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| Fake News | by mikemacmarketing |
Fake news or "bullshit" news has become more relevant in the previous year due to the recent election, which has essentially proven how effective news without regard for truth can be on our society. Through use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, it has become increasingly easy to produce content that appears to be a factual info article on the surface, but is actually not grounded in truth, and is used instead to gain views or promote a certain way of thinking. By creating a false alternate reality that caters to an audience's confirmation bias, people can start to lose sight of what is really happening outside of their immediate sphere of experience. When this happens, our country's system of democracy weakens. Citizens in a democracy need to make conscious individual decisions about who and what they are voting for, and should strive to be as informed as possible before coming to any conclusions. When fake news is allowed to run rampant across the internet, it interferes with the public's ability to gather information correctly. In this way, people need to make an effort now more than ever to filter between what is credible information, and what is fake online.
Hi Alex,
ReplyDeleteYour post was very informative about fake news. I also noticed that during the past election and even now still, there are countless fake news and/or bullshit articles cycling around the mainstream media and the internet. The video you linked to was super interesting and I learned a lot from it. I also think that people get caught up with fake news so easily because it is such a big entity. In the past years, there have been little to no fake news articles that people could get caught up in, but now, they're everywhere so it's hard for people to discern what is true and what is not.