Speculation a new deception?
In August 2018, Kerala was hit by the flood. While many were trying to help the people affected by this flood, few jumped and took this as an opportunity to gain political mileage. A charge was made against Center Government of denying 700 Cr help offered by UAE. Many news publishing websites hopped on to bandwagon and published this news. One interesting thing about this news was how they structured the headline of the news. The following screenshot shows the heading of the few news.
Do you observe the words such as “might”, “may” or a punctuation mark such as “question mark”? This clearly states that even these news publisher knew there is no hardcore evidence to the claim of “Center rejecting 700 Cr offer” and that they are just making a guess. Later events revealed that the claim was indeed false. Nevertheless, these headlines were successful in creating the image in people’s mind that Center Government is evil and is against the people of Kerala. In fact even after this claim was proved false, many still believe in the claim.
These observations make one think:
- What is the intent of these kinds of deceptive heading?
- Given that most news used the same kind of language was it a coordinated attempt?
- Is this an attempt to take advantage of innocent and busy readers who can miss this subtle “may” or “might” trick?
Attempt to find the answer may take one deep down the rabbit hole and keep one engaged in its exploration. But for now, we must be aware of how “Speculation can be used to create a deception”.
