Fake News: What Happened to Facts?
Gone are the years of facts. Facts were once used as a measure of the truth, an indisputable shared understanding of something we could all agree was true. With the introduction of the internet, things looked promising. A new opportunity to democratise truth presented itself.
Yet, as we move into 2020 the lines have been blurred to an unrecognisable extent, with truth now being indistinguishable from lies, commonly substituted with the term ‘fake news’. However, does fake news represent much more than its literal definition of something that is neither fact nor truth?
Fake news is much more than a label attached to clickbait titles online. The political landscape globally is very fragile as a result of the prominence of fake news. Politicians lying has not only become more frequent, but performed on a much larger scale and no politician personifies this observation better than president Donald Trump.
The appointment of Trump as President in 2016 would propel the term fake news to stratospheric heights. He has manipulated the term fake news into one of his most effective techniques when appealing to the American public. Following his highly controversial performance during his time in the White House, he has re-branded the term to create an opportunity to fabricate statistics without any factual evidence to support his outbursts. Simultaneously, creating an environment whereby in the eyes of his supporters, he is untouchable by the American press, labelling anything remotely close to criticism or condemnation of his character as ‘fake news’.
Trump optimises the use of the term, the leader of the free world at the pinnacle of world politics, avidly using social media, such as Twitter, as a tool to create narratives that support his positions and undermine his rivals. Trump and his use of fake news has trickled down into everyday media with devastating effects, whereby it has never been harder for the public to distinguish between facts and fiction.
The escalation of social media, in particular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, has created a space for fake news to thrive making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between impartial news sources and the agenda driven ‘fake news’. In the past few years these platforms have transformed from the light-hearted, personal medium that connected friends into a multi-billion dollar industry.
These platforms unhealthily self-perpetuate your already established world view, feeding you ‘news’ that aligns with your views. The algorithms that these websites are built upon track your every movement, what you like, what you look at and suggest similar content based on what it thinks you want to see. This has resulted in the furthering of a toxic politicised society encouraging news outlets to publish what readers want to hear rather than what they need to hear.
However, despite fake news growing as an issue, it is important to consider that ultimately news is, and always has been, subjective. News and data can be manipulated and perceived to produce conflicting results, especially in the political arena. Is the glass half full or half empty? In years gone by, despite this fact, news in the most part was considered factual, there was a well-established and trusted structure of recorded events that happened without calls of fake news.
The now flippant and very common use of the term has created a melting pot of opinion whereby the agreed facts are now almost impossible to locate. The idea that all opinions must ultimately have equal validity and weighting regardless of factual basis has changed the game. The advancements of the technological era presents an alternative incentive behind traditional news publication to get clicks at any cost, even if that means misleading their reader.
Fake news has changed society for the worse. Facts are no longer truly distinguishable from fake news. The introduction of the internet has created an environment where truth is being drowned out by copious heaps of fake news masked by clickbait titles that prioritise server traffic over the truth. News being reported from so many sources has over-saturated the media. Propaganda and political interpretation has always been present within traditional media, however due to political fragility, fake news and what it represents have never been so relied on.
The importance and necessity of impartial reporting of news cannot be understated. It is essential. The unconvincing culture that the term fake news has shaped has made it even more important to find the truth amongst the rubble of fiction. But at the end of the day who knows… maybe this is all just another piece of fake news.
