The truth behind fake news
By Jasmine Hernandez
Fake news is a form of media manipulation that spreads untrue information. The rise of social media has brought fake news as a commonplace.
Fake news consists of misinformation and disinformation.
According to the University of Michigan Library, Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is mistakenly or inadvertently created or spread; the intent is not to deceive. Disinformation is false information that is deliberately created and spread "in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth."
The University of Michigan Library said how these types of information are produced is related to who the writer is and the various reasons why it is created.
The writers may be wanting to make money, regardless of the content of the article, they could be satire writers who want to either make a point or entertain you, or both, or writers who want to influence political beliefs and policy makers.
As for poor or untrained journalists, the pressure of the 24 hour news cycle as well as the explosion of news sites may contribute to negligent writing that doesn't follow professional journalistic standards or ethics.
Raj Kishore Patra of the Department of Mass Communication and Media Technology at Khallikote University, in Berhampur, Odisha, and Arpita Saha of the Xavier School of Communications at Xavier University said the spirit and ethics of journalism are compromised by fake news and the public perception of the place of ethical journalism within the modern information sphere.
Fake news can confuse and deceive adults, which can lead to culture jamming, polarization of opinion, obstruction of reality, and harassment of conventional mainstream media.
Emilio Ferrara, a research team leader at USC Information Sciences Institute and an associate professor at the USC Viterbi and USC Annenberg said “Most misinformation is spread by people — not by bots, foreign actors, or troll accounts.”
According to the Pew Research Center, about 1 in 5 Americans get their news from social media.
Unable to process all the material of blogs, videos, tweets, and other sources of information, our own cognitive biases decide what we should pay attention to.
Models revealed by Scientific American show that even when we want to see and share high-quality information, our inability to view everything in our news feeds inevitably leads us to share things that are partly or completely untrue.
Search engines and social media platforms provide personalized recommendations based on the vast amounts of data they have about users' past preferences.
They prioritize information in our feeds that we are most likely to agree with and shield us from information that might change our minds. This makes us easy targets for polarization.
Experiments on Twitter by Bjarke Mønsted and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Southern California indicate that information is transmitted via “complex contagion.”
When we are repeatedly exposed to an idea, typically from many sources, we are more likely to adopt and reshare it.
To restore the health of our information ecosystem, we must understand the vulnerabilities of our overwhelmed minds and how the economics of information can be leveraged to protect us from being misled.
According to the Cornell University Library, what the public can do about fake news is to learn to recognize fake news sites; be curious and actively investigate news stories, they can use news sources that are accountable for their content and that follow journalistic ethics and standards, use care before sharing news content with others on social media. Pause and reflect on news sources that arouse strong emotions, positive or negative, and learn to recognize your own biases and compensate for them.
An infographic of a man extinguishing current fake news about the coronavirus. (Photo: GETTY IMAGES)
This image shows the cover of a newspaper emphasizing to not encourage reading fake news while taking a moment to check sources. (Photo: Be Connected)
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