Our Responsibility to Online News: An Open Call to Facebook, CNN, Twitter, and co.
Okay, so we’ve over-saturated the term, “Fake News”; that’s in our verbal catalogue at this point in time. But the deeper, more integrated context of its notion has yet to be seen by all social media users alike. When I say “social media users alike”, I am referring to you. You, the citizen of the Free World who has privileged access to a database of cognitive information from others like you. And if you really discern just how much of an allowance that is to our culture, you’d truly value your responsibility to “Fake News”.
“What do you mean?”, you may ask. Well, let me put this into perspective for you. “Fake News” can be coined as the era of high-velocity, fast information for news agencies; meaning, the moment someone gets a “tip” from a tweet or a Facebook post, it is automatically deemed valid and truthful. Thus, the vicious cycle of “Share, Retweet, Like, Repost, Fwd.,” churns through a charging speed of data and delivery method.
It is at this point where the transparency of online news gets murky, and the processing of its information becomes alarmingly flawed. Because news agencies and social mediums alike have adopted this high-stimulating culture, they’ve also adopted the competence and advantageousness that lingers with it. Meaning, if they sprint to the [developing] story first, they’re deemed as the winner, regardless of authenticating its factuality, and just overall general fact-checking.
Okay, so now this is where transparency of online news becomes dangerous, and the processing of its information is now live for the world to perceive, intuit, and rationalize its sensory. It is now completely out of the hands of fact and truth, and is undone within the wires of the human brains of (potentially) hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people. And when this happens, it masks our capability to have deep, credible conversations — be it of cultural, political, or creative formality. If we can’t have that, then how can we expect the convention of problem-solving to curate when we don’t have the correct, accurate answers in our back pocket?
Where does this leave us?
This is where we look to media organizations; CNN, Facebook, Huffington Post, Twitter, VICE, etc. ,— I’m looking at you. It is your responsibility to ensure that the common fact base remains in tact; you have access to resources, networks, and a research base to synthesize data and information correctly. It cannot be about click-bait headlines, polarization ideologies, and limiting filter bubbles in order to garner shares and views anymore. We have to control the complexity of our database; weening out fake sources, biased ideologies, and exploitation of social media algorithm(s).
Reputable, established (and still credible) media organizations (as listed above) need to enlist fact-checking systems that prohibit fake outlets from making their news cycles go viral. Heck, even develop a new system(s) that not only said media organizations can use, but us as well.
We (including media organizations) need to collaborate with each other. We have to be hyper-aware, and always question the story at hand — rather than react to it based on our sensory of emotion. Citizens do it in politics, it’s time to inhabit those virtues and the Freedom of Expression within online news. We work best when we’re unified and together — it’s been proven.
And maybe that’s the lesson we’re slowly learning out of this social media era that we haven’t made sense of yet. We haven’t really understood and located where all these information and ideological streams are coming from; we’re just kind of going with the flow. It’s definitely a world you can get lost in, that’s for sure. There’s just so much data being transfused in all directions. It’s overwhelming, really. But it still doesn’t excuse our capability of being able to a) understand, b) synthesize, and c) question the information correctly. And maybe, just maybe, we can abolish “Fake News”.
It’s our responsibility.
