Fake news invasion
Fake news has become a subject of worldwide concern, because these kind of news can lead to the censorship or suppression of the critical thinking and other violations of human rights. It is disturbing that disinformation and propaganda are implemented to confuse the population and interfere with their right to receive varied information and to form their own opinion. We do not realise but they are making fun of us, do they think we are idiots? Do they think we are going to believe everything they say or write?
For example, the KFC supposed “rat” incident.
It may be rat-shaped, but is it a fried and battered rat? That is what a young man posted on his Facebook account with the indignant photos denouncing that it was a rat by the texture and how hard the supposed “chicken” was. A few days later he returned to KFC to complain and, according to his version, the employee apologised and said that it was indeed another animal. The news spread like the gunpowder on the Internet, where some people soon raised doubts about the authenticity of what the boy said. To begin with, because at certain angles it was clear that it was not a solid body -the cracks showing how there was whitish flesh underneath and a bite revealed the flesh, clearly chicken in spite of their shape. In addition, after reviewing the restaurant security tape, KFC ensured that the boy had not been there on the day he said. In the end, a DNA analysis performed by an independent laboratory confirmed what we all believed: it was chicken, with rare form, but chicken. Fake news are not always completely false. We can say there are three types: stories which are completely invented, stories with a real germ enveloped in lies, and super partisan stories.
With the election of Donald Trump, fake news have generated an intense debate in the United States. It seemed so far something specifically North-American. But there have been some cases in Germany, Italy and Brazil. Spain is not an exception. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards have read that Albert Rivera (one of the candidate to president) wants to recover the mili for people who neither work nor study; that the PP (Popular Party) does not want working-class people studying in the university or that we can pretend to prohibit precessions not to offend the Muslims. The three news have two things in common: they had a huge success on Facebook and are false.
In Spain, the fake news business is not the one of two former young waiters on a couch in Long Beach or in Macedonia who imagine what random political exaggeration will generate more traffic. In Spain, few webs bet only on political news to generate traffic and those who do so aspire to create an ideological community that has the medium of reference. With news of more universal issues can also pursue traffic in Latin America. They incite half of the reaers: those who are for or agains the holder. Total virality is in human stories, such as the one published in Mediterranio Digital, which says something like “He loses his limb for attempting to rape a girl who wore the cheating-condom”. The condom is a barbed prototype that women would put in the vagina when they detected danger, but it has never been comercialized.
Small blogs are full of publicity. Their business is to make these news circulate rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another by Facebook -mainly- in order to get more visitors to their site and to enter with the unsuspecting who click the ads. They are sloppy web sites that do not inted to build an audience. They are limited to publish an image, video, advertisement, etc. that is circulated rapidly on the Internet, such as stereotyped stories, sensationalist or good news. The main goal is to get the wick on Facebook.
Facebook has a special success category: the “fake good news”. The ones about protection of animals is perhaps the best example. Norway allegedly created an animal police in 2015. Veterinarios.info made the exact copy of an information of a Spanish medium but changing “Spain” by “Norway”. But it doesn’t matter: almost 300.000 shares. The fact that “Spain will fine 30,000 euros to those who leave a dog” received almost the same shares, but the real information was weaker: the law was a draft and affected only to the Community of Madrid, not to the whole country.
The topic of fakes on the Internet is nothing new. The question of reliability of the online information we can get, its sources of origin, the speed with which content is consumed and disseminated in networks, the alterations suffered by those contents alonf the way, their multiple reinterpretations and mutations, etc. they are topics of interest for years in the study of digital culture and in online communication techniques. It’s up to you what you take as reliable or not from Internet.
