Fake News

This week’s blog topic is very interesting: we need to make up a fake news, and then post it a random social media platform to see reactions from our friends or followers. It is a good experiment to see how individual affects the spreading of fake news, and it even can be a test on my personalities and ethos considered by others.

I chose to post on Instagram. Usually, I don’t share any personal life online because I am afraid that my personal information will be leaked unconsciously through these “sharing”. My Instagram account is more like official account of a handcraft lover. I am very interested in paper crafting and photography, so I always post my works and photos that I took on it. And therefore it will be very wired for me to post anything that relate to myself. Then I was thinking about posting a fake news about weather and my current location.

Thus, I decided to post a snowing photo that I took last year in Lehigh University, and posted it on Instagram with a caption that “I can’t believe that it is still snowing in March.” and add a location of Lehigh University. Majority of my followers are classmates or college mates, which could be students in Lehigh and students in Juniata, I was expecting to see people in Lehigh were confused with my location and though that I was back to Lehigh, and I was also expecting to see friends in Juniata to ask me why I was back to Lehigh during classtime.

I posted it during dinner time Monday night. In the first hour, I received only 2 likes and zero comment; I think it might because it’s dinner time, everybody was eating and chatting, no one was checking the social media. However, I only received 10 likes at that night, and usually my post will receive more 30 likes. And I only got few comments, but nobody was curious about the weather or location, they just commented like “nice photo” or “good shot”. And all comments are from people in Juniata. The day after, I started to receive likes from people in Lehigh. Funny thing is that, I checked the weather in Lehigh, it wasn’t snowing at all.

I think maybe on Instgram, everybody is just scanning the photos, check the tags and like the good ones, they are not reading the captions, or thinking about how it could be possible. The same situation happened to me. I have a friend always post vacation photos but obviously she can’t have vacations for the whole year, but I never comment anything but just like her beautiful photos. I think the truth is, when most of us are checking photos on the Instgram, we tacitly approved that photos could be “out-of-dates”. We accept people that not post present photos, and we also just post selected ones to create a certain figure, identification or image.

Another interesting thing is that, as soon as I post this Instgram, Juniata started to snow on Tuesday Midnight, so I received some comments from Juniata people, like “where did you get the photo? The snow is that thick apparently?” They were not only ignoring the time, but also ignoring the location though all the information is provided under their eyes.