Fake News

Social media has been making a huge impact on society ever since the first networking sites were created in the 20th century. In our day and age, social media has been a huge outlet for people to spread false news, ranging from small to large topics.

For my fake news story to spread, I chose a meme that quoted Melania Trump and Michelle Obama’s speeches from March first in their respected years. Trump has had issues in the past related to plagiarizing Obama’s speeches, which also ended up being fake news, so to many who believed this initial fake story, the second could be easy to believe- kind of on the lines of, “once a cheater always a cheater.”

I found the meme on Snopes, which is a fake news checking website. They provide the claim, in this case it would be Trump again plagiarizing Obama, a rating, which in this case is false, and the origin of the story. Someone created the meme with misquoted and incorrectly paraphrased parts from her speech to make it seem plagiarized.

I used Twitter as my platform of spreading this fake news story over Facebook, because my Facebook is full of family members that are definitely a lot less gullible than the anti-Trump people I follow on and that follow me on Twitter.

Now for the results. I did not get as much engagement as I expected, probably from either posting not at a prime time, or from the Twitter algorithm just not showing my story to many people. I had friends from Juniata that liked the post on Twitter, and one actually brought it up to be in person. I then explained that it wasn’t real, and that I had to post a fake news story for a project. I did not want him to be spreading the fake news by word of mouth anyway.

One person who I expected to engage with my post is my uncle, who also follows me on Twitter. He is involved with politics on all of his social media platforms, even though he rarely speaks about it in real life. I was expecting him to respond to the photo about how he isn’t surprised, or that he would call me out and know that it is fake news.

Ever since having this assignment to post fake news, I have in return become more aware of fake news across social media. Before now, I have probably retweeted things that aren’t real, or liked posts on Facebook that are false. I will try to be more conscious of things that I repost on social media, in hopes that I do not further spread fake news.