In the past, Hillary has been seriously ill, the Democrats were about to pull the plug on her candidacy less than a week before the election. Donald Trump has had fake news written about him too. There was a piece about how Pope Francis has endorsed the business tycoon. That never really happened. Here in India, traders were going on strike, a certain telecom magnate apparently new enough about the demonitisation scheme so far in advance that he had time to rebrand and wreak havoc in the market with a new provider, all this with black money. Sounds familiar? Chances are you’ve seen and read a lot more news, and all of it turned out to be untrue. Just how easy is it to spread false information? Not that difficult it would seem, judging by the amount of websites out there that peddle it.
So, what are the solutions? Google and Facebook have refrained from hiring human editors and moderators for their sites, not just because of the massive price factor but also because it’s logistically easier to monitor this via software. When a topic is trending on Facebook, for example, an algorithim automatically pushes this to the top of the trending charts. What happens then it is that more people see it. This is what happened in the instance of the ‘Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump’ news piece back in September. Today, more and more people are relying on social media as a news source, instead of traditional sources. Facebook and Google have pledged to find ways to stop ad revenue going to these sites, which is the only way they can stay alive. But when one site shuts down, another one can crop up. So, we need to find other ways too, to tackle this menace. Until then, the fake news will keep on flowing.
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To say that fake news items on social media could have swayed voters during the 2016 US Presidential election may underscore the clout of such platforms. Yet, it says little about the potentially uncritical engagement of its users with freely available, if even unreliable, information. Nevertheless, is it really the indiscriminate consumption of such information alone that may have goaded the electorate’s choices, or was it the insularity of social networks themselves that were the bigger influence? After all, social networking allows users to dwell in a bubble of the like-minded, where shared opinion is likely as persuasive as the news, fake or otherwise.
Benedito Ferrao, English professor
The internet is the last medium of free speech. Curtailing information available is a sword of two edges, while it will stop hearsay it also gives the people who control it immense power to influence our opinion and views. As the dominant primate on this planet, we should never indulge in herd mentality but rather question and research everything we consume on the internet to form a well-rounded opinion or view.
Ashleigh Morgan, advertising executive
