Fake News

In this article the writer addresses different key events that had happen to bring the term ‘Fake news’ to our attention. The article used the example of Donald Trump’s presidential election and how he was accusing the media of bringing out what he called ‘fake news’. The article addresses the fact that the term fake news didn’t arrive with Donald Trump, it has always been there because different news outlets would have their own version of the event. What the article is trying to address is that we as consumers are using the term incorrectly because there is no such thing as “fake” news, it should be called spreadable news because people make their own version of news and then spread that via social media.

The article also talked about the meme of Pepe the frog where he was stolen by the alt right at the time of the 2016 presidential election where he was used to represent as a white nationalist icon and a hate symbol. So there was a twitter campaign called #sanepepe whcih emerged to try and declaim him but it got out of hand so the original artist, Matt Furie had to retire him.

The article also addressed the event that had happened through an online conspiracy rumour known as “pizzagate” where it was posted on social media and it falsely claimed that the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria was at the centre of a child sex ring and it was run by Hilary Clinton. So Edgar Welsh attended the pizza restaurant in North Carolina with a riffle and a hand gun to save the children apparently being held there.

Key Definitions:

Civic Engagement – addressing the issues of public concern
Spreadable media – audiences sharing content for their own purposes
Pepe the frog memes – appropriation of political dialog through memes
Fake news – False stories that are deliberately published or sent around, in order to make people believe something untrue
Mainstream media – traditional forms of mass communication, such as newspapers, television, and radio.

Other articles / links relating to the article:

The first link that we found relating to this article is a video explaining the battle of Pepe the frog. In the video it stated how Pepe has been miss used in the 2016 presidential election as a white nationalist icon and a hate symbol.

The second thing that we found was an article written by Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow where they address how social media and fake news has changed the face of the US presidential election. In the article it stated that “the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories” (Allcott, H. and Gentakow, M. 2017) this tells us that most of us get our news on social media and most of the time it is fake. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.31.2.211

The third thing I found in relation to this article was an article that was written by Hannah Jane Parkinson for the Guardian about how fake news had helped Donald Trump win the election. In this article it addresses the issue of social media and how it played such a big role in the 2016 US presidential election and how major social media platform such as Facebook came out to say that they are not a media company despite the fact that 66% of it’s users are getting news from the site.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/fake-news-donald-trump-election-alt-right-social-media-tech-companies

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Propose practice based solution :

The practice based solution that I would like to bring forward is the idea of having an automatic fact checker that will sun on your social media. This will have to be installed on to the user’s social media account and it will run a check every time you are logging in. In the article the main issue that the writer was stating was the fact we are encountering news on social media all the time and most of it is fake news. So this is why I have thought of this automatic fact checker solution because the problem that most of us are facing is having news clouding our social media platform and we don’t know which one is true or fake. So to stop this problem, the fact checker will be used to scan your social media and block any news that is considered fake. This idea also has its disadvantages because it will need to check all the news against other media outlet and in that we could encounter some news that might not be fake but the news outlet might be giving their own opinion on the event, so to have a fully functional automatic fact checker might be harder to accomplish.