Research Paper: Fake News
Section 1
Fake news crisis has been one of the most debated topics as far as public and scientific discourse is concerned since the 2016 United States presidential campaign. Originally, the fake news phrase was applied to political satire. Currently, it refers to inaccurate things along with contexts that are completely unlinked to mediated communication. In summary of the above factors, fake news refers to a fundamental shift in political and public attitudes, which are represented by journalism and new plus how facts and information may be acquired in the digitalized world. The fake news phenomenon is not a new, since time immemorial partisan press has always publicized biased opinions and occasionally stories that have no factual basis. The fake news has been set up by States as a weapon in ideological and informational warfare globally, along with broadcast signals jamming and recently blocking the websites. The situation became a major preoccupation for the United Nations (UN) when it was established with the onset of the Cold War. The organization handled the problem regarding the threat it posed to friendly relations between peoples and states by the systematic diffusion caused by intentional false or distorted reports. The increase of fake news shows the erosion of permanent bulwarks against misinformation in the internet era. There a lot of missing concerning the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malevolent actors. I found this topic appealing since it has been flagged for fuelling propaganda, hate speech, and violence. For instance, Pizzagate, an infamous exceptional situation, occurred when a false news story was based on the shooting incident. In December 2016, in Washington DC, a man decided to self investigate a story that was completely based on the unfounded conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton’s team was operating a pedophile ring from pizzeria premises. This resulted in violence in which he was arrested with assault and related offenses. Additionally, I am interested in fake news since it has become a major preoccupation for global organizations, national law and policymakers, media and media actors, civil society, and academia.
Section 2
The article highlights how various people and organizations use social media platforms such as Face book and Twitter to disseminate false information and various ways to recognize the fake news (“My Social Media for Seniors, 3rd Edition”, 2020). False news tends to spread quickly and flourish because people spread the news online and offline, and most of the people are attracted and tend to believe false news since most to be appealing. Currently, all an individual must do is just post the latest misinformation on Face book or Twitter, and literally, in just a few seconds its spreads globally. In most cases, an influential individual is sources of fake news, if he or she decides to make an ill-informed tweet, which will be received by thousands of his or her followers, about ninety percent tend to believe it’s a fact. This worsens since the follower will share the tweet with online friends, and in a couple of minutes, the fake news hits the whole globe. People tend to believe what they read online since we have been conditioned to trust information read on traditional newspaper and magazine journalists as humans. Therefore it’s rare for one to question the authenticity of what is read without questioning (“My Social Media for Seniors, 3rd Edition”, 2020). Additionally, there is a confirmation bias phenomenon that occurs in every individual. The phenomenon is the tendency to interpret new information as an affirmation of existing beliefs. If the information an individual aligns with what they already believe, we take as further proof; therefore, one will believe or not what they read online. Additionally, people tend to believe there is hope in a situation where one is a victim. For instance, if one is deep debts or cannot find a job, they will believe that the current work-from-home scheme pays forty dollars per hour. The article’s topic is relevant to the topic of study since the social media platform is the principal source of fake news.
Recognizing fake news is easy; it can be found on an individual’s social media feeds and fake news websites. These sites exist to disseminate fake news articles such as hoaxes, information, and propaganda solely. The purpose of these sites is to misinform the public and make them believe they are reading real news articles. The writers of the articles deliberately craft believable-sounding but completely falsified information for financial or political gain. Such type of information becomes a threat to democracy (“Digital Information Ecosystems,” 2020). The article highlights that most social networks have implemented initiatives to fight fake news. The initiative was based on the fact that most social platforms have to redeem themselves from criticism to avoid scaring away the advertisers who criticize social networks regularly. For instance, Google has allocated initiatives such as CrossCheck project that was established by Google in 2017 allowed the internet users to report suspect content on the internet, social networks and ask questions through a dedicated platform, to enable the CrossCheck partners to monitor the survey and respond directly to the requests on the platform. The researchers analyzed the topic if the fake news could kill information evaluated how quick misinformation spread. One classic example of how quick misinformation spread was performed by three Boston researchers (“Digital Information Ecosystems,” 2020). The study concluded that traffic depended on internet users instead of information distribution robots. The distribution and acceleration were dependent on the human source. The misinformation distribution tendency originated from the information novelty and potential to fascinate the readers than the real information. The study showed that true and false information was spread at the same speed since they were not endowed with emotions and therefore were not sensitive to content novelty. The article highlighted ways of detecting fake news and how quick misinformation spread, which are important factors to consider when linked to fake news.
