Facebook is spying on you!
According to research Facebook monitors everything you do. As if privacy problems weren’t enough. Facebook can tap into your microphone and listen in on your conversations, even read your messages. They can see you through your camera too. How else would they be able to advertise so specifically to you? And what’s worse Facebook is to start showing you who is looking at your pictures and how many times, with detailed information, and statistics of how long they spend looking at your profile. They will also start to send messages to the police if they find something suspicious or see you out in suspicious locations — so long to teenage drinking and recreational drug use. And forget about stealing, they have all your details. And it won’t be long before your phones turn into little tiny robots and start trying to take over the world, all in the name of Facebook.
And like that, you’re hooked — well, I assume you realised this was false when you read the tiny robots bit. But at the beginning I had you go a bit. Whether it was out of fear or panic, you have to continue reading so you can analyse how this is going to effect you, never doubting (until robots) because this is something you suspect already, right? Of course this isn’t happening. You can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s “Fake News” and it’s so easy to write. It was relatively believable too (minus the robots), given that this is an era of rapidly advancing technology and we’re always a bit suspicious of these big companies. Fake News facilitates this suspicion.
What is Fake News?
Fake news is a parasite of the internet. A parasite is “an organism which lives in or on another organism and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other’s expense”. Fake new is intended to do that, extract maybe your data, or your following, subscriptions, etc. A good example and probably one of the more well known is that of the Fake News on the lead up to the US Presidential Election in which Hillary Clinton was accused of involvement with a child sex ring. This “news” riled someone up enough that they went into a pizzeria — alleged place of operations — and fired an assault rifle¹. Initially Fake News intends to get something out of you rather than give you something. Whether that’s to turn you against something or someone, or whether it’s just to get their statistics up. It’s getting something from you and it is constantly winning too manipulating you, sometimes without you realising.
Fake news is also a bullet, it travels fast and always has a target. And, boy does it hit too. This kind of news is usually more common among political business, studies found that political falsehoods travelled three times faster than true news². Just imagine all those stories you hear about your potential leaders that you’ve shared could be a fabrication from their opposition, all so they could get your vote. It was too late for Hilary Clinton when the truth behind the sex ring was falsified. Don’t be caught off guard. You’re not a target, don’t let yourself be one.
Why do we fall for it?
It’s easy. Let’s be very honest, if you see something that you’ve had suspicions about and it’s “proven” or there some anonymous research that confirms these thoughts, are you not going to believe it? We all like to think we knew something before it comes out. So, initially we are biased³. That’s why we fall. Bias that it’s something we want to believe, because our friends believe it, because respected people we believe in believe it. Simply, we believe what we want to believe.
How to fight against fake news?
That’s easy too. It does come down to critical thinking⁴. Analysing on a neutral (non Bias) ground.
- Check the sources! If other trustworthy sites are not covering the story, it’s probably a parasite. If this said story is true and it a major headliner, it would be covered by more than one independent news.
- If something doesn’t seem right, seems a bit fishy or makes you angry, check it out through different sites. Put it into site checking websites. Don’t spread articles you haven’t checked out by sharing it on social media.
- Make sure you look at the quality of the information. Is the grammar good, spelling mistakes? Poorly punctuated?
- Do they have actual sources you can look at and read yourself? Names of reputable people? If not, you know what it is.
Fake news as only as popular as you make it. It spreads as fast as you spread it. Don’t fall victim to internet parasites or web bullets. You’re smarter than that.
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/08/pizzagate-conspiracy-gunman-i-regret-how-i-handled-the-situation and https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/18/what-is-fake-news-pizzagate
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fake-news-twitter-spreads-further-faster-real-stories-retweets-political-a8247491.html
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/contemporary-psychoanalysis-in-action/201612/fake-news-why-we-fall-it
- https://www.summer.harvard.edu/inside-summer/4-tips-spotting-fake-news-story
