Living with Fake News on Social Media

From connecting as much as 1.7 billion people worldwide to coordinating a full-on revolution in Egypt, Facebook has played an increasingly important role in our lives over the past decade. As we are becoming ever more dependent on our social media outlets, it is important to be critical of the information that we receive.

On August 28th, 2016, Facebook’s “trending topics” feature promoted a story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly being fired for supporting Hillary Clinton. Although this never happened in reality, the fake story trended for hours before being finally taken down. Ironically, the incident took place after Facebook replaced its decidedly biased human editors with computer algorithms. Without these human editors on the lookout, it became much easier for false stories to trend.

Facebook has yet to make a decision on how to draw the line between the company’s mission to let people share whatever they want with their friends and false stories spreading like wildfire on the website. Former President Obama has personally addressed the topic of fake news by saying, “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not,” he said yesterday, “and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”

Indeed, critical thinking is a crucial skill that we need in this day and age where we are consistently bombarded by information. It is always important to fact check our news because even the most trustworthy information sources can make mistakes. The simplest first step that we can take is to have more than one source of information that we can rely on.