Topic: Fake News
Fake news can be defined as any news story which is meant to intentionally mislead its readers in order to get them to believe something untrue about a person or entity. This type of news has become increasingly popular in the 21st century, as social media sharing allows fake news stories to spread much faster than they could when news was printed. Additionally, the advent of online revenue has given companies incentive to sensationalize their headlines to attract readers who will bring them add revenue, a method commonly referred to as “clickbait”. Personally, I have not seen very much fake news on my Facebook feed, and I deleted my twitter a while ago. In the instances when I do see fake news, the headlines are usually so ridiculous that I know right away I am being mislead. I think the best way to recognize fake news is to be very skeptical of headlines that sound too wild to be true. Also, it is important to make sure you are reading news from a reputable news source, which I believe has become harder and harder to determine in recent years. A failsafe method is to use politifact or snopes to check headlines you are skeptical of, as these sites will give you unbiased answers as to what is true on the internet. Personally, I do not get any of my news from social media, and instead have the Apple news app set up on my phone so the news updates I receive are from sources I know I can trust. For people who are worried about being in a filter bubble, I would say the best thing to do is switch up your news sources to more dependable sites (npr, reuters, etc.) and to also use the methods I described above for fact checking headlines that seem suspicious.
I believe fake news should definitely be regulated to a certain extent. While it may be difficult to identify articles which take quotes out of context or use correct but misleading visual figures, it should not be allowed for blatantly untrue Facebook or Twitter articles to be posted to the sites. I believe these sites have a responsibility to their users to keep them from being mislead, and to make sure that if an article is presented as news on a website, it actually is news. While fake news is certainly a grey area in some cases, it would not be difficult to filter out articles which are simply untrue, and it seems as though a lot of these kind of articles exist on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. It would be important, though, for companies to be very transparent about what they are censoring and how they are doing it, because censoring fake news could quickly turn into censoring undesirable news, such as Facebook’s privacy scandal, without the proper guidelines in place.
I believe the focus on fake news is very warranted. It has already been discovered that fake news had an impact in the 2016 presidential election, and while we may never know to what extent it impacted the election, I think its pretty clear that this problem needs to be solved before it grows out of control. If companies like Facebook and Google do not do the right thing and begin to filter fake news, I fear it will become increasingly difficult to find news you can trust, and people will either go around believing things that aren’t true, or will have to spend an arduous amount of time fact checking the news they receive, which should not be necessary.