Like it or not, a lot of people get their news these days from social media鈥攕pecifically sites like Facebook and Twitter.聽 News disseminated on the Internet and shared on social media is what a lot of people are claiming helped Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.聽聽Some of the more gullible people of the world habitually post dubious stories from shady websites like LibertyWritersNews, AddictingInfo, InfoWars and everything in between on either end of the political spectrum.聽
A new word has been coined by the Oxford Dictionaries Group to describe the kind of information that these kinds of websites like to spread: 鈥減ost-truth.鈥澛燭he phrase refers to news made to look like news, but that is far more heavy on an emotionally charged narrative than any real fidelity to the truth. Fake news sites rely on deliberate exaggeration, strongly loaded words, and mountains of stereotypes and categorical statements.聽And sadly, there are huge numbers of people who absolutely love it.鈥‵ake news is laughably easy to discern if you look even a little critically at headlines. 鈥淵ou won鈥檛 believe what you see next,鈥� after all, when 鈥淢ike Pence Slams Hamilton Cast in Latest Response!鈥� With fake news, it鈥檚 always absolutely urgent that you see something unbelievable; some scandal has been exposed; some critical-mass emergency moment is about to transpire or someone is always getting 鈥渞oasted鈥� or 鈥渟chooled.鈥澛�
Am I taking a stab at this because I鈥檓 a reporter? Of course I am. As someone who wants everything he writes to be objective and free of any sort of distortion or inexactitude, it (almost) physically hurts to see people posting hyperbole about shady government ties to the 鈥渘ew world order鈥� in the Democratic party, or whatever the hot-button political-outrage-du-jour is with them.聽
There鈥檚 another telltale sign that betrays the fake news site: the surfeit of tastelessly placed ads for products no sane person would ever really need.聽 Whether it鈥檚 InfoWars鈥� Alex attempting to sell an apothecary of sketchy health products including 鈥渕ale vitality enhancers,鈥� fringe energy drinks and colloidal silver or just the smattering of assorted ads for useless garbage that cover most of the page at sites like 鈥淚havethetruth.com,鈥� advertising is what drives many of the people who create fake news sites to do them to begin with.聽聽
That鈥檚 right, not even the people who write that stuff believe it, in most cases.聽
Fiery political vehemence brings in hordes of people, and their clicks translate into dollars earned for the people who launch those websites. It鈥檚 basically what people who make real news and make ads to accompany real news sources do, except in an utterly ill-informed, tasteless fly-by-night manner, usually out of one鈥檚 own living room.聽
Google and Facebook both claimed that they would be cutting off ad revenue to sites that ostensibly create and share fake news. That鈥檚 a step in the right direction, but I don鈥檛 think that鈥檚 the full solution to the cacophony of mindless misinformation.聽
Fixing this problem requires more than some lines of programming and a lengthy ban list. What we need is to nip this at the bud, and, you know, just educate people well enough that they are able to discern fake news from its genuine counterpart.聽聽
One of the most insidious things about fake news is that it鈥檚 not entirely fabricated. It鈥檚 based on real people, and it鈥檚 premised, in many cases on things that actually happened. Its authors take what real people really say, and warp it out of context, exaggerate where they see fit, and bookend it with rallying political cries.聽聽
What it really comes down to is the necessity of looking at things with objectivity. Many people who create fake news have pulled in tremendous profits form the election that went on in the States, because of the partisan fervour that drove people to the extreme narratives that appeared in hundreds of glorified blogs that chatter about the news, rather than report on it.聽
Partisan politics can quickly erode a healthy dose of skepticism, but now, more than ever, as more and more people can flood the world with information and call it news, it鈥檚 important to cultivate that skepticism and ask questions.
