Fake News:
Everything You Need to Know
by Donald H. Marks, physician scientist
Reason, ethics, health justice, 3rd generation Veteran
Before we dive into my thoughts on dissecting fake news, let’s first talk about what exactly we mean by fake news. The idea of news varies from person to person, because what you consider as news might not have any news value to others. But, for the sake of our discussion, we can say that news is information about events you look at everyday in media sources, the newspapers or televisions, that happen near you, or around the world. Even recognizing a solid, truthful source of news can be difficult. People often reach for the MSM of their country - in the USA, that might be Fox news or CNN, in England it might be BBC. To be helpful, but without introducing bias, I offer my own discussion of trusted news and info sources : http://bit.ly/3G8rCMW
Just like everything else, news contains its own evil seeds; the kind of news that gives the appearance of useful information but really only serves a different purpose. When news is not real, is distorted, doctored in a way that misleads people, creating confusion, it is called fake news.
What is fake news?
In a general sense, fake news is false news. The news stories that are fabricated, have no authentic or reliable sources, with an intention to deceive people to take advantage of something, while manipulating the mass opinion are known as fake news. For background purposes, I list my own trusted news sources http://bit.ly/3kECPvr
It can be hard to find out the origin of fake news. But, it does not take much time for false fake inaccurate misleading news to spread out everywhere, thanks to social media. Many times, fake news is created intentionally, mostly to gain interest in political, economical concerns, or to raise the heat for certain issues.
Types of fake news
Fake news can be divided into several types, based on its traits. Fake news is another burning question in the era of infodemics, when information is so dangerous that it can even cost lives. Following are my thoughts on the new concept of Infodemic: the epidemic of information.
The problem of misinformation and disinformation is also associated with fake news. Misinformation is when the mistake is not intentional, when information is false due to technical error, or a lack of adequate background research or fact checking. But disinformation comes with harmful intentions, and it is one of the key ingredients of fake news. To be helpful, without introducing bias, I offer a short discussion of fact checking http://bit.ly/3qudEyX
Some types of fake news in addition to on MSM, facebook or Twitter, are given below.
Clickbait: Internet based contents that are created in a way to attract audiences and make them click on it. Sensational headlines, images are used in clickbait contents.
Propaganda: Biassed, false, misleading information that is spread intentionally to support specific ideology.
Satire/Parody: These sorts of contents are not originally considered as fake news because they are created for entertainment purposes, but, sometimes these might work as fake news; like if somebody happens to believe a satire for real, that satire then functions as fake news. Take for example article on The Onion website.
Sloppy journalism: This is basically bad journalism. When a reporter fails to take care of important characteristics of news, including the editor insisting on checking background facts and accuracy, the reader / news consumer / you will be fed with false information.
Misleading headlines: The news may turn out to be alright, but, sometimes the headline does the damage.
Biased/Slanted news: People usually love to watch or hear what they want to. So, when somebody sees something that totally agrees with their belief, they might even not want to think about its authenticity. Thus, fake news can easily take over them.
Advertorial: An advertorial is an advertising that is published in the structure of a news. Hence, it can often be misunderstood as news, while the main purpose of such contents is to let the consumers know about the products.
The origin
The term 'fake news' first got people’s attention during the 2016 US election cycle. Some of us possibly got acquainted with the phrase at that time but the history of fake news goes far far behind.
Fake news can be traced back to the early 15th century. In 1440, German printer Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press that helped flourish the newspaper business at a mass scale. With news, fake news was also inevitable.
At that time, journalism was apparently a new concept, and there were no standard ethics of how to collect news. It was only in the 17th century, when people started caring about fact-checking.
Donald Trump was not the first (former) American president to have a problem with fake news. The second president of the United States, John Adams once wrote that the press had propagated more new error than ever before.
There have been war propagandas in the history of every war. Even during the American Revolutionary War, leaders like Benjamin Franklin promoted propaganda for their political cause. Hitler’s regime had its own propaganda ministry to enforce Nazi ideology during the second world war.
Not to forget that, the allied powers also used similar methods in their favor.
Trump, US election, and fake news
It was Hillary Clinton, who first mentioned the phrase 'fake news' in 2016, according to BBC. Later on, in January 2017, Donald Trump said ‘you’re fake news’ to a CNN reporter while meeting the press. He then constantly brought up those words on Twitter.