The article highlighted strategies to use to identify credible sources of information. These strategies include: checking date, credentials, top-level domain (TLD) and domain, deeper analysis, confirming with the local library (Conners, 2020). The initial part of verifying the authenticity of the information is to start with the site one is familiar with to narrow the search for articles with studies conducted ten and above years ago, the reliability of the questionable. The unreliability of the study is indicated by available of more studies on the same subject conducted recently. Additionally, an article is outdated if it has broken or dead links. The next factor to consider is the author’s credentials. A professional with experience is more reliable than a blogger who is just interested in the field. TLDs are unique, for instance, .edu for an educational website or gov. for a governmental website (Conners, 2020). The uniqueness of the TLDs is useful when looking for specific information on a particular field. However, it is important to read the information critically even in such sites some hackers can alter the information. This article is very informative in reference to the fake news topics; it highlights deeply tactics to determine the authenticity of the information one is interested in.
The video focused on the democracy of media organization since, according to the journalists’ president Trump of engaging in a misinformation campaign to confuse the public (MetroFocus, 2020). The guest host in this discussion was Dan Abrams, a lawyer, and journalist in the profession. Currently, President Trump has attacked the mainstream media of fake news, which is a partial truth and partially false. The media organizations to attain the democracy need to own up the accusation (since thirty years ago, there has been a tendency of mainstream media to spread fake news) and then starting being fair in any information they disseminate to the public. Some of the political leaders use the term “fake news” when they want to convince the public to believe them (some of the news have factual basis), such news a termed as bias news (MetroFocus, 2020). This video is relevant to the topic since it highlights measures that the media organizations need to take for the public to believe its news.
Section 3
Allen et al., (2020) study was based on a deep analysis of the two main reasons causing challenging in evaluating disagreements over the prevalence and the importance of misinformation. First, the analysis was based on the observation that the Americans consume news online through desktop computers and mobile devices such as television; however, none of the data sources covers all the three modes (political polarization, trust in public institutions and democracy). Second, fake news analysis frequently fails to account for how much is consumed compared to other types of news or non-related news content. This is caused by the volume of the online content, which is very large to effectively broken down. The study found that recent research literature on online sources of fake news and misinformation is directionally and proportionately inconsistent (Allen et al., 2020). Firstly, the research treats the news as the principal importance issue, whether on TV or online. Additionally, research on online news and specifically on medial social platforms noticeably outweigh research on TV, at a ratio of 5:1. Lastly, the fake news topic outshines all other related-related research, such that the study found only 1% of the general news consumption was fake news.
The study was conducted to investigate social media and fake news during the 2016 election. The study’s findings clarified the level of general exposure to fake news and how persuasive fake news would need to be to achieve the pivotal impact (Allcott, & Gentzkow, 2017). According to the article average of US adults and could remember one of the orders or probably several fake news articles during the election period with higher exposure to pro-Trump articles than pro-Clinton articles. The impact of election results depended on the effectiveness of the fake news exposure in altering the people voting. There is evidence that is exposing the voters to one additional television campaign advertisement altered the vote shares by 0.02 percentage points approximately. This meant that if one fake news article were aired of a TV campaign, it would change the number of vote shares by approximately one percent (Allcott, & Gentzkow, 2017). Many factors cause a single fake news story to be more effective than television. For instance, in the case that Pope endorsed Donald Trump, this fact would be substantially fascinating and probably urge a rational voter to vote for Trump instead of a typical campaign advertisement. The study based its assessment on the number of stories read and remember and did not include stories that were aired but not read or read but not remember, affecting the result. The fake news database was incomplete, and the stories’ impact could have been omitted, which is significant.
In summary, the two articles in this section are relevant in reference to fake news topics. The initial topic was focused on deep analysis of the reasons causing a challenge in evaluating disagreements over the prevalence and the importance of misinformation. It is vital to be aware of the prevalence of the fake and its effect on the public and businesses. The source was credible since its analysis was based on current research. The second article analyzed a very important factor: social media and its impact on political leaders’ election. The accuracy of the findings is not achieved in this study. This is because the study based its assessment on the number of stories read and remember and did not include stories that were aired but not read or read but not remember, which could affect the result. The fake news database was incomplete, and the impact of the stories could have been omitted, which is significant.
References
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of
economic perspectives, 31(2), 211-36.
Allen, J., Howland, B., Mobius, M., Rothschild, D., & Watts, D. J. (2020). Evaluating the fake
news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem. Science Advances, 6(14), eaay3539.
Conners, J. (2020). What is a Credible Source? How to Evaluate Web Resources.
WhoIsHostingThis.com. Retrieved 30 July 2020, from https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/credible-sources/.
Digital Information Ecosystems. O’Reilly Online Learning. (2020). Retrieved 30 July 2020, from
https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/digital-information-ecosystems/9781786304148/c07.xhtml.
MetroFocus. (2020). FAKE NEWS VS. REAL NEWS [Image]. Retrieved 30 July 2020, from
https://www.pbs.org/video/fake-news-vs-real-news-ltadaw/.
My Social Media for Seniors, 3rd Edition. O’Reilly Online Learning. (2020). Retrieved 30 July
2020, from https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/my-social-media/9780135913611/ch02.xhtml.