Fake News: The Threat

Xiaoyun Ma
xm445015@ohio.edu

Fake news stories had been shared widely across social media during the presidential election. When you think of fake news, the first images that flash to your minds are probably those posts and links on Facebook with sensational headlines. You may remember the article that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop? The story is completely misleading, but it was posted on a lot of fake news websites and shared by radical social media during the election.

We are usually defining fake news as those stories that untrue and misleading: the stories themselves are made up by journalists without verified sources. Apparently, fake news is far more than an epidemic phenomenon. It has existed since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 14th century. In the beginning, fake news has created to provoke prejudice and irritation which always come with violence. For example, the Nazi party's propaganda used the media to reinforce power in Germany during World War II, applying racial discrimination to incite the public against Jews.

The difference between propaganda and fake news is that propaganda is usually manipulated by the government like the Nazi party. Fake news can be created by anyone, not just professional journalists, spreading out news stories around the globe by the social media.

Speaking of the social media, it has become a fertile land for breeding and spreading false news stories. Three prominent right-wing Facebook pages posted fake news stories 38% of the time during the analysis, and the three left-wing Giants did the same in almost 20% of their total posts, which means their millions of followers are fed with false information frequently, according to Buzzfeed News. Besides, 60% of surveyed student state the information they get online is misleading, and only 4% of U.S. web-users express that they have a lot of confidence in the information from social media, according to Pew Research Center.

"Fake news is contaminating journalism..." Jonathan Heawood, the CEO of Impress Press, stressed that fake news threat to journalism. 64% of American adults admit that they have much confusion on current events because of fake news stories, according to Pew Research Center. Journalism is the biggest victim of the fake news; then, is social media playing the main culprit of creating and sharing the fake news?" Probably, everyone is involved in jeopardizing the trust of journalism; after all, social media only serve as a tool to spread out the misleading information which created by the human. The biggest problem that social media suffering the most blame is the speed. Once the false news is posted, there's nearly no way to correct.

To confront with fake news, social media should launch or partner with more sophisticated fact-checkers. Journalists should possess better reporting skills which represent more sensible and prudent about citing verified sources, checking facts and being completely transparent to the audience; more important, guiding the readers about the metrics of real journalism. The audience should learn how to distinguish between true and fake news, which meaning that pay full attention to clickbait titles, doubt suspicious the information of authors and publishers, and scrutinize the publication date and source.

Fake news has a very long history of being the threat in American ever since the 18th century. It will only be uprooted by fully transparent and accurate journalism across the clickbait-free social media to more vigilant readers.