The term FakeNews became a mainstream buzzword during the US election 2016. It devoured the social media, mostly because it earned people a huge sum of money by advertising revenue. Here is my list of Red Flags, Dog whistles, Buzzwords, Hot button words that IMO will be used to effect the 2022 midterm and 2024 presidential elections and trigger hatred on social media. https://bit.ly/3CojW5J
In mid-2016, some teenagers from a Macedonian town started sharing fake news about Donald Trump and the US election on social media. They had fake news websites dedicated to this. The only reason they did such a malicious job was money. They were getting a lot of cash from social media advertising systems, and since sensational news gets much attention and eventually cash, they could not resist doing this.
People saw the power of fake news that election year. Some researches even claimed that it was fake news that helped Trump win the election. Although, it is debatable, but fake news sure had a considerable effect on that election.
Covid-19 fake news surge
Since the day Covid-19 has been deemed to be a human crisis, fake news also has been a part of it. We have seen a bunch of rumours about the pandemic, and as time flew by, the style of the rumours has changed too.
At first, it was about how normal the disease was. Then, when everybody realized that Covid-19 is not going anywhere anytime soon, the second phase of fake news started flowing. This time about the cure of coronavirus, specially home-made cures, or witchcraft, etc. Finally, now we are going through the phase of disinformation regarding the vaccination programs.
Now that it’s about life and death, one must try their best not to fall prey to fake news. It’s a shame that we have so much information now, nonetheless that’s what makes us vulnerable.
Contribution of social media
Confirmation bias is one kind of cognitive bias that is related to people’s belief; how they don’t want to contradict with their existing ideologies. In case of information, the confirmation bias provokes people to look for, gather, process information that agrees with their prior belief, norms, ideas.
This is a reason why people don’t want to question about the information acquire on social media. And this has something to do with social media algorithms. These algorithms collect user data, analyse them, and then show relatable contents to the users. So, users only see what they like to see, thanks to those algorithms, thus, they don’t bother inquiring about the authenticity of the news they read, and keep living in a bubble.
This is just one way how social media helps surviving fake news. These platforms are so vast that it is almost impossible to control the spreading of fake news. Big conglomerates like Facebook, and Twitter are already trying to censor fake news from their platforms, but it's devouring the Internet like wildfire. For these reasons, I personally advocate for repeal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230(c)(1), to hold social media responsible for malicious, harmful and false posts. In one one of my related articles, listed below, I provide techniques to fight fake news, including fact-checking, black chain, and how to overcome the onset of information overload, AKA #infodemics.
I (DHM) personally advocate for
Repeal of the #CitizensUnited ruling by The Supremes, because businesses are not people and endless amounts of #darkmoney are harmful to democracy,
Return of #FairnessDoctrine to all media, public and private, to enable fair and balanced reporting and opinion,
Medicare55, expand Medicaid and negotiate all drug prices
repeal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230(c)(1), to hold social media responsible for malicious, harmful and false posts.
Additional information
Reliable news sources used by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼 http://bit.ly/3kECPvr
Fake News: Everything You Need to Know (this article), by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼 http://bit.ly/345cj95
Best Online Free Fact-Checking Tools, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼
Red Flags, Dog whistles, Buzzwords, Hot button words that IMO will be used to effect elections and trigger hatred on social media. https://bit.ly/3CojW5J
Fact-Checking: The Ways We Can Fight Fake News, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼http://bit.ly/3qudEyX
Infodemic: the epidemic of information, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼
The Curious Case of Deepfakes, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼
Here Are The Real Fake News Sites (forbes.com)
My Favorite and Recently read books📚, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼
https://bit.ly/3ok9UxI Also on @Goodreads
Einstein, Relativity and Relative Ethics. Does God play dice with the universe? http://bit.ly/2HC5YEN
Jonas Salk, Polio Vaccine and Vaccinating Against Hate. Remembrance of my afternoon in Paris with vaccine titan Jonas Salk http://bit.ly/2HE5bDl
What I have not told my family about the meaning of time. Personal thoughts on Longevity. http://bit.ly/2HDQDUb
Transit States. Collected poetry of DH Marks.
Paperback https://amzn.to/2HArNEy
Kindle https://amzn.to/2YhvYva
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