Ways to Combat the Fake News Issue and Stop It From Spreading

If I had to explain fake news to someone unfamiliar with the term, I might say something such as, it being misleading information or a piece of false information that has been manipulated and changed to fit an agenda. This type of news, is so outrageous that it grabs the attention of the general population and affects people's viewpoints, a new propaganda technique if you will.

Fake news has been flagged as dangerous over the past few years due to various events where governments have used it to skew elections, by fooling the general populations into believe in these “news articles” that holds mainly false facts.

A very prominent way in which this concept was used was in the 2016 US elections where agendas were pushed by discrediting certain news stories and promoting false facts (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017). Even though Fake news in essence is lying about important information, is it different as a misinterpreted news report, mistakes in a news report or some facts of a report being not one hundred percent correct. Fake news never has any truth to it, whereas a misinformed news story is based on some factual information.

A Fake news story is supposed to grab one's attention to persuade an idea, it's relatively new and subtle. Although journalists should be objective they aren’t all the time. Due to this violation to the journalistic integrity, it is often difficult to distinguish fake news from actual news. Many don’t trust mainstream media due to the recent spread of fake news (Riffkin, 2015), especially teenagers, who will soon represent our population and influence later generations, as stated by DePaulo (Depaulo, 1997). This means even though fake news is a real threat to that of the public's’ individual opinions and outlooks, people are able to recognize the ill truths of the Fake News epidemic.

The best way to stop fake news would be identifying them (Pennycock, 2017). Controlling these types of news stories will rest on governments and how they choose to run their countries. A place where various views are accepted and ambiguity, misinformation and outright lies do not affect one’s opinion or a place where the public can’t trust its media outlets and therefore does not easily distinguish between actual news and fake news, are the possible future we might endure depending on what governments decide to do about this epidemic. There are quite a few private institutions being created to combat this issue which already indicates that its not all up to the government.