Social Media Manipulation: The Impact of Fake News

The year of 2023 is upon us and fake news has started to take over our country. Fraudulent news articles, some totally fake, and others just extremely exaggerated, has run rampant through various social media outlets, especially Twitter. Sources usually make up this news to taint an individual’s reputation to hurt them in some way. Often used in politics, this fictitious news can not only damage a person’s reputation heavily, but also sway many viewers interests and beliefs on a subject or situation. So many people now have trouble believing what they view on not only social media, but also on many news outlets, and that is becoming a problem that could linger on. Overall, a person viewing the social media falls under the influence of manipulation, so in the essay this issue is revealed and discussed as each of us should be able to make own decisions based on the truth, rather than biases or hoaxes of articles that are published.

Let's start with the history of social media. According to Benjamin Hale, a graduate from Sarah Lawrence College where he received a bachelor's degree, the first social media site ever created was Six Degrees in 1997. A user could create a profile and friend others. From this was born the era of blogging and instant messaging. However, social media did not become popular until MySpace was created in 2003. Facebook also came around at that time, but only Harvard students had access to it. Facebook paved the way for all other social media services. Then around 2010 the world was introduced to Instagram, Twitter, and the rest of the now popular social media applications.

It's undeniable fact that social media is appealing for us and our brains. For example, Richard Axel, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University and a nobel prize winner, mentions how the brain represents the external world all ties back to the way it represents the chemosensory world. Chemosensory is the response to chemical stimuli, and this plays a crucial role in the way social media brings their users back for more. Individuals who use social media often feel an urge to refresh the page or check how many likes they get. According to Rebecca Schneider, a graduate from Penn State University, this urge is the result of a chemical that is released in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine gives an urge for a reward, so when somebody checks their post and sees they got another like on it, they feel a sense of satisfaction. This creates an addiction in people, and they are hooked onto social media sites like Instagram.

Social media has been a strong contributor to the recent rise of fake news. According to Monica Anderson and Andrea Caumont, research associates and editors at Pew Research Center, out of the 60% of adults who use Facebook, 30% of them get their daily news from it, while Twitter users come in with the mark of 8% respectively. As Alfred Hermida talks about in his chapter on Social Media and the News, humans are social animals, so they will sort, filter, and share information and news to create and nurture relationships. That is completely fine, until their perception is altered on what they are looking at. According to Gershon Dublon and Joseph Paradiso, doctors in physics and sensory building, mention how electronic media has basically become an extension of the human nervous system, and it distorts human’s perception of the world and the information they receive. When an individual’s perception of the news is altered, they can believe what they read and see in fake news. Roja Bandari, Sitaram Asur, and Bernardo A. Huberman, in their proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, did a study on how accurate the news shared on Twitter is. They found that 84% of the news shared on Twitter is not fake news. Considering that 16% of news shared on a popular social media site is fake, people need to be able to know when they are looking at fake news. If two thirds of United States’ adults got their news from social media in 2017, some of them were probably trusting the wrong sources. Daniel Petty talks about, in his article 'Is social media destroying the news?', how social media sites now present news that the reader wants to see instead of the actual news. Through algorithms, social media sites are changing the perception of many users’ views on the news, and they are only being shown what they will like and share to other users. The sharing of fake news is the major problem in the spread of it.

Also, social media is an influential tool during the elections. President Donald Trump was quite familiar with using social media during the presidential election in 2016. According to Nicholas Carr, an author on technology and culture, it actually started in what was known as the Facebook election of 2008. Obama used social media to connect with the public and gain an advantage over his opponents. That was nothing compared to the 2016 election which featured Ted Cruz live streaming on Periscope, Marco Rubio snapchatting his thoughts, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush debating over Twitter on student debt, Bernie Sanders getting nearly two million likes on Facebook, and of course Donald Trump bashing every candidate over Twitter. However, many people feel like social media ruined the 2016 election and other elections. Sam Sanders, a reporter and the host of It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders at NPR, thinks that social media made the 2016 election unbearable. He mentions the petty fight Team Bush and Team Clinton had over Twitter and how it got to the point of trolling. He also mentions a study he did that found that during the period of time between the first presidential debate and the second, one-third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly one-fifth of pro-Clinton tweets came from automated accounts. When that many tweets on the election are coming from fake accounts, many users are having their perceptions altered. These fake accounts are not even necessarily delivering real news, and they are therefore destroying the elections and people’s views on the candidates.

In conclusion, social media is one of the most influential tools in the world. It can help deliver news to the public, but it can also destroy the way people view the news. Fake news has too much of an influence in the American society right now, and social media is not helping the issue. However, if the public is educated on what news they should trust and what news they should not, then fake news would be eliminated from having an influence in society. If an individual is taught to figure out who is behind what they are looking at, and the credibility that person has, then they can know when they are viewing reliable and credible news. If kids are taught this in school, then many people would not have to worry about elections and the perception of reality being ruined through fake news.