Introduction
During the last several decades, people have been obsessed with creating their rules, standards, and qualifications and following the principles of democracy, free will, and independence. However, such confidence and persistence make them vulnerable to a serious, primarily invisible threat known as fake news. Social media and other online resources have become critical sources of information that people like to take for granted without differentiating between facts, partial truths, and lies.
As a result, false information is disseminated and affects people in various ways. This problem in social media platforms was reconsidered after the US presidential elections in 2016 and 2020 and the UK national election 2019 (Celliers and Hattingh 229; Olan et al.). However, spreading fake stories is not a recent or novel process, and the history of disinformation has long roots.
This paper will focus on fake news, its history, elements, and effects to identify the solutions for today’s users. Internet technologies contribute to the progress of fake news and its old and new algorithms and forms, challenging public faith and uncontrolled polarization and promoting improved education, media literacy, and social involvement.
History of Fake News
Even though people have noticed fake news’s damaging and devastating impact recently, one should understand that disinformation was present many years ago. For example, Machete and Turpin remind people about yellow journalism in the 1890s when unchecked crime news, gossip, satirical news, and sports sensations were commonly published (236).
For an extended period, it was possible to avoid the identification of news as negatively fake because journalists used such terms as “parody,” “comedy,” and “satirical shows” to explain the preferred content and strategies (Machete and Turpin 236). Thus, when people got access to interesting but provocative stories, they did not think they were exposed to fake news but were entertained. However, it became difficult to differentiate between true and false, and new concerns emerged.
With time, the boundaries between jokes, satire, truths, and fake news were neglected, mainly when people discussed political or public issues. If a story was found excellent and able to cover the required pattern, the decision to use false or exaggerated information was made (Polletta and Callahan 57). In the 1990s, many tort stories were published in newspapers, including the complaints of fast-food restaurant consumers who burnt their legs or lost their psychic powers and received large monetary compensations (Polletta and Callahan 57).
Still, third-degree burns were diagnosed, and insignificant financial aid was offered to the clients without even covering the primary healthcare needs (Polletta and Callahan 57). Such stories were familiar in the United States and across the globe. Still, again, people did not pay much attention to the consistency of facts, which provoked additional questions about the importance of checking credibility.
In the contemporary world, many regulations and obligations have been identified to check the flow of fake news online. The events during the 2016 presidential elections became an excellent reason to examine the situation and understand the level of fake news penetration in society. Trump administration used solid evidence to demonstrate how unreliable journalists could be in their intention to cover news and become recognizable.
At the same time, Trump himself used his stories’ “allusive power” to promote “collective identity” and win the race (Polletta and Callahan 59). The purposes of fake news changed, and people admired the pleasure of news more than the necessity of believing in the story (Polletta and Callahan 60). In other words, people did not want to understand that their emotions and ambitions made them depend on the news in the past and challenged their presented.
Therefore, society needed a clear and specific explanation of fake news to eliminate unnecessary judgments and understand what outcomes had to be expected. In many sources, fake news is defined as “fabricated information presented as the truth,” “the publication of known false information and sharing it amongst individuals,” and “the intentional publishing of misleading information” (Bondielli and Marcelloni, Gravanis et al., Shin et al., qt in Celliers and Hattingh 223).
All these definitions help journalists and ordinary readers identify their relationships and clarify what information they might exchange. In existing studies, researchers tried to combine the concept of fake news with other similar concepts, including deception, satire, disinformation, rumor, and clickbait (Zhou and Zafarani 3). These forms have specific characteristics, but their main idea remains the same – to explain the inevitability of fake news.
The spreading of false information may be predetermined by different personal, business, or malicious factors when a person is interested in achieving the desired goal. Fake news is available via clickbait, sources containing some information but with misleading headlines, addressing the sensation to attract the reader (Celliers and Hattingh 229). Deceptive news is used to narrow the definition of fake news because this information is more harmful, and the author intentionally misleads the public (Zhou and Zafarani 4).
There are cases when people read or watch satirical news and consider it fake. However, Li and Su inform that this type of news aims to share commentaries on current affairs, proving the possibility of irony that should be taken literally (2). Some fake news may be based on rumors, but their authors do not expect to assess the validity of their stories; instead, they rely on group solidarity (Polletta and Callahan 66). Human history and modern society are hard to imagine without rumors, satire, or deception. Fake news consists of disinformation (when people intentionally mislead others) and misinformation (when people get facts wrong and share inaccurate information unintentionally).
