FAKE NEWS?
As many other people my age I’m sure, I wake up to my digital alarm on my phone, then it’s just there in my hands, how can I resit all the applications at my fingertips, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, the list goes on and on! As I scroll through an almost limitless number of newsfeeds I see; new adverts for products I’ve shown prior interest in, friends and family’s achievements and announcements, recent events and news articles which at 8am in the morning, my brain will believe anything! Anyone else think McDonalds was really making a disgusting pickle burger on APRIL FOOLS DAY?? Yeah well, you’re not alone, the sources of our ‘News’ is so misleading yet so convincing.
Now I’m sure most of us in 2019, especially those alongside myself, studying communications and media, are pretty familiar with the previous list of social platforms, and surely majority have at least a slight idea of their developers and producers. Well for those who do and those who don’t know, sometimes we are presented with ‘Fake News’ and often this fake news takes form in a post or comment on some of our favourite social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
As an example, one of the most widely known and recognised developers, Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook itself, has been caught out in the news several times for letting fraudulent information onto his social platform. For a social server so popular with such a large audience, you would think would be safe to retrieve legitimate information from, although this has been proven wrong on multiple occasions. Now for some this may not be considered an issue or matter of importance as they retrieve relevant and factual news from a more reliable source although a large part of the community does rely on such social platforms for their news, this can cause great discrepancies and issues within a community.
It’s been a tough year for Facebook. The social networking juggernaut found itself engulfed by controversies over fake news, electoral interference, privacy violations, and a broad backlash to smartphone addiction. Wall Street has noticed: The company has lost almost $100 billion in market value in recent weeks.
(Klein, 2018)
After some time and thought, ask yourself, do you really trust your news sources? Of course, there are some blunt lies fed through our newsfeeds that are obvious to the naked eye, although there are some more undercover fakes hidden right in front of our eyes, left for us to decide upon their factuality. From personal perspective, unless it is widely conceived as a lie, I will believe most post and news shared via reputable resources, such as factual news websites, although I choose to not trust some news articles that cross my path as there are many competing reporters and companies out there fighting for the same audience, therefore manipulating minor yet crucial details of stories to engage a larger viewing.
REFERENCE
Klein, E. (2018). Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge [Accessed 10 Apr. 2019].
WHAT AM I DOING? 