Fake News and the Internet’s Damage to Society.
I remember sitting behind the television, many years ago, watching the news with my parents. At that time, I was still young and innocent, and never even heard of the term “fake news”. In fact, I had only heard of it a few years ago, when Donald Trump had gotten his role as US president.
Interestingly enough, the first time I had heard of this term is with the US president himself. A friend of mine showed me a meme linking Trump and fake news. At that time, I just laughed, but it wasn’t until now that I realised how big an issue it was.
Fake news isn’t as harmless as you’d think it is. You’re probably thinking: “Some person has just told lies online. How can that be as serious as other problems in the world, such as terrorism, gender equality and racial equality?”.
Fake News isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Even though the internet is becoming filled with it nowadays, it isn’t commonly found on mainstream news webpages, such as ABC news and BBC news. It is being put onto dodgy news webpages that might seem “legit” and pretend to be a trustworthy news source, and it is also being post onto social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This poses a serious question on which articles and posts we should trust and which we shouldn’t trust.
A couple of years ago, most people would trust most news items that they had found online. These days, some people would distrust everything they see online, which is increasingly problematic, as they would be ignoring the actual news and the actual problems going on in our society.
There is another problem relating to what we can see on the internet. Now, when the internet was first invented, it brought the world closer together. But there is another feature that has popped into the internet that separates society apart. This new feature is called a filter bubble.
Filter bubbles detect what we like. It takes information about what videos we watch, our location, what links we click on, who we follow and decides what we see, and what we don’t see. For example, if you have a particular political view, webpages such as YouTube, Google and Facebook can filter out information so what you see satisfies your views. What you see is different to what people with contrasting views see. What was originally designed to bring the world closer together is separating it into more extreme groups, who share the same belief. These groups do not interact with other people who have contrasting beliefs to them. People stick stronger to their beliefs through a process called ‘confirmation bias’. Google has even admitted to a problem with a filter bubble in its search engine algorithm.
Now, you can see that fake news and filter bubbles are damaging our society. The internet is feeding us with false statements, which means that we can no longer fully trust what we see online, and we are trapped in our own bubble that an algorithm has created, that only shows us things that align with our perspectives. But that’s not the scariest problem.
On the 4th of December 2016, an armed gunman entered Comet Ping Pong (a pizza restaurant) and opened fire at a locked closet. The gunman claims that he was investigating something he found online that suggested that Hilary Clinton was holding a child sex ring in that pizza shop. This endangered many lives, and caused long-term fear and anxiety to the customers in the shop. This is a real example where fake news has caused serious problems. This incident was known as “Pizzagate”.
Another example is where vaccines were linked to autism. This was shown in a study by Andrew Wakefield in 1998, that showed that vaccines could cause autism. This caused many people do decide not to vaccinate their kids. This group of people identify as “anti-vaxxers”. Not vaccinating your kids can be harmful for them, but can cause harm to other people as well. Vaccinations can protect you from diseases that could be potentially deadly, and having someone who is not vaccinated in your community means that there is a risk of spreading that disease to other people.
Here are just two examples where online conspiracy theories have risked the lives of many people. Now do you understand how big an issue fake news is?
You’re probably thinking “how am I going to tell what’s factually right and what’s factually wrong on the internet?”. Well, luckily for us, there are ways to test if a source is trustworthy or not. In this series of videos, Mike Caulfield explains the techniques used to verify if a source is credible or not. Here are the main tips I’ve learned from those videos.
Step 1: Investigate the source of the material.
Google search the website name and see what the internet says about that organisation. Don’t read what the website says about itself, but what another source (like Wikipedia) says. A good way is to paste the webpage’s domain URL, (such as www.random.com, rather than www.random.com/Q5xt4ran), and type Wikipedia next to it. Therefore you can find out the credentials of the webpage.
Step 2: Investigate the original source of the material.
Find out if any other source has done the reporting. You can find this when the webpage makes reference to another webpage. Click on those links and investigate that webpage’s credentials using the first step. This way, you are checking the credibility of the original report.
Step 3: Rely on well-established sources, and established media sites.
Use fact-checking websites, like Snopes, which do the fact checking work for you. Also, use well-established media sources, such as ABC news, that are highly factual and accurate in their reporting. Search their webpages if they have the same story or not. To find out more about reliable media sites, use this fact checker website to find out which sources have reliable and unbiased information.
Fake news is a big problem in today’s world, and many people do not know what to believe and what not to believe. It can be extremely harmful, in those cases mentioned above, and even can risk people’s lives. However, with those three simple steps that Caulfield explains in his videos, we can ensure (or at least do our best to ensure) that the sources we look at are trustworthy and reliable.
Hopefully my article has given you an insight to this misuse of technology, and hopefully you are now aware of the dangers of fake news and able to use fact-checking techniques to avoid believing things that aren’t true.
Sources used (including sources hyperlinked, whether I used it or not). You can read these for further information on topics covered in this article.
https://twentytwowords.com/children-of-anti-vaxxers-respond-to-their-parents-philosophy/
