Tag Archives: fake news

by | April 18, 2019 · 4:50 pm

The Crisis in Journalism

A critical problem plaguing society is the prevalence of misinformation in the press. If we as a society allow personal bias to twist the words of individuals, then we are doing a disservice to society as a whole. Some may see any limitations placed on the press to be regressive. However, these individuals fail to comprehend the conception of historic relativity. Nothing is more oppressive to liberty than ignoring pressing issues that tear down the social contract between an individual and those that represent them in society. Effective liberty is only possible with social cognizance from the shapers of public policy.

The ever-changing world of technology presents new challenges in 21st-century society. The recently proposed legislation in Georgia, which would establish a journalism ethics board, aims at tackling the issue of misinformation in the age of social media. Lawmakers are addressing a relevant and pressing matter that has worsened with the rise of social media. Fake news often relies on personal bias, false memories, and misattribution in order to influence how individuals interpret and remember information. I cite this particular fact to shed light on the psychological reasoning that may explain the uptick of fake news and cyber propaganda.

The crisis in liberalism is the rise of untrustworthy information and the rapid spread of said information on a global scale, which has a profound effect on featured individuals. The credibility of news is being tarnished by the appearance of information masquerading as trustworthy, hiding behind the legitimacy of major news organizations, while actually spreading misinformation. Those whose words yield great power have a societal responsibility and should be held accountable for the ideas that they introduce into society. Individuals interviewed for the news have the right to give context and debunk any misleading presentation of their character. These statements do not imply that all news organizations are knowingly spreading false information, but establishing a journalism ethics board would hold journalists accountable for how they choose to present information.

The problem of misinformation becomes the problem of society, extending to all areas of the globe as a result of the internet, in which the public’s opinions, knowledge, and ideas are shaped by news organizations. Journalists have a duty to the people to sustain them with knowledge that is accurate, fair, and thorough. “Such an organization demands much more of education than general schooling” and carries the duty of freeing individuals from their slavish instincts by presenting unbiased, fact-checked information with integrity (31). It demands more of journalism.

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by | · 11:52 am

Assessing the Fake News Epidemic

Never before in history have our communities been so interlinked; the boons and benefits of social media, and the internet as a whole, cannot be understated, for through them information is proliferated in ways it never has before, and is available now to more people than ever. Such revolutionary developments have their pitfalls, however, and that which is popularly being referred to as fake news is blighting the network of information that these past decades have so carefully crafted. Falsity in reporting is hardly a new phenomenon. The problem arises from how easy it now is to inject it into the stream of information that flows into the public, and how simple it is to disguise it as credible fact when it is truly nothing but deception.

These frustrations require some solution, lest we suffer further descent of our public by this corruption of our most sacred and powerful unifying force: our now nearly limitless capacity to communicate. But what solution would suffice that could not be called an injustice? What remedy is there that exists that would not prompt a vicious outcry, a rally for the preservation of that vital, considered even inherent, part of our society: free speech? For in spite of the public fury stirred over falsities and calumnies spread through the world like fact, there has likewise been an equally insistent voice deriding the very thought of attempting to censor what others may have to say.

Yet there is another facet to this corruption – it is far more complicated than lies being spread as truth and being difficult to recognize. It is true, much of the public is inclined to believe news at face value, especially when encountering information that subscribes to the worldviews they have adopted. However, these same people also wield the label of fake news as a hammer, a weapon with which they seek to strike down that information that opposes their ideals or beliefs. Fake news is more than an inconvenience; quite the opposite, in fact. It serves as an incredibly convenient tool for one seeking to discredit that which does not conform to the palette.

This complexity, along with the determined preservation of free speech – a goal that will perpetually remain noble – makes the question about what to do about this phenomenon difficult to answer. Regulation is one simple remedy. However, allowing the government to regulate the news is a slope far too slippery to be navigable, and the public would never accept it, such is their mistrust now of their authority figures. It is this mistrust that would likewise ensure that what facts the government put forth and emphasized as truth would be viewed with even more skepticism. The more an organization seeks to convince the world of their veracity, the more doubt they accrue, and the more skeptics they create.

Another proposal, if implemented properly, could aid in alleviating the problem, if only marginally. There are, at the moment, independently-operated websites that check facts, confirm the authenticity of statements, and point out glaring errors in reporting. These services are quickly becoming more and more necessary for the preservation of the sanctity and increasingly crippled credibility of our information proliferation. However, they are utilized with far less frequency than they should. The devotion of resources, either privately or through the government, to maintain these websites and bring them to the forefront of our culture, would be one step of many to, rather than regulate speech and communication through the censorship that would create a furious public, establish what information is credible, and what information should be discarded or ignored.

Setting limitations on what can be read and viewed in society is a dangerous prospect, given the sanctity of the precepts that have long stood in opposition of just that. So in lieu of such limitations, encouragement to seek the truth and emphasis on identifying what is truly false is perhaps even vital to society. The public needs to quickly understand whether the object of its attention is a deception, or the truth. We have established the communication we require to make our society truly great. Now we must maintain it.

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by | · 3:32 am

News Regulation and the Public

The public’s greatest asset and its greatest deficiency of the moment is communication. Because we live in an age where anyone can transmit information anywhere else in the blink of an eye, the vetting process to verify that the information being transmitted is accurate gets overlooked more and more. Beyond the obvious opportunity social media affords for the individual to hold a platform without the conventional checkpoints of fact-checkers and sources as should be demanded by traditional press, esteemed publications have also become more and more flippant when it comes to reporting facts. The introduction of the internet jump-started alternative forms of online media, including sites run entirely based on ad revenue and donations, which incentivizes not only biased reporting in favor of the audience providing the most financial support, but also “clickbait” – deliberate misrepresentations of the truth to encourage another site visitation and another few cents of revenue. In short, news is spreading faster than ever before, so fake news is spreading faster than ever before.

