Fake News: Believable or BS?

Maddie Wickham
mw731914@ohio.edu

We live in a world where everything is digital and anybody can make any kind of content they want, when they want. In elementary school, I remember being shocked when my teacher told my class not to use Wikipedia because anyone could go on the website and change the information written. Things have only escalated from that time period. Nowadays, anybody can publish anything on any random website and adults will read the information, believing it's true simply because of the fact that it's an article on a website. The real question is, is fake news so real sounding that we believe it, or do humans need to be more conscious of the media they're consuming?

In a recent Buzzfeed article, it stated that a Buzzfeed News analysis found that top fake election stories accumulated more views than the total engagement of important election articles. The top 20 rating false election stories generated 8,711,000 social media engagements. Brendan Nyan, a professor at Dartmouth college stated that he was disappointed in Facebook for not attempting to combat the fake news circling their website.  The fake news articles got so popular that 3 months before the presidential election, the false articles were getting more shares than the real ones. Some people even think that these widely popular false articles helped sway the election.

In an article called "When it comes to the academic study of fake news, 'BS receptivity' is athing", author Laura Hazard Owen explains how people are now, more than ever encountering more BS than ever before given that we have such advanced technology. This can not only connect to news media, but social media as well. For example, someone could look totally beautiful and happy on their Instagram page but not be that way in real life. The article states that Trump fans tend to believe fake news while as Clinton supporters have a hard time believing real news. People will read and listen to what they want to be true as well. Even if the news is fake, they could believe it because they hope the news is true.

Source: http://www.niemanlab.org

Not only can people make fake articles, but fake polls as well. Anyone can design a survey nowadays, so citizens must look at the source and experience of they surveyor before relying on the survey.

Furthermore, removing sources from news articles had no effect on what people thought about the accuracy of the articles. Fortunately, Facebook is in the works of publishing logos along news articles so citizens can know the source of the article before believing it.

So, are these fake news articles believable or are some citizens not being careful enough about what articles they read? Probably a little bit of both. Educated and active citizens need to make it imperative to check the source of the article before they share it with others or make a decision based on it. The majority of the US needs to be more aware of what they read and realize that not everything on the internet is true. This concept of not trusting the internet is a bit difficult for us millennial to understand because we've had internet for so long we don't see anything wrong with reading news from places like Facebook. As the years go on, I hope America never experiences a "Fake News" era again.