Social Media and Spreading of False Information
One of the most talked about issues right now is fake news and false information. Even people who are fairly careful can get confused about fact vs fiction. However, the spreading of false information is not as easy as it looks. All of the most believed false stories hold an emotional impact for the reader that causes them to spread the information without thinking. In this article I want to explore how our emotions and fears can affect the spreading of fake news through one major social media issue: The false accusations after the events of the Boston Bombing.
Social media site Reddit came under fire when after the Boston Bombing, various users decided that they had solved the identity of the Boston Bomber. They were very wrong, as the person they accused had committed suicide before the attack was carried out. Their actions led to various problems for the family as other social media sites and even journalists started to believe in the so-called bombers guilt. While this event remains an important lesson about why social media users should not attempt to play the hero, it also gives us a good way of viewing how emotion and anger can affect how we perceive information.
It’s a well-known trick in yellow journalism to use anger to sell your papers or to get your links clicked on. In “Median Effects Research” media theorist Glenn G. Sparks talks about how anger is one of the emotions that allows us to remember things best. This is why journalists largely rely on stories designed to give these emotions. However, this can lead to problems as our desire to see justice done can override our logical thought processes and lead to innocents being hurt. It also ignores the actual victims of the attack, as anger very rarely leads to positive emotions such as empathy.
We can see how the use of anger to spread news lead to the Boston Bombing incident as users on social media continued to spread the information out of outrage without anyone bothering to make sure that everything made sense.
However, there is one other thing that may have increased the spreading of false information, and that is the Spiral of Silence. To be brief, the Spiral of Silence is where people avoid saying anything that may make them unpopular even if they are unsure about how true something is. I wonder if users of social media went along with the crowd on the Boston Bombing issue out of fear that they would be accused of sympathizing with the bomber if they said a different opinion. While this would not necessarily lead to the direct spreading of the information it would definitely hide any differing thoughts and achieve essentially the same basic result.
While this event may not be the first-time anger and fear has led to major issues, yellow-journalism is largely blamed for encouraging the Spanish-American War, and it wasn’t the last time. It’s still an important lesson about making sure that information we see is correct and not allow our emotions to cloud our judgement, because if we may end up hurting someone innocent if we allow this to continue.
