Fake news is here to stay, but don't panic

Although the awareness of fake news has increased recently, people have been creating fake stories since ancient times. For example, ancient people created Greek mythology to help explain what they didn’t know about the universe. This makes me suspect that the future of fake news may not look much different than the past and the present. Further, a new study suggests people could be trained to actually resist fake news in the future.  

Fake news has often been used to manipulate the public.  For instance, according to the article When Fake News Leads to War in the American Conservative, Franklin D. Roosevelt told the nation during a radio address on October 27, 1941, 

“I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the New World Order. It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have ruthlessly obliterated all the existing boundary lines … bringing the whole continent under their domination. This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.” 

However, this map was a fake created by British agents whose assignment was to bring the U.S. into Britain’s war which became World War II.

Fortunately, there have always been people who believe in the truth and who are willing to work to identify fake information. Journalists are an example of a group of people committed to investigating and reporting the truth. Although, some question the integrity of journalists, journalism is a profession. Just because someone writes an article does not make the person a journalist. People with degrees in journalism from schools accredited by organizations such as the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC), have been and should continue to be viewed as credible brokers of news. According to the ACEJMC, accreditation ensures journalism schools adhere to educational requirements and standards.

In addition to traditional credible publications featuring articles written by professional journalists, there are websites such as Snopes which, according to the site, “began in 1994 by researching urban legends and has since grown into the oldest and largest fact-checking site on the Internet, one widely regarded by journalists, folklorists, and laypersons alike as one of the world’s essential resources.” Snopes fact checks a wide-range of new stories to provide readers with the truth. Although, the website was created many years before the fake news related to the recent presidential elections, the web traffic on Snopes increased by 146% in 2016 compared to 2015, according to a Guardian article. This seems to suggest people have and will continue to seek the truth even as the ways they receive news evolves.

There is also evidence people could be trained to resist fake news in the future. Similar to the way vaccines work to immunize people by exposing them to weakened versions of viruses to build up a resistance in their bodies, psychologists may have found a method of helping people resist spreading fake news according to a report published in Global Challenges. The method used in this study exposed people to a small amount of certain type of misinformation before they encountered a large amount of fake news on the same topic. The result was the views of participants provided with the misinformation vaccine were significantly less affected by the fake news compared to a control group which was not provided the vaccine.  But could this method really help to slow the spread of fake news? Time will tell, time will tell.

Time has shown us that although fake news has been a fact of life throughout history, people have always found ways to reveal truth. There is no reason to believe the influence of fake news will grow in the future.