Fake News Even Happens in the Middle of Nowhere.

As background information to help the reader understand what I’m talking about in this blog post:

Pennsylvania is divided into counties. Juniata College is located in Huntingdon County (see map below). The area I am going to be talking about is the county beside Huntingdon known as Bedford county.

Personally, my house sits in Huntingdon county, but the town I am a part of is basically on the boarder of the two counties.

Now. Onto the post.

The Bedford County Free Press is run by an anonymous user who claims to have an inside scoop of police records and information viewed as “drama” revolving around Bedford County. This page has received much backlash for its lies, accusations, and illegally identifying minors related in the area’s crime. The man that runs the Facebook page has gone to court in many cases, and has gone as far as hiring actors to hide his identity.

Even with all this unethical background, people within the area still make his page relatively popular for being from a small rural area. The page has over 20,000 likes and averages around 100 likes and 50 comments per post. Most of the comments are simple name tagging to share a post with a specific person.

On Saturday, March 21st, in-between the social media chaos revolving around COVID-19, The Bedford County Free Press took action and posted the following statement:

The post received 494 likes, 597 comments, and over 2,400 shares (checked 3/25/2020). The Facebook page quickly started receiving backlash over information stated; a large one being the post’s claim of “thousands of cases” even though Bedford County has an estimated population of 3,000. Other reactions were “prayer posts” and the community’s thoughts on what precautions were being implemented in addition to people’s opinions on how the state and federal government were handling the pandemic.

The post was obviously fake with the intentions of stirring people’s emotions in order to get them to share the page. The Bedford County Free Press makes some revenue off posting advertisements onto it’s page, and as social media becomes an effective marketing strategy: More subscribers = Higher Value.

The Bedford County Commissioner later responded with her own post denying the claim:

What else has proven this post to be fake, and downright unprofessional is a response post made by The Bedford County Free Press claiming that the page never claimed the information true and only posted because it was “a letter to the editor” (see below).

However, even after throwing the blame onto an anonymous “letter to the editor”, The Bedford County Free Press dove further into the publicity stunt by creating a Facebook group named “Tales of the coronavirus from Bedford County, a BCFP group page.”

As ridiculous as this looks, the page that launched that same day now has over 700 members.

This is in no way a surprise to me, because The Bedford County Free Press knows exactly what it’s doing (as mentioned before) and will stretch out every possible tactic to gain more of a following.

People who are not well educated in the realm of fake news have a tendency to believe online sources even if they are obviously fake. The credibility is found within the fascination that if someone was able to publish a piece to the internet it must be true.

The credibility strengthens when users see the local aspect. Citizens within Bedford county or the surrounding area that fall into this category of trusting fake sources are bulls eye targets for pages like this one. Seeing that it’s sourced locally increases the trust immensely.

The Bedford County Free Press has a reputation of this behavior, but using the current pandemic to their advantage does more harm than past activities made by the page.

Due to the never ending flow of news relating to the COVID-19 virus, panic has set in within the area. My local grocery store struggles to keep bread on the shelves, people have shut themselves within their houses completely, and dread has fell down upon many community members.

Fake News is entirely a money making scheme that dehumanizes the millions of people behind the likes, comments, and shares. Posts such as these have a negative effect on society. I someday hope that the grade level classroom begins having a curriculum that focuses more on how to identify and stop fake news from spreading and receiving it’s undeserved attention.