Check before you share: Fake news undermines truth, leads to uniformed electorate
The fact that almost half of votes cast went to a man who described Mexicans as rapists, advocates for racist stop-and-frisk policies, tracking Muslims and brags about being a sexual assailant has a lot of people worried.
While I hoped that personal perceptions of the President-elect churning hatred were exaggerated, I don’t think they were. Even this liberal arts campus has already seen hate being propagated.
Given that most forecasts of the election had Clinton with a healthy margin of victory, the results came as a surprise to many, making many people wonder what went wrong in predictions. One of the major proposals was fake news on Facebook.
While it’s impossible to say the magnitude of impact fake news might’ve had on the election, some analysts have speculated that, in terms of traffic, fake news may have outperformed real news on the world’s largest social media platform.
In the weeks leading up to the election, there were millions of shares on a couple articles with claims including Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton being linked to a man found dead, and Bill Clinton raping a 13-year-old girl. None of those were true and all of them were completely fabricated.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denies his company’s impact, but I’m not convinced; however, I’m convinced millennials need to fix that.
The generation that makes up most of the population in today’s universities is raised to be skeptical of the internet, but older generations aren’t quite so savvy.
Fake news sources like “The Denver Post” are made competently enough to fool anyone who doesn’t fact check, which is an unfortunately large population.
This is such a big problem that a large amount of people aren’t able to distinguish between satire and actual news. Some people might think this is a mild problem at best, but to use a personal anecdote, I shared an article from The Onion last year on Facebook about American Christians having to celebrate Christmas in fear, and my grandmother, a very intelligent person, thought that was real. Two weeks ago, she voted.
Because she doesn’t share any articles, I have no way of knowing how much fake news she or anyone else may have read. That said, I’m perfectly willing to be that annoying guy in the comments calling out the crap and taking flame from pundits because it’s important to flag lies when they appear. If no one does that, it can spread and American democracy, which depends on informed votes from citizens, faces a serious threat.
As young people trained to distinguish between real and fake online, it’s our job to make sure everyone else has access to accurate information.
We at the Volante are based in the Al Neuharth Media Center, whose namesake is quoted on the building to establish a burden of fairness on the media. Those words are just as true today as they’ve ever been, but the world has changed a lot since the founding of USA Today.
Facebook is a major news aggregator for a lot of people, 30 percent of Americans in 2014.
I want them to maintain a neutral platform that doesn’t stop anyone from saying things because I believe in free speech. That said, as a man who loves truth, justice and the American way, I must speak out against anyone from anywhere threatening my nation with false information.
With the internet, anyone can make anything look credible. It’s the media’s responsibility to report the truth, and it’s the responsibility of everyone on the internet to make sure it can be found.
