Misinformation, Fake News - Public Relations

Liam Cunningham

lc218118@ohio.edu 

 

Fake news in the media has been an eye-catching issue for years now and continues to grow with the expansion of social media. With more and more people depending on social media for news, there are worries that the content can influence consumers unable to identify the information as trustworthy or not. Social media has played a huge role in this aspect of being destructive. To this day public relation positions and journalists fight against the issue of fake news.

According to a study from The Knight Foundation, they used tools from Graphika which is a social media intelligence form to study fake news. In 2016, this study examined more than 10 million tweets from 700,000 twitter accounts that were linked to more than 600 fake news outlets. This study is one of the largest to date on how fake news spread on the social media platform, called Twitter. 

Picture source: The Conversation

With fake news continuing to become an epidemic, public relation professionals are scared and angry how fast stories are falsified. The goal of a public relations professional is to share stories with reports, and release the most accurate information to others. These professionals do there job with honesty by running information through legal departments. They do this to guarantee that no information is being misinterpreted or falsified. With false information being presented, consumers are then questioning the trust that they have with the media. 

How do public relation professionals fight against this powerful issue? According to Kristi Stolarski of the Falls, we need to consider the journalist or media, do research, and find the source. 

Considering the journalist or media can mean a lot of things. In today's times, anyone can be a journalist and try to publish their own information. As we consume news, look at the source and determine how trustful it can be. Also, looking at the accuracy of the information that is presented plays a major factor in this. This leads into doing research, diving deeper into a source can help understand if the news is fake or not. Check the source, citation, and dates of research to ensure it is trustworthy. For example, a situation that may have been true years ago, could have evolved and no longer be a fact anymore. Lastly, look at the source. Once the news is presented it is shared on multiple different platforms. This leads to making it seem like the information is true when it can be falsified. 

Overall, the topic of fake news is complicated. As the internet continues to expand it makes it very difficult to distinguish fake news from trustworthy news. Even though there is the theory that everyone would like to hear good news, we have to consider that public relation professionals need to release the most accurate and trustworthy sources.