Elements of False Information
The propagation of fake news is characterized by several essential elements, namely social media platform algorithms, echo chambers, and confirmation bias, which determine the level of people’s responsibility and the social environment. According to Celliers and Hattingh, algorithms that aim at fabricating reports become one of the leading causes of spreading false information (229). Today, many bots and cyborgs are implemented in social media to spread misinformation. PageRank and stochastic gradient descent are popular algorithms for machine learning applications to detect false information and differentiate between predicted and accurate data (Zhou and Zafarani 24, 29).
During the presidential elections 2016, hundreds of bots were created to participate in online communities on different social platforms (Celliers and Hattingh 229). However, even the presence of such algorithms provokes additional debates in the field. While some people believe that algorithms are necessary to detect misinformation and maintain informed decisions, others think platform owners are responsible for restricting false information distribution (Machete and Turpin 241). Recent experiences prove that not all fact-checking algorithms work the expected way, and much fake news continues penetrating Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.
Another element of fake news promotion is closely related to the increased number of echo chambers. People experience a so-called echo chamber effect when biased information is reinforced within particular communities, making people confiding and suggestible (Zhou and Zafarani 2). They create an environment to exchange their beliefs and reflect on a situation from a subjective point of view. It became possible to filter out alternative ideas and concentrate on something exciting and more critical (Machete and Turpin 236). On the one hand, echo chambers are not dangerous because a limited number of people get access to fake news.
On the other hand, it isn’t easy to control the creation and growth of such chambers in the World Wide Web. The promoters of fake news create their platforms, break physical distance, and share various information that can be interesting to the chosen circle of individuals (Zhou and Zafarani 2). There is no clear distinction between rumors, satire news, misinformation, or disinformation. The purpose is to gather as many people as possible, unite them with the same idea on the platform, and gradually expand the impact.
In addition to natural places like echo chambers and fundamental tools like algorithms, confirmation bias is vital in distributing false information online. In their study, Zhou and Zafarani want to know why fake news has become a global topic of interest while it is never considered a new phenomenon (2). They find the answer in the speed of creating and spreading false information and the level of popularity of social media among modern users (Zhou and Zafarani 2).
People who want to introduce fake news and ensure its success address confirmation bias as one of the easiest ways to interpret a new fact relying on existing beliefs. In other words, when a person hears news about an already proven event or material, the desire to check its credibility is minimal. Instead of following the primary responsibility of journalists and editors to check each piece of evidence, people continue living in the same environment and take everything for granted. Preexisting attitudes define current attitudes and deprive users of an opportunity to look at the same issue from a new perspective, but the impact of fake news becomes more devastating.
Effects of Fake News
Public faith, political polarization, and how society can be divided under the pressure of fake news are the three significant impact areas for evaluation. The level of knowledge may predetermine the acceptance of news published online people have at the moment. Polletta and Callahan reveal that people who “have little information about the issue in question” prefer to “interpret their own experience in terms of what they have heard in the media” (64). This analysis of public opinion proves that individuals who use media to formulate their position depend on what others think and know. They do not find it necessary to check the material’s credibility. With time, it is impossible to make people abandon their preferred searching methods for new information and change their attitudes toward news (Olan et al.). Partisan media covering issues such as COVID-19, climate change, poverty, and immigration is the primary source of information.
Today, people develop their relationships, create new jobs, and define what brands are fashionable, relying on the material they hear and see in the news. McGonagle explains fake news as an attempt to deliberately fabricate and disseminate information to mislead the population and make them believe falsehoods (qt. in Apuke and Omar 318). Thus, public faith is one of the goals the creators of fake news pursue.
Online news frequently characterized by false information is based on attention-grabbing advertising to increase the traffic to the source (Celliers and Hattingh 224). People are interested in what they already know and continue reading the information from the sources they find, which leads to the inability to stop the contribution of fake news. Public faith is in the web of falsification and uncontrolled dissemination, and there is no easy way to escape it.
