniques to provide logical discussions under relevant headings. Studies and related works on social media misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, fake news, information disorder fact checking, digital fact checking, and gate keeping were carefully identified primarily through online data base, using Google search, research gates, and works on other academic repositories like Scopus and Google Scholar. Since this work relied on secondary data in explaining how digital fact-checkers can limit the erosion of adulterated news materials and other information pollutants in the media space, to ensure trust, credibility and highly effective digital gatekeeping process in today’s media production, ample evidences were provided on the need for a hybrid newsroom operation in order to effectively combat misinformation and other disorders