The effects of fake news on social media

Wesley Humphries

In this day and age, social media dominates almost every aspect of people’s lives. They communicate with friends through it, share their actions throughout the day, and use it as a source of entertainment.

Social media are among the primary sources of news in the US and across the world. Yet users are exposed to content of questionable accuracy, including conspiracy theories , click-bait, hyper-partisan content and even fake news reports.

Fake news is gaining a lot of national and international attention. Many world leaders, are bringing this problem to the forefront of the public eye, along with many news organizations. Also, several social media outlets such as Facebook and Google are creating and enforcing new regulations for their sites to help prevent the spread of fake news stories via their platform.

False news epidemic is sweeping across the internet and gaining power. It is clear that it will continue unless something is done to stop it. Many believe that it starts with educating the public on how to spot fake stories or unreliable sources. That way, people will know what stories online are reliable and which ones are not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XzPpcmkJ0g

In this video, David Chavern, News Media Alliance chief executive officer and president, discusses social media's struggle to deal with fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech. He speaks with Bloomberg's Emily Chang on "Bloomberg Technology."

Other than false information, often times outdated information is spread completely out of context on social media. People see a story from months ago that they assume is breaking news, and they spread this outdated and irrelevant information. An example of something like this happening is President Obama’s plan to permanently protect Planned Parenthood. President Obama moved to enact this plan in September, two months before the results of the election would be known. Even now, the plan has not gone into effect. However, this story resurfaced after Donald Trump’s victory in the election and many people saw it as retaliation from President Obama, even though it clearly was not. So this story was blown across many social media outlets with a lot of outrage coming from many people, regardless of the fact that the story was months old and had no correlation to the election.