Fakes News: How It Spreads, How to Stop It, and How to Find It

In a world that is mainly experienced through a digital lens, it is clear to everyone that fake news, confirmation bias, and echo chambers all feed each other to create a mess of misinformation. If we, those using the internet, recognize this and view it as problematic, why does it still exist?
I believe that confirmation bias is what started the trend of fake news, though echo chambers support the downward spiral we seem to be in. People genuinely don’t want to hear other opinions or options — human nature deems it so that we must believe one thing and be set on it. Stepping outside of our bubble of knowledge, belief, and values is uncomfortable and dangerous.
So, we act on these personal patterns of information, specifically in how we interact with social media. Because of this and the algorithms of social media platforms, we create our own echo chambers of the same voices and opinions that we have grown accustom to. There is no exposure to other information as we live in an “ignorance is bliss” mindset. So how do we combat our own ignorance?
Once we are in this echo chamber, it is hard to get out of it. Someone else must infiltrate that barrier and physically do something about it, which falls onto the ethical value of holding each other responsible. If someone in your bubble posts fake news or is being unfair about a story, it is your civic duty to respond in an educationally passive way, suggesting other routes of news information.

Professional media analysts recommend cheating the algorithm of social media platforms and either ghosting for weeks (no liking, commenting, etc.) or by physically turning off filters or liking things you wouldn’t normally interact with. However, while that may work, I believe that it cancels out the purpose of social media. This method is exhausting, tedious, and it turns enjoyable, mindless scrolling into a chore.
Now, what is the role that journalists play in preventing fake news? Besides continuing to post ethically on their own public Facebook pages for themselves as a reporter and their corresponding news station, a journalist, in the end, is just a normal human being. On their personal social media, they have the same responsibility as a normal citizen to actively comment on fake news a friend shares and correct them. It has nothing to do with being a journalist, and I think too many people are expecting the dilemma of fake news to solely be handled by those in that profession.
We all created the fake news dilemma with our own echo chambers. Even people that say they are completely unbiased are guilty of such. So, as a whole community, it is now up to all of us to claw our way out of the hole we have dug.
Fake News Case Study
Fake news isn’t always necessarily as obvious as some people think. Some misinformation is more subtle, and rather than spread lies about a story, it does not disclose all the appropriate information. This type of fake news, in my opinion, is much more dangerous.
We can analyze this effect through the coverage of South Park getting banned in China and the makers issuing an apology. Both Breitbart and BBC covered this story in two very different ways.

Breitbart published their article on October 10, three days after South Park’s Twitter released an “official apology.” The headline, in all capital letters, read “‘SOUTH PARK’ PUNCHES BACK: ‘F*** THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT.” This title is not only misleading, but the capital letters are a “big red flag” that it is fake news according to OnTheMedia.org. While the headline is correct in the sense that South Park is continuing to make fun of the Chinese government, the actual phrasing of “F*** the Chinese government” came from the first episode that recently got banned, not the apology itself.
The article continues to describe the episode that got banned in a broad context, only specifically quoting offensive lines and not providing context to the entire episode. After that, it briefly quotes the apology, before looking at the South Park episode to be released after the apology.
The entire article is bland and misleading. Without in-depth explanations of the situation at hand, there’s no context for readers to make their own bias decisions off from. There is also no point of view or reaction from the Chinese government in this article, showing how bias and one-sided the reporting is.
In comparison, the BBC article was published the day after the apology was released. Their headline reads “South Park China: Writers in mock apology after Beijing censorship.” The headline is straightforward and tells the whole story unbiasedly in one sentence.
Complete with subheadings, the BBC article describes the original offensive episode that got banned in full context, including not only a couple offensive phrases, but references to a Winnie the Pooh meme that historically went viral a couple years ago.
Then, BBC gives context as to how China reacted to the offensive show and the measures the government took to “protect” its people from harm. This provides more context to the Chinese culture and why they found it offensive and what “banning” means. Later in the article, it also goes in-depth about China’s history with censorship, which provides more context and is extremely professional in that it is outside research.
Finally, the apology that was posted on Twitter is quoted, analyzed, and outside context is provided to explain references that readers might not have been educated on prior.
While these two articles covered the same thing and in similar ways, they hold different auras of professionalism, bias, and how an audience would be swayed. The Breitbart article immediately makes China out to be the “bad guy” of the situation and pokes as much fun at them as the South Park episode did. The BBC article distributes the story without taking a side, allowing readers to genuinely educate themselves and develop their own opinions justly.
This is why this type of fake and misleading news is dangerous: the readers of both articles are provided with similar facts, but Breitbart readers are without full context and understanding, leaving them wholly uneducated. However, they have enough information to get into debates and try to convince others to join their side, which is just as unfair, and few people are able to ask the right questions to help educate them.
