Fake News, Facebook Edition

Leah Lindemann

ll456717@gmail.com

Where is "fake news"? How can you spot "fake news"? But most importantly, what is being done about "fake news"?  There are the questions that we as a society must be asking ourselves in these times of pivotal events happening every day and what's to come in the next few months. 

In 2019, Colleen Shalby in LA Times stated how fake news can be considered anything that is misinformation intended to sway and confuse the public with conspiracy theories. Fake news can be found anywhere ranging from television reporters, words of mouth, and most famously known: social media. But social media is where most of the unethical reputation is coming from when it comes to fake news. However a specific social media site is trying to change its reputation, Facebook. 

Facebook is a widely known free website where you can sign up to connect with friends, colleagues, and family from all over the world. A user can share their thoughts with a quick message or picture and send it out to the world. But besides a user just sharing what fun things they did over the weekend, its also used for people to get their daily news from. 

While this is nice that Facebook allows users to get news fast and easy on one platform, the news getting posted is not always following ethical standards of being truthful and accurate. Since anyone is able to make a Facebook profile, that also means anyone can post an article and say that it's accurate. If by chance that unethical article blows up for everyone to read, then people are getting false information and are spreading that fake news to others. However, Facebook is making changes to filter out these fake news articles.

 

 Picture source:  https://money.cnn.com/2016/12/16/media/facebook-fact-checking/index.html

 

Although fake news has been around for a while, the term started occurring more in the media resulting in the election in 2016. After the Russian social media propaganda that targeted the USA's presidential election, Facebook started to change the way articles were filtered into the user's feeds. In an article by Kaveh Waddell, he states, "Twitter and Facebook now flag some misleading posts, videos, and images, and sometimes include links to rumor-busting reporting on the topic,". This is especially crucial now because of COVID-19 and the election coming up in the next two months. 

When it comes to COVID-19, there are so many unknowns with this disease, and spreading fake news causes panic among the people. For example, there was false information going around that COVID-19 came from "Corona" the beer. In a survey from 5WPR, it was found that 38% of 737 adults would not buy the beer following the coronavirus outbreak. If there was an accurate article posted that cleared up this silly claim, then there would not be spread of this fake news. 

Overall, fake news is everywhere in the world but especially in social media. Now that steps are being taken to censor fake news, credibility can be put back into these sites. But the people need to be the judge of an article and not believe everything that they see on their feed.