Extra clicks may increase truthiness

With a wide variety of publications at our fingertips, it is really hard sometimes to identify current and not exaggerated sources for information. However, there are some clues we can use to help recognize sources which tolerate biases or have agendas which are not purely informative. Some sites, such as right leaning Infowars and left leaning Newslo, may appear like a typical news websites at first glance because the formats of the home pages are very similar to creditable news sources such as, The New York Times and Washington Post.

In order to understand if a website may be more likely to contain fake news, one clue is to look at the titles of the news articles. If they seem sensational, it may be news site that is susceptible to publishing fake news. For example, on February 24, 2017, Infowars published an article written by Jon Bowne titled “The Democratic Party: Chock-Full of Scumbags.” Although, this article should have been at minimum presented as an opinion article on the Democratic Party candidates running for election to become the party’s chairman, it was presented as fact-based news. In contrast, the New York Times published an article by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns that included the same topic of the election of the Democratic party’s chairman, on February 23, 2017 titled, “Weakened Democrats Bow to Voters, Opting for Total War on Trump.” The New York Times article reflected the turmoil and weaknesses within the Democratic party based on numerous sources that could be verified and did not rely on name-calling to tell the story. Although, this may seem obvious that this Infowars story was not real news, many of the articles on Infowars do appear to be real news stories which may make it easier to trick some readers into believing such articles to represent unbiased journalism.

Conservative readers are not unique in their vulnerability to misinformation. More liberal readers can also be fooled by websites appearing to present real news. For example, the website Newslo looks like a typical news website. However, if you scroll to very bottom of the homepage and click on the “about” link, a page will come up that reads “JUST ENOUGH NEWS… Newslo is the first hybrid News/Satire platform on the web. Readers come to us for a unique brand of entertainment and information that is enhanced by features like our fact-button, which allows readers to find what is fact and what is satire.” Unfortunately, as evidenced by an article written by Alex Stevan and published July 17, 2016 titled, “Mike Pence: ‘Allowing Rape Victims To Have Abortions Will Lead To Women Trying To Get Raped’,” the distinction the site claim to try to draw between satire and news, does not seem clear to all readers. In this particular example, there are two buttons near the top of the page, one is marked, “show facts” and the other is marked “hide facts.” When “show facts” is clicked it highlights the first paragraph of the article in yellow. When “hide facts” is clicked the highlight on the first paragraph disappears.  However, the title comes from the portion after the first paragraph so unless readers click on the article and then understand most of the article including the title is meant as satire, it is completely misleading information. The 165 comments about the article make it clear that many readers do not understand the misinformation is intended as entertainment and Newslo did not weigh-in to set the record straight.

fake news can not continue

Fake news has been going on for many years now, and at the rate that it is going, will it ever end? Does is needs to end? According to former president Barack Obama,  he has spoken about fake news on Facebook and other media platforms, suggesting that it helped underline the US political process.“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said during a press conference in Germany.  Since the surprise election of Donald Trump as president-elect, Facebook has battled accusations that it has failed to stem the flow of misinformation on its network and that its business model leads to users becoming divided into polarized political echo chambers. We live in a world with so much misinformation that is put together very well and at the rate it is going will we very actually figure out what is true or not? "We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted,” Obama said. These comments come after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected the “crazy idea” that fake news on the social network swayed voters in the US presidential election. That’s in spite of analysis by BuzzFeed that showed that fake news on the site outperformed real news in the run-up to polling day. This not the first time that Obama has commented on the problem. At a Democratic party rally on 7 November, he denounced the “crazy conspiracy theorizing” that spreads on Facebook, creating a “dust cloud of nonsense”.

The issue is not unique to Facebook. If you were to believe the top Google result for “final election results” on Monday, you’d think that Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election. He did not.Earlier this week of November 16, 2016, Google and Facebook announced plans to go after the revenue of fake news sites, kicking the hoaxers off their ad networks in an attempt to prevent misleading the public from being profitable. Although this reduces the financial incentive to generate fake news websites, it doesn’t tackle the distribution of such content on Facebook.

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.

  

A New Phenomenon of Journalism

The term “new yellow journalists” is not familiar for most of the readers even though almost every day we come across their writings. There is a frank “confession” in the article about two graduates of the University of Tennessee, who found out how to make fast and easy money on the Internet. This new phenomenon is very interesting, but requires to browse more information, the historical path, and the reason why news that was made by these new writers became so catchy and popular. Below are founds that explain some intriguing facts.

                                                                     

Most of the time on the news there are terrible and depressing events that spreads around really fast compared to positive ones. The writers see it and use it to their purpose. This effect causes a depressing slant and indicates that sudden disaster is more compelling than slow improvements. By saying otherwise, the readers encouraged journalists to focus on negative news.

The evidence for it is an experiment by Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, at McGill University in Canada. This experiment is valid because they said to the participants this study focuses on eye tracking and nothing about the real purpose. The results of the research are identically depressing as the stories that were read by participants. They chose pieces of news about corruption, setbacks, hypocrisy, but very few about topics with pleasant words. Even though, these people said they preferred good news. This experiment is evidence of human collective hunger to hear and remember bad news (“negative bias”- psychological term).

So why people are being persuaded by materials that cause them to think “what is that? I got to click”, as said Wade from The Washington Post article ''For the ‘new yellow journalists,’ opportunity comes in clicks and bucks''. Because people have evolved to react fast to potential threats. People tend to react on violence, chaos and aggressive wording because for them it is a signal that they need to change what they are doing to avoid danger.

More than half of adults get news from social media. Because of this many companies started using Facebook and Twitter and others to get financial news to investors. Of course, these companies also use social media to disseminate bad news. Interesting information was found on the article When Companies Tweet, Investors Listen,

“When tweets contained good news, trading volume was lower, as was the bid–ask spread. This shows that the asking price was in line with what buyers were willing to pay, which generally means that investors are comfortable with the stock price. The opposite was true when bad news was tweeted out. And, as that bad news was retweeted again and again, the bid–ask discrepancy got bigger and trading volume increased, showing unease among investors.”

Therefore, it is helpful to know about these new phenomena that develop within general development of our society. People seem increasingly vulnerable to schemes that take advantage of their need for the adrenaline rush instant gratification can provide. Learning about it could protect us from manipulation on the Internet, TV, and other sources. Do not let journalists who use tricks to make you click on the bottom make easy, fast money.

What the future holds for fake news!

This here is the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

This is a tweet from Mr. President Trump spreading fake news.

The President of our country is sharing and spreading fake news through social media like Twitter. 

If this doesn’t tell you what fake news has come to, then be warned.

Fake news has only gotten worse and will continue to get worse if readers are not knowledgeable.

Fake news in the future is only going to surprise us.

This is a clip of how tech advances will only create bigger issues for fake news. 

In this Majority Report clip, a presentation of the creators of Adobe and Photoshop, who are now introducing “Project Vocal”. Project vocal is somewhat like Visual Photoshop on images, but instead, allows you to edit speech in text. This program is going to give journalists a very easy way to manipulate voice recordings and continue to spread fake news in the media.

Many people today fall for what they see through text or images that may have been photoshopped, but to actually hear a video with edited speech will be something hard to determine what is real and what is not.

This is a prime example of how social media will be in the future.

The question is, will the audience have the knowledge to determine whether or not it is fake news?

Schools should make it a lesson plan to keep our youth alert to fake news to prevent false belief.

Steer clear of fake news!