While I am probably the only person who has a Twitter but not a Facebook account, I do not see or look for news whenever I log onto the social media. I also do not have friends or family willing to let me peek at their accounts, so I have never been directly exposed to this mysterious thing called “Fake News.” Fake News has never and does not directly affect me, but after reading these articles, I think I have some understanding now of this wide-spread phenomenon.
Fake News are news articles, usually published online, that dish out false information for the purpose of “clickbait,” or for simply making money from people clicking and viewing the story. They are usually filled with false and sensationalized information about a specific political topic, and while they are occasionally written in hopes of persecuting other political parties, these articles are simply ploys to gain revenue from website advertisements. Fake News is also highly sensationalized but is written in such a way that readers may believe that is true if they do not fact-check this source.
Overall, I think that the concept of fake news is fascinating; I wonder who came up with this idea of writing such articles to generate views and revenue. I’m not really offended by the existence of Fake News; I think that they can be very entertaining, like The Onion, as long as readers know beforehand that such news is fake. This is, however, where the problem of Fake News arises, for these articles are written in such a way that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. If certain fake news is wildly spread and believed to be true, lies can influence readers’ opinions in a false manner, and that’s a pretty scary prospect in my opinion.
As scary as that possibility may seem, I don’t think that Fake News should be totally censored, however. I believe that not only do people have a right to publish what they wish on the internet to a certain extent, these articles seem to have some entertainment value as well. Also, free speech would allow for their publication. In the case of displaying links to these articles in other websites’ news sections, private companies have the ability to choose whether they decide to promote such links or not. Removing these articles from the internet entirely, however, would be wrong.
Trusting social media to pick the proper news to display on their website, fake or not, is a trickier situation. On this topic, I believe that Michael Munez captures my opinion quite well; he states that “imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.” On principal, I do not have a problem with private companies deciding which news content to display, but if a company decides to include a nonbiased news section on their page, then it needs to be fact-checked and filtered for fake news. For example, I believe that the Facebook employees who chose articles for the website’s trending news section based on bias were acting immorally and against the idea of nonbiased, reliable news. I also believe, however, that it would be acceptable for a website to prefer “biased” news if that is what the corporation or organization believes and expressly states that fact alongside such articles.
While I believe that deciding what type of news content should be displayed is up to the individual company, I’m leery of the idea of Facebook and Twitter deciding the accuracy and truth of an article. Because of the aforementioned case of personal bias, I believe that such social media should enlist the help of third party resources to ensure the article’s accuracy and save the time and energy of creating a separate team to complete this task. However, I do believe that is it imperative that companies mark the nature of the news source they are promoting in order to properly inform their users.
Leaving this clarification out of websites is the most dangerous aspect of Fake News; Max Read states in his article that “many of those stories were lies, or “parodies,” but their appearance and placement in a news feed were no different from those of any publisher with a commitment to, you know, not lying.” Luckily, Timothy B. Lee has the perfect solution to this terrifying prospect: “one way to help address these concerns is by being transparent. Facebook could provide users with a lot more information about why the news feed algorithm chose the particular stories it did.”
I believe that transparency in this situation is key. While companies have a right to promote whatever articles they wish, both they and their users need to be acutely aware of the article’s nature before reading. Companies have an innate responsibility to provide accurate news depending on their goals and beliefs, and social media and aggregators of information have this same responsibility of truthfully reporting the type of news before users read it.
The type of news specifically reported to me was all the same until I left Nebraska; everyone around me had the same views on religion, politics, the weather, anything. It wasn’t until I came to Notre Dame and started having intense conversations about these topics that I realized that people held such different viewpoints on every debatable subject. Therefore, being in a bubble and breaking out of it has allowed me to experience and understand various viewpoints on different subjects. I think this bubble bursting could occur through the internet as well, if users decided to receive information from multiple sources and be open to the existence of varying opinions.
Even though the threat of a “post-fact” world looms if people did not exhibit this behavior regarding other’s opinions, I think that people always have naturally gravitated toward more sensationalized news that triggers emotions, and there were then always truth seekers, willing to look past the emotions to find accuracy within articles. Facebook is currently pushing this search for truth as well, dispelling the “post-fact” news by eliminating fake news from their trending section.
Fake news will now always exist in today’s society it will always exist, and that’s not a bad thing. However, as people become more aware of its dangers as I have, I think that the truth will prevail despite the threat of a “post-fact” world.
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