Fake news and its impacts on society

How to deal with fake news?   The current response to fake news primarily revolves around three prongs — rebuttal, removal of the fake news item and educating the public. Rebuttal: It is a form of fact-checking wherein the fake news is debunked by pointing out errors like mismatch, malicious editing and misattribution. Removal of Fake news: Technical companies like Facebook and YouTube uses algorithms to proactively remove fake news from their platforms. Also, WhatsApp has put a limit on forwarding messages, so as to limit the spread to fake news. Educating the end-users to be more discerning consumers of news by informing them of verification tools so that they can ascertain the accuracy of a news item before sharing it. Another method that is propagated by the government, concerns tracking the ‘source’ of fake news. For this government proposes to de-anonymise all social media accounts. However, this provision is criticized on account of the invasion of privacy, curbing of ...

  Major impacts You understand by now that fake news and other types of false information can take on different faces. They can also have major impacts, because information shapes our world view: we make important decisions based on information. We form an idea about people or a situation by obtaining information. So if the information we saw on the Web is invented, false, exaggerated or distorted, we won’t make good decisions. For examples of impacts, let’s return to some of the examples presented earlier Financial impacts or impacts on my health If I like that blogger and her post pushes me to buy her product… Will I spend $60 a month for an ineffective product? Will this product interact with other medications I take? If I eat nothing but bananas for 12 days, obviously this can affect my health. It’s far from a balanced diet! Fear Will I stop going out because dangerous clowns are circulating in my town? Will I have insomnia? Will my quali...

         Causes of Spread of Fake News In India Erosion of Media Ethics:  News media is no longer seen as an arbitrator of the ‘real news’. Media is alleged to be  echo-chamber  of the dominant political class. Thus News Media have lost credibility due to complicit and motivated reporting, which has become a source of fake news. Social Media:  The advent of social media has  decentralized the creation and propagation of fake news. The sheer vastness of the internet (over 35 crore users in India) and social media users (an estimated over 20 crore WhatsApp users alone) makes tracing the origin of fake news almost impossible. Polarization of society:  Increasing divide in the society on ideological lines has made the job of spreading fake news easier. Lack of legislation:  There is  no specific law to deal with fake news in India. Free publication or broadcast of news in India flows from the fundamental right to freedom of ex...

    with the elections of tod. History has a habit of repeating itself, as we saw last year in the US. But this time around it’s become almost impossible to escape fake news. Social media ensures that fake news is spread faster than ever and has a continually increasing impact on the world. Analysis by BuzzFeed News identified the top performing fake news story on Facebook in 2016 as “Obama Signs Executive Order Banning the Pledge of Allegiance in Schools Nationwide”. Published by a fake news site created to resemble ABC News, it garnered over 2.1 million shares, comments and reactions in just two months. Even worse, during the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from 19 major news outlets combined! Research by BuzzFeed amongst over 3,000 US adults found that fake news headlines fooled American adults about 75% of the time, with those citing Facebook as thei...

  Fake news   is a  neologis m , or  fake news   websites , have no basis in fact, but are presented as being factually accurate.  Dr. Nolan Higdon has argued that the definition of fake news has been applied too narrowly to select mediums and political ideologies.   Michael Radutzky, a producer of CBS 60 minutes , said his show considers fake news to be "stories that are probably false, have enormous traction [popular appeal] in the culture, and are consumed by millions of people." These stories are not only found in politics, but also in areas like vaccination, stock values and nutrition.  He did not include news that is "invoked by politicians against the media for stories that they don't like or for comments that they don't like" as fake news. Guy Campanile, also a  60 Minutes producer said, "What we are talking about are stories that are fabricated out of thin air. By most measures, deliberately, and by any definition, that's a lie." The...