People think news distribution is one of the main signs of democracy and free will in society. Still, they fail to understand that fake news is a reason for political polarization. Compared to regularly published and printed sources of information, online material is based on “highly opinionated and polarizing comments” (Li and Su 11). The situation with Trump’s presidential campaign is one of the brightest examples of how fake news affects politics and raises additional concerns.
When Trump began accusing the mainstream media of providing dishonest and hostile information about his personality and activities, a new stage of the war on media was initiated (Li and Su 2). However, instead of eradicating all sources of false information, he focused on the organizations he disliked or found damaging to his campaign. Democrats addressed the evidence to prove liberals as racists, strengthening political polarization and dividing American media into right-wing and left-wing (Polletta and Callahan 62). It was a matter of time before people were divided following their beliefs and the information they found online, proving fake news is a cause of societal division in the country.
Finally, when politicians and journalists become divided in their opinions, people cannot avoid the adverse impact of fake news when they have to build their beliefs. Only a few individuals find it necessary to check each piece of information, while most rely on what they read online. Apuke and Omar use the Nigerian context to understand how disinformation divides people: the 2014 Ebola outbreak and saltwater baths, President Muhammadu Buhari’s death and cloning, and the religious crisis in 2018 (321). All these pieces of news spread fast and motivated people, but their credibility was never checked. Thus, some people believed everything, others rejected it, and some did not notice current changes. The social divide grew, and uncontrolled fake news was a core reason.
Solutions to Fake News
The issue of fake news in the United States and abroad is now recognized as a severe threat, raising the importance of educating people and improving media literacy. Many researchers define education on fake news as essential in combating false information (Apuke and Omar 323; Celliers and Hattingh 228; Olan et al.). Talwar et al. promotes applying the third-person effect hypothesis introduced by Davison at the beginning of the 1980s, according to which messages usually affect others more than their creators.
Therefore, it is essential to establish corrective action to combat the spread of fake news and promote relevant information (Talwar et al.). Education and media literacy should improve the desire of ordinary online users to be careful with unchecked information and stop trusting unreliable sources (Celliers and Hattingh 232). People must become critical consumers and citizens in promoting fair and credible material. The more individuals know, the less they tend to trust unreliable resources.
However, education and knowledge can emerge from nothing, and there has to be a basis to help people improve their awareness. The solutions to combat fake news should be promoted by local governments that formulate messages and regulations to encourage users to choose corrective behaviors and mitigate disinformation (Talwar et al.). User engagement positively affects the quality of information, and government regulations allow society to block false content with the help of new technical innovations (Zhou and Zafarani 33).
This connection between citizens, governments, and technologies plays a vital role in finding the solution to fake news and predicting its negative impact on people. When real stories contradict false materials, people may question a media organization. Although not all people believe in the power of their engagement, it is high time to start talking online and reveal controversies and inconsistencies. With time, media companies will understand the worth of increased accountability in their work and start filtering their news, diminishing the number of fakes and biased facts.
Despite a well-developed line of solutions and improvements, there is one critical counterargument in this discussion. According to Apuke and Omar, education about media may be challenged in some regions because of the already implemented regulations and standards (324). For example, in Nigeria, creating adequate awareness depends on the work of educators and librarians who reinforce literacy skills (Apuke and Omar 324).
Still, many documented studies do not focus on credible and reliable information, and Nigerians continue receiving poorly checked facts without comprehensive awareness strategies (Apuke and Omar 323). Education may be based on non-practical ideas and damaged context, and people cannot check if they use sustained material. Therefore, additional measurement tools and strategies are necessary to distribute education and media literacy in all regions properly.
Conclusion
In general, the significance of tackling fake news is commonly discussed in modern literature, and people share their opinions on how this type of information affects their behaviors, decisions, and beliefs. Today, in the era of digitalization, the Internet has already become a regularly used source of information, and it is possible to find the answers to different questions quickly. However, in their pursuit of applying democratic principles and free choices, people neglect such concepts as credibility and accountability.
Fake news, with its algorithms, different forms, and clickbait, negatively affects public faith and divides politicians and society. Improving education, media literacy, and social engagement is essential to promote adequate and accurate information. Still, an informed citizenry is not enough to predict the distribution of fake news. Additional strategies to combine government regulations, educational resources, and personal opinions are necessary for a better understanding of the role of news. Creating false information and spreading it online does not take much time, but eliminating its negative impact is time-consuming.
Works Cited
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