Most of us feel frustrated when we rely on information that turns out to be fake news. Fake news is used by various actors who aim to manipulate public opinion and use it as a powerful political instrument. Therefore, we should develop practices that will protect us from the adverse effects of misleading information spread in the form of fake news. I have been following the news feed for the recent five years, and I discovered that the unchecked information spread is getting bigger audiences. This issue is particularly important since traditional and social media fake news damages the social structure and human relationships. Therefore, I am going to present the scientific definition of fake news to prove the interest in the issue among the scholars; then, I will discuss the legal perspective on the fake news, present how the fake news impacted the 2016 election, and suggest two ways to combat the unchecked information – through data mining, and the automatic detection.
The scientists are society members just like other people, and they are disturbed by the impact of the fake news. Quandt et al. (1) define fake news as “(a) a derogatory term denouncing media and journalism; and (b) an umbrella term for various forms of wrong, misguided, or fabricated information.” Therefore, scientists distinguish between the intentional and unintentional forms of fake news.
It is also important to consider the fake news concept from a legal perspective since some legal procedures should be developed to regulate this issue in the future. Klein (1) defines fake news as “rumors, counter-knowledge, misinformation, post-truth, alternative facts or just plain damned lies,” and adds that there is a need for further discussion to determine the fake news in the legal framework. Allcott and Gentzkow (211) admit that the fake news severely impacted the 2016 elections since it “circulated largely in the social media.” The scientists found that during the election, every American saw several fake news stories the month before the election, although only half of that people believed the fake stories.
Works Cited
Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social media and fake news in the 2016 election.” Journal of economic perspectives 31.2 (2017): 211-36.
Klein, David, and Joshua Wueller. “Fake news: A legal perspective.” Journal of Internet Law (2017): 1-13.
Pérez-Rosas, Verónica, et al. “Automatic detection of fake news.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.07104 (2017).
Shu, Kai, et al. “Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective.” ACM SIGKDD explorations newsletter 19.1 (2017): 22-36.
Quandt, Thorsten, et al. “Fake news.” The international encyclopedia of Journalism Studies (2019): 1-6.