ENG/200: Rhetoric And Research

Fake News

Josiah Snipes

Eng/200 Rhetoric & Research

05/04/2020

Introduction

There has been quite a number of absurd stories doing rounds on the Internet for quite some time. Some examples include the allegations that Pope Francis endorsed Trump as the American presidential aspirant, Hillary Clinton participated in child-trafficking errands in a pizza shop, and tainting of Corona beer bottles with urine to mention but few. Conspiracy theories, urban myths, and hoaxes have been spread through media as news, hence being branded the title "fake news" (Mills, Pitt, & Ferguson, 2019). It is hard to eliminate fake news from the various media platforms due to the uncontrolled use of various platforms which allow people to express themselves. People have been posting on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter among others, fake news with malicious intentions. Therefore, fake news harm people in different ways and therefore it is important for media platforms to know the credibility of the news they broadcast to people and also lay out some restrictions to their users on spreading misleading information.

Fake News

Fake news have not been used to spread lies about prominent people, but also by companies during advertisements. The main challenge is that the advertisements may be displayed on the websites which spread the fake news and this may have a negative implication on the company in terms of ethical issues (Mills et al., 2019). The technological advancements have made it easier for people to access news on various platforms including the social media. However, research has shown that many people highly doubt the authenticity of the news broadcasted by social media due to the cases of spreading fake news through these outlets (Paisana, Pinto-Martinho, & Cardoso, 2020). It is with no doubt that fake news has negative impacts on various parties.

What then can people do to protect themselves from falling for the fake news? Fake news flags have been used to help increase readers’ cognition characteristics and allows them to spent more time on the headlines of the news. However, the flags on the fake news were not enough to regard or disregard the reader's bias. Researchers found out that the red flags were not strong enough to overcome the reader's confirmation bias, mostly because they dismissed news that challenged their beliefs as being fake, and not because they have been flagged. Another point the researchers found out is that readers dismissed reality if it contradicted their truth. The explanation behind this is that beliefs are driven by confirmation bias. Lastly, it was also concluded that levels of skepticism had increased due to the increase in fake news. Headlines were not believed to be entirely true because the authors confirmed they are, but readers questioned the credibility of the news due to the increased fake news awareness (Moravec, Minas, & Dennis, 2019).

Conclusion

The presence of fake news in the media has become a norm in today's society. However, the news has negative implication on various sectors like advertising and journalism. There has been an attempt to stop the spread of the fake news through use of flags. However, it has not been easy to disregard the fake news because of people's confirmation bias, inclination towards certain beliefs, and increased levels of skepticism. Therefore, media outlets should devise new and effective ways to combat the effects of spreading fake news.

References

Mills, A.J., Pitt, C., & Ferguson, S.L. (2019). The relationship between fake news and advertising brand management in the era of programmatic advertising and prolific falsehood. Journal of Advertising Research. DOI: 10.2501/JAR-2019-007

Moravec, P., Minas, R.K., & Dennis, A.R. (2019). Fake news on social media: People believe what they want to believe when it makes no sense at all. SSRN Electronic Journal. Retrieved https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328798002

Paisana, M., Pinto-Martinho, A. & Cardoso, G. (2020). Trust and fake news: Exploratory analysis of the impact of news literacy on the relationship with news content in Portugal. Communication & Society, 33(2), 105-117. doi: 10.15581/003.33.2.105-117

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