Have you ever come across a post you have read online and ever questioned if it’s real? I’m here to tell you, what you are reading, might be fake news from a fake profile or website that looks to be real with comments, and a whole social media page. You might be thinking to yourself, “Oh I know how to spot fake news, oh this post here is clearly fake just because I know it is.” It’s deeper than that as the spread of fake news happens because of how people think, how information is shared to this day, and how social media works in general.
A major reason why fake news spreads online is because of how social media algorithms are set up. For example, platforms like TikTok and Instagram are designed to show users their own content that they are interested in and keep them actively hooked while keeping them on their app. As said in Oxford academic article, “There are many interrelated causes of the misinformation problem, including the ability of non-experts to rapidly post information, the influence of bots and social media algorithms.”
https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/40/2/daaf023/8100645
So from this we can only assume that these bots that are created find what ever information they want or make up information and just rapidly post about it to get people hooked on it and for people to believe it. As what I can see, problems like bots saying problems and spamming all these fake messages to agree is making people agree as well and thinking the information must be correct even though there is no fact checking with them is a problem. People just need to be aware of what our world is today and how much AI is growing.
Another huge reason why we see misinformation all the time is because of how fast information can move online. Since the start of when phones and electronics starting coming out, it was a lot harder to make believe in fake news sources cause their was not many places you can go to for answers. In today’s world, there are so many sites, news sources, people to trust, all of this just to make money. One interesting point said in MIT News is they say, “the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. Instead, false news speeds faster around Twitter due to people retweeting inaccurate news items.” With that in mind, I can only assume that people are very close minded people and do not care about other opinions and will post whatever they want without doing little to know research on the problem.
In this video we see multiple of examples of people talking about the news, weather or just crazy events. Within this video at first they show two news people talking and take turns showing each video and it’s for sure hard to tell what’s fake and real especially when you’re in a rush or don’t care what you’re seeing and it’s scary. The fact that videos like this come across people page everyday and nobody seems to care about this issue is not good. Fake news is becoming our worlds “real news” and it’s a scary time. Eventually people won’t even turn to news anymore because they will think it’s all fake.
The biggest factor of all of this is really just bias and peoples emotions. As said in Georgia’s state news hub “studies largely pointed to belief in fake news as confirmation bias, which is the tendency to believe information that supports your existing worldview. But this new study suggests something deeper is going on, especially during times of uncertainty like the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that people do consume fake news differently than tabloid news, which is largely consumed for entertainment and not taken seriously. With fake news, people are believing and sharing it because it feels useful either emotionally or informationally.” It’s sad to think that in todays world that people will believe whatever just because they have strong opinions on it and based off what they hear from the internet in which is a very bad place in general to talk and hear things now.
They not not even question the fact that it’s fake news and just always accept the fact that they are right. This raises a new issue of lack of digital literacy, meaning they do not know how to accurately or do not know how to verify if that information is correct. with this skill people might become more able to spot fake headlines, fake images, edited ai images, deep fakes, however, is getting harder and harder everyday.
The internet is becoming a more and more powerful place and it is really scary of what people can do. Fake news is taking over everyone’s heads and is corrupting people’s minds and turning them wild. The spread of fake news cannot be overlooked and is a very important problem we still face to this day. I think fact checking and looking into multiple news sources can help but also really important, don’t believe everything you see online. It’s the internet, and anything can happen online good or bad, real or fake!
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