Has the power of fake news and open journalism destroyed our trust in online political campaigns?
Before the digital age we, the consumers, would go to a newspaper stand and pick up a copy of The Daily Mail or The Economist if we wanted to find out what was going on in the political world. Nowadays not only can we access these newspapers online, but we can also go on social media sites, like Facebook or Twitter to easily find out about what is happening. We could rely on traditional newspapers to a degree, as accredited journalists were writing these articles, now there is open journalism, where anyone can post an article or comment, challenging us to work out whether it is fake news or not.
Fake news came into the spotlight during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Recently I came across an article with the title ‘Trump may owe his 2016 victory to fake news, new study suggests’ . The article continues to discuss how fake news can be so powerful that it can impact even those who have only ever voted for Democratic candidates to vote otherwise. Statements such as ‘belief in fake news remained a significant predictor of defecting from Clinton.’ (Gunther, Nisbet and Beck, 2018) prove how fake news has been able to gain such power due to how we gather our information in the digital age. ‘Social media has become the main source of news online with more than 2.4 billion internet users, nearly 64.5 percent receive breaking news from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram instead of traditional media.’(Martin, 2018)
Facebook is the social media most widely used for news in the digital age. There have been multiple criticisms about it being a platform used for news, especially in the 2016 presidential campaign, due to the fact that “Facebook stumbled into the news business without systems, editorial frameworks and editorial guidelines, and now it’s trying to course-correct.” (Solon, 2016) Fake news was able to travel around Facebook so easily due to its algorithm, the more clicks and likes a post gets the more times it’s going to appear on user’s timelines, allowing the news to travel rapidly, whether it is true or fake. Before the digital age users could only gather their news from legitimate sources, such as newspapers and not from citizen journalists and even worse bots, which are made entirely to send out fake news.
We are living in an age where there has been a shift in power from news organisations to consumers, thanks to the internet and social media. Open journalism has impacted the way we see the news and leaves us feeling unsure of whether what we are consuming is fake or not. Facebook and Twitter have recently been trying to gain more control of what is being posted on these sites to try and limit the amount of fake news posted. It will be interesting to see if there will be a further shift on these sites regarding regulating comments and posts to try and stop this distrust of social media and political news, due to the endless amount of untrustworthy news on them.
Bibliography:
Gunther, R., Nisbet, E. and Beck, P. (2018). Trump may owe his 2016 victory to ‘fake news,’ new study suggests. [online] The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/trump-may-owe-his-2016-victory-to-fake-news-new-study-suggests-91538 [Accessed 28 Nov. 2019].
Martin, N. (2018). How Social Media Has Changed How We Consume News. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2018/11/30/how-social-media-has-changed-how-we-consume-news/#1b1c94983c3c [Accessed 28 Nov. 2019].
Solon, O. (2016). Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories [Accessed 28 Nov. 2019].
