Fake News - What Is It? Why Is It Dangerous?

Fake news. What is it? Fake news is a problem nowadays especially with the growth of social media and fast advertising. Learn about fake news on this blog post and educate yourself for the future. This topic gets me thinking, what is fake news? Why is it relevant to a student's life? What are the effective solutions to this so called problem?

Pondering. Photo: Artel Richard

How is fake news related to our everyday lives? Fake news spreads dangerously quickly and has received the attention of various magazine and news companies as well as the general public. Fake News was the word of the year for Collins Dictionary in 2017. Although people have just started talking about fake news, it has been around for hundreds of years.

“Fake news is not a new phenomenon. It has been around since news became a concept 500 years ago” Politico Magazine

Fake news manages to find its way into our lives and eat away our sanity bit by bit like parasites. From news articles to videos on social media, fake news continues to somehow grab our attention and waste our time with deceiving news or pointless content.

“If we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” said Barack Obama

The definition of Fake News is, "false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence politics or created as a joke." (Cambridge Dictionary)

Fake news is used to misinform audience in favor of the company or news provider or subject or the opposite; used to criticize and ridicule a target or subject or a group of targets.

An image depicting fake news as a tree on Wikipedia

With the development of social media, everybody can post or read fake news. That means that everybody can deceive or be deceived. “A new study finds that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.” (Borenstein, 2018). This scare quote from Huffpost shows that either people are more interested in lies than truth or the fake news is so deceiving that people believe they are true even though they're not.

A section from an ABC News article called When Fake News Stories Make Real News Headlines states, One said he re-writes headlines, saying, “You have to have a good headline for your story to be successful.” For example, a headline he said he wrote was, “Rush Reveals Michelle’s Perverted Past After She Dumps on Trump,” but he said the original headline was, “Rush Reveals Michelle’s Past.” (Chang, Lefferman, Pedersen, Martz, 2016). If this is the type of headline that people consider 'good', our society has a serious problem.

Fake news is not just about feeding lies to the society in favor of the liars, fake news creates corruption in society. That is what makes fake news so dangerous.

Even the president of the United States, Donald Trump lies constantly, as mentioned in this New York Times article, which is not very different from fake news. This is a problem because everyday, there is more and more chance of false information deceiving normal citizens. Imagine what our future would be like if all the content creators, presses, companies and political groups did was feed us fabricated data.

But children and younger audiences don't read news articles or listen to the news so they don't have a problem right? Wrong. Like I mentioned previously, with the growth of social media, the younger generations are perhaps even more vulnerable to fake news than the older audience. For example, YouTube creators have started using a method called 'clickbait'.

Clickbait is, "articles, photographs, etc. on the internet that are intended to attract attention and encourage people to click on links to particular websites” (Cambridge Dictionary). This method is used to draw attention to what seems like an exciting content when the video is far from the title or have little to do with it. This allows the creator to make videos with minimum effort while obtaining high amounts of views to gain popularity and revenue.

Since the younger generations are growing up with technology, meaning they will be accustomed to the mountains of social media sources and applications, they will be more open towards the risk of fake news which makes fake news not only dangerous for the people of the present but for the people of the future as well.

Fortunately, there is a list of possible solutions social media companies and websites are looking into on The Guardian. These examples include hiring real life individuals to revise articles before they become published so that only the truth is told.

Hoping for a future with less fake news and misleading content, I have some questions in mind. How can we implement advanced technology to prevent misleading news? How can we educate the general public about fake news? Will the world ever be rid of fake news?

As brutal as truths can be sometimes, I believe that the truth is better than toxic false information and misleading facts. It is because of the numerous facts mentioned above about fake news that I have trust issues. Would you rather want to live with fake news or be satisfied with truth?

The video below is a fun but true example of fake news from Collins Dictionary Word of the year.