The Internet sits on a thrown of lies!!!

As social media platforms clutter their forums with fake news my professor decided to have this great idea for our social media class to create fake news on a social media platform and document the engagement we received from the fake news 😑😑. And boy did I receive some great support and love from everyone, however this made me feel so guilty in the process that I am sure I broke my little grandmothers heart and I am going to be honest… she is no condition to have her heart broken like that. Poor gram gram. I also am afraid I would possible get jumped by my friends for feeding them false news, but hey! My grades are more important than friendships at this point.

This little experiment I ran showed two-different sides: What it looked like when readers get duped and how it felt to spread fake news.

There were so many positive reactions and I have never had so many people like a post of my ever or even reshare! I am surprised that I still have friends to be honest or even followers. This post brought out people who I haven’t really talked to since fourth grade or old teachers of mine which was shociking to me. It was interesting to run this experiment because I was able to see who was a real friend or not. A wise woman once told me and by woman I mean Brittany Mlynek, “this assignment will #weedoutthehaters”.

Now I couldn’t keep this lie up forever. People would approach me in passing and congratulate me. I would just smile and say thank you, but the lie was just eating at me. So I followed up the next day with a post explaining the real situation and I definitely did not get the greatest responses. A lot of disappointment and nasty comments. For example:

So as you can see I didn’t get the greatest responses back, but surprisingly I didn’t lose any followers. During this process, I realized a couple things, when we can remember something more easily, we are more likely to believe it’s true. Another was that not a lot of people called me out on this fake news except for one person and that was my athletic trainer. But even then, she didn’t want to comment on Facebook because she wasn’t entirely sure so she waited the next day to hear my story. Lastly, I realized that the solution to fake news problem lies within our brain. We as readers must recognize it and not share it or we should just call it out for others who are not capable to do so themselves. LET’S NOT BE A PART OF THE PROBLEM!! Also, I most likley will be going to hell for creating a fake news like this so if you want me to pick you up on the way to hell… I can. 😈🔥🔥.