My Fake News Experiment
We’ve all seen the fake news stories that circulate the internet like wildfire, but why is fake news even a thing? Why would someone publish something other than the truth? Why do people believe it? The answers to these questions are a bit more complicated than you might think. The simple response is that people are just trying to stir the pot and others believe it. The issue arises when fake news is spread far and wide with the assistance of social media. The mix of both credible news and fake news has caused distrust in our media outlets. According to a new survey by Pew Research Center, about two-in-three U.S. adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.
In order to investigate the spread of fake news, I took to Facebook (the place where I tend to see the fakest of news articles) to see how my followers would react to a fake news story. I’m the kind of person that posts on my personal page maybe three times a year — so I was very curious to see if people would believe me. I couldn’t come up with a clever story to spread, so I found a fake news article on the internet to post.
My fake news article was sourced from the famous satire website “The Onion”. I have to admit that I had a difficult time selecting an article. I needed something that sounded “just real enough” to be believable, but not too boring that my followers will overlook the post. I decided on an article titled “We Ask Dr. Fauci About What He’s Planning For The Next Pandemic”. I know that a lot of my followers are the kind of people who get heated about politics and COVID so I thought it would be an interesting choice. The results were very interesting.
I honestly thought that nobody would respond to my post. I thought people would just scroll on by. I assumed that people would read that the article was sourced from The Onion and dismiss it. The first comment that came in was from a high school classmate of mine.
I found this response to be really funny. First of all, the spelling error is hilarious to me because it shows how quickly people type these responses without thinking. And what does this follower of mine even mean? It is also obvious that this person didn’t actually click into the article (in which they diffidently would find out that it is fake) they just read the title and voiced their opinions without even attempting to fact check the information.
Another one of my favorites was a response that received more likes than the actual post itself! This response implies that the last two years of the pandemic were all a hoax. The replies to the comment were all in support of this opinion as well. It is crazy to me that people actually think and believe this!
Overall, there were many more comments bashing Dr. Fauci, dismissing the pandemic as fake, and implying that one singular man could create and spread a deadly virus. I concluded my experiment by editing my post and explaining to everyone that this article was posted as an experiment for my class. I informed my followers of the dangers of believing everything you see online and the increased spread of fake news on social media. The comments then flooded with people saying that they thought it was a little weird and out of character for me to post such an article. It is also funny how a few of my previous commenters happened to delete their comments after knowing that the article was fake. It just goes to show that people are very quick to believe something without doing their own research first. I would encourage you to take a look into what fake news pops onto your social media feed and why people respond the way they do — I guarantee the results will shock you.
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