Manipulated news

Many years ago, the famous left-wing linguist Noam Chomsky, once professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described in his work “Manufacturing Consent” how political and economic elites influenced the news coverage of renowned newspapers and TV channels.

In the age of the Web 2.0, however, it is no longer reserved for influential elites to manipulate the content of the news due to their favour. A huge amount of people use social networks such as Facebook or Twitter as their daily source for the latest news. The articles, however, are sometimes everything but reliable since every user is allowed to upload the “latest news”. Recently, the German newspaper Handelsblatt became a victim of media manipulation. (See http://www.handelsblatt.com/social-media/netz-aktuell/luegenposting-wie-sich-das-handelsblatt-gegen-facebook-hetze-wehrt/13417698.html). The right-wing Facebook page “Deutschland deckt auf” shared an article about the installation of women only compartments which was originally published in the Handelsblatt. The problem was that they changed the original title and added the assertion that the installation of the compartments was a reaction on harassment by refugees. In fact, the original article does not mention any of such allegations. The newspaper reported the incident but Facebook answered that “Deutschland deckt auf” had not violated the terms of the social network because fan pages were allowed to edit the original headlines of articles that they share. This practice should not be allowed at all since a lot of people just read the daily headlines and could therefore be easily fooled by manipulative users of the social networks.