Approaching the growth of fake news pragmatically affords that understood “truth” can change based on what’s useful in the moment; if we define fake news as “news that is not true,” we can extend misinformation to also describe information that is simply not beneficial to the public, whether because it is actively harmful to a community or because it is simply extraneous. Fake news, then, can be considered any transmitted information that is a misrepresentation of actuality or that is unnecessary and would add confusion.

The public is, on the whole, uneducated and unlikely to reason appropriately when faced with fake news. This fact is made clearly evident by the number of satirical Onion or Clickhole articles shared genuinely by millions of people through social media. It is not enough to expect the average person to be able to hold themselves accountable and fact-check news themselves if the public cannot discern when it is appropriate to question the information being presented to them. As such, the private issue of people being misinformed and hearing wildly different versions of the same stories depending on what publications they trust or people they choose to follow, becomes a public issue that must be regulated.

Factchecking sources which can be used to debunk internet myths and misinformation already exist, and while they some do have political leaning that impacts their likelihood to challenge certain sides’ ideas, neutral factcheckers like Snopes and Politifact do exist. The difference between these sources and something like Media Matters, which leans left and mostly criticizes figures from the right, is funding. Politifact, for example is funded almost entirely by non-partisan groups, removing the motivation to do a certain type of reporting that would be more profitable.

Diverging somewhat from ambiguity, I offer a proposal: It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the government could fund an implement a similar neutral fact-checking service, staffed by people from all sides of the political spectrum. This service would clear up whether news is true – meaning accurate and beneficial – or false and/or harmful to regulate the media and ensure the public is not being exposed to disruptive ideas, without potentially falling victim to the biases a private business with private motivations is wont to.

Of course, limiting media has the potential to limit free speech, and there arises the question of how much of the information being put out there has to be factchecked. Just because satirical sources and ill-founded ideas can be misleading doesn’t mean they should be silenced outright. Regulations should be for publications and people posturing as ones perpetuating truth, not those existing for entertainment or general musings. A pragmatic alternative, then, could be to place regulations on the social media platforms most used by people requiring them to visibly flag their information as “news” vs “entertainment,” so that everyone who sees the posts being spread can tell at a glance whether they’ve been fact-checked per regulation (news) or should not necessarily be considered reputable (entertainment).

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by | April 17, 2019 · 10:39 pm

Freedom of Inquiry Through Regulation of Fake News

There was a time when the foremost thinkers of our country declared that freedom of speech was to be an unalienable right that could not be mitigated or silenced no matter the circumstances. These men lived in a time when speech consisted of careful public deliberation between well educated people who took careful consideration to thoroughly understand all aspects of each nuanced issue and argued either in person, in a well rehearsed and/or careful speech, or through painstaking writing that was carefully crafted on parchment with pen and ink and sent on a slow and winding journey to hopefully be delivered to its intended recipient. However, we now stand at a time when words and ideas can be passed instantly from one person to the next, reaching previously unreachable audiences, influencing previously uninterested people, and not always allowing the proper time, location, or means to create meaningful solutions to the problems at hand. Industrialization has brought us a new reality and set of circumstances, and we must alter our mode of thinking to fit our new environment. The new age of social media we are living in has created a new environment with previously unforeseen circumstances, therefore, necessitating a reevaluation of the value that total, unmitigated free social inquiry provides when contrasted with its consequences.

Recently, the country has seen an onslaught of fake news on social media sites. It seems as though every Facebook friend’s mother is constantly sharing a news story so blatantly false, one cannot believe any person was ever incompetent enough to fall for its lies. The spread of these news stories proves that that fake news can be an effective means for changing people’s minds, influencing political trends, and creating social movements. People are easily swayed by the eye catching aesthetics of fake news media that play to the ignorance of the general citizenry and threaten our democracy.

There exists an enduring idea that if each individual is given the power to contribute his ideas and people deliberate about those ideas, the best ideas, the ideas that will serve the most people in the greatest way, will surface, and we will be better for it. Unfortunately, this is not true. No longer can individuals achieve omnicompetence as they maybe once could as there is not enough time in the day to full comprehend all of the multifaceted and quickly changing issues facing our world every day. For this reason, we must work together as a society to combine our knowledge and education in hopes of achieving a communal omnicompetence. We must carefully and deliberately choose the best ideas to consider and use the most educated minds to help us to determine the solution that most aptly fits within our society in its present state.

We are living in a new world of instant messaging, constant communication, and the high-speed transmission of news, yet we are continuing to live as if public discussion is conducted through oratory in a public square. As the times change, we must adapt our means of communication in order to best serve our democracy. In order to effectively plan for our greatest democracy, we cannot allow this spread of fake news to continue. The expulsion of fake news must be deliberately planned in order to stop its deleterious effects. While fake news arguably serves individual liberty, as it allows each person to do exactly as he wishes, it deprives people of the opportunity for development of individual capacity and free intellectual inquiry because it halts individuals on their quest for knowledge and journey towards self-improvement by being constantly bombarded with false information which he is forced to discern. Social media can be a place for free social inquiry, but it must be regulated to serve the public interest rather than the private interest.

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