Fake News: An Alarming Epidemic
There once was a time, not too long ago, when opening the news was an easy way to check facts if there was a dispute between two parties. One party would be proven correct, and the other party would be proven as incorrect. Nowadays, however, especially with political machines turning at full speed, and third parties taking interest in these conflicts, there is no shortage of falsified information flying through the airwaves and through cyberspace.
Although this misinformation is affects everyone, it has the biggest effect on the political climate of the world, particularly the current United States presidential administration. The current President of the United States has been known for bullying reporters and accusing any news broadcasts showing anything that may paint him in an unfavorable way as “fake news”. This has caused a great deal of confusion and conflict in the American people as they all search for a source of news that both supporters and detractors of the President trust. The Cambridge Dictionary defines fake news as: “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or another media, usually created to influence political views…” That’s a concerning definition, especially when considering how often that word is thrown around in the current day and age. What makes this definition noticeably more concerning is when one reads the example sentence underneath the Cambridge Dictionary definition.
The example sentence reads: “there is concern about the power of fake news to effect election results. ” This is especially concerning when one considers the fact that the Cambridge University press that publishes the Cambridge Dictionary is based in England. This means that even on an international scale, fake news is a major issue with the capability to drastically change the outcome of an election. Fake news came to the forefront of the minds of the American people most notably during the 2016 election, with misinformation being spread by several campaigns on both sides of the aisle. Several Facebook pages started churning out falsified information and misleading information through links and posts tailored to each Facebook user. Many of these pages were created by hackers or “trolls” overseas, many of whom have been linked to the governments of those countries, to divide the American people and further their own nation’s interests. The lack of fact checking on the articles and links sent around on social media on the part of the social media sites, as well as on the parts of those reading the articles, led to a sudden spike in misinformation throughout the American population. The impact of this misinformation didn’t come to the attention of the American people until after the election. The cries of “fake news” that got the attention of Americans at first came from then-candidate Donald Trump.
In the runup to the 2016 Presidential election, Trump seemed to use the term “fake news” to denote any media coverage of him that he didn’t approve of. The frightening thing is that it may have been the very thing that won him the Oval Office. A study by Richard Gunther, Paul Beck, and Eric Nisbet of Ohio State University showed that believing in one or more of the falsified news stories that were slanted toward then-candidate Trump made a Democratic voter exponentially less likely to vote for Clinton based on how many of the stories they believed. This rate of change had little to no effect in turning Trump voters to Clinton, however, as the vast majority of the falsified news stories spread during the 2016 election were pro-Trump, anti-Clinton, or both. The biggest issue with the fake news epidemic is that the social media sites that they seem to spread through like the plague don’t check their reliability and trustworthiness. This means that essentially anyone with a website that sounds official can report something as “news” and post it to Buzzfeed or several other popular sites that spread misinformation during the 2016 election.
Social media sites need to check the news stories that are posted on them. They can no longer say that the falsified stories don’t have a real effect, or that the people can tell that what they are reading is inaccurate, because clearly it has had a significant impact on voting as shown by the Ohio State University study. If spreading fake news has had that much of an effect on elections on a scale as large as the Presidential election, sites should have the sense to hire a staff to check news stories shared on the sites for accuracy. Hiring a staff for these companies could help avoid a costly lawsuit. Connected to the issue of misinformation being spread through social media and disrupting the way in which people vote, the role of Facebook’s ads must be brought up. Facebook was recently the subject of a government investigation including a lengthy questioning of CEO Mark Zuckerberg due to their practices of collecting and storing user data.
The social media site then had a major issue when it was revealed that they shared the collected user data of over 87 million Facebook users with the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which had connections to the Trump campaign. This allowed the firm to post political ads personalized to each user, often trying to sway them in the direction of Trump. Zuckerberg was also questioned by the Senate as to what Facebook planned to do about the fake news being spread through their media. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal played a large part in the drafting of the Honest Ads Act, a bill currently in the Senate that would mandate greater transparency from political advertisers. This is clearly too much of an issue to be fixed by just one bill, but it’s a very good start. Until that bill becomes a law, however, America is essentially on its own when trying to determine the legitimacy of an ad or a news story. That means that people need to understand how to read a news story and determine its truthfulness on their own. If someone can understand that they need to confirm a news story to be true, that they need to check more than one credible source. Odds are, if a story is only on one news site, or if it’s not on any news site and is instead only viewable through a social media post, it’s not true. Another way for someone to find an authentic news story is to go through a source that has been historically credible, such as BBC News, one of the most trusted news sources in the world. Most importantly, however, the key part of the process in determining the legitimacy of a news story is to realize that the world is in the age of misinformation and fake news, and to just read every story with skepticism. If the story seems too outlandish to be true, it probably isn’t true.
The sad truth is, the ramifications of fake news go further than just altering the way people think and vote in terms of the political word. Fake news has led at least one person to incredible violence toward innocent people in public. In early December of 2016, a North Carolina man traveled to Washington, DC with a rifle, and opened fire in a pizza restaurant filled with innocent people after reading a false news article online that stated the pizza restaurant as the location of a child-trafficking ring led by high-ranking Democratic officials, including the Clintons and Obamas. No one was injured in the attack, and the man was sentenced to four years in prison. While no one was injured in the attack, it shows how seriously the fake news epidemic should be taken, and how quickly something as devastating as a shooting can start with someone not fact checking an article online. The world is entering a new chapter in its history, a chapter that needs to include greater skepticism on the part of every single person with access to the news. Suddenly the world is thrust into a time where people seem to have forgotten the single most important piece of advice that every mother bestowed on their child from a very young age: “don’t believe everything you read online. ” The world needs to remember that advice and move forward with the knowledge that not every news site can be trusted.
