Fake News, Fake News, Fake News seems to be one of the only things anyone, including the “real” news wants to talk about anymore. Fake News is the concept of writing and circulating articles around the web with untrue facts in them. It’s become such a hot topic, because people are saying that it played a significant role in the 2016 presidential election. When it comes to Fake News, I definitely think that circulating blatantly untrue stories around the internet is a bad thing and should be mitigated as much as possible. However, I don’t know how easy it would be for Facebook or other companies to prevent it. It’s a more complicated matter than just “It’s bad. Make it stop.” In my opinion one of the reasons it’s such a hard question is that news sources like the Onion have been releasing satirical content with untrue statements for a very long time, and I think most would agree that the Onion isn’t doing anything malicious.
When scrolling through my Facebook timeline, I don’t really see much of what I perceive to be fake news. Most of the content I see that isn’t direct posts from my friends are largely just videos about random unimportant things. When it comes to regulating the news that we see on Facebook, I don’t think I have a problem with Facebook picking and choosing what I get to see. I mean, it is their website. I can pick and choose anywhere I want to get my news from, so if I choose Facebook, I should have to deal with what Facebook gives me. Nobody watches Fox News and then says “Hey Fox News showed me news that I don’t like!” But just because I don’t mind them regulating the news that gets spread on their sites doesn’t mean it’s easy for them to pick out “Fake News” articles and remove them. Like I said before, I think a lot of it comes down to news sources like the Onion. (well actually I don’t know if you call the Onion news, but you know what I’m saying.) The Onion would lose a huge outlet if Facebook created some rule that all news posted on their site had to be true. And it’s also just a slippery slope for them, because while some of these “Fake News” articles are blatantly untrue, in other cases, facts are disputed. Given the bias nature of modern news, filtering out “Fake News” could get Facebook in a lot of trouble, because then it might turn into Facebook filtering out anything their curators don’t like calling it fake. And like one of the articles said, it seems like they already filter the trending stuff, but they don’t (at least I think they don’t) completely remove articles that they don’t like. When it comes to news, I think it’s up to the audience largely to be smart about what they’re reading and to know that almost everything is biased.
For me, I honestly read and watch very little news. I would say that word of mouth is probably my largest source for news, so I probably pay attention to this stuff way less than a lot of people. Honestly if an article or post starts to look political, it often causes me to move on and stop reading it.
I don’t think we live in a post-truth day. I think the vast number of news sources out there make it pretty easy to check the validity of these articles. If you read something that seems fishy and can’t find any other news outlets that have said similar things, it’s probably untrue. When the Times, the Post, and the Tribune all release articles saying the same thing, it’s pretty easy to believe them and identify whatever they’re saying as probably being true.
jdumford Ethics Blog 