This is Why People Need to Watch Out for Fake News

Challenges lie ahead for media, being responsible for providing the right content to the right people. In this digital era it is very hard for citizens to distinguish correct information from lies.

As a result, the audience doesn’t believe anything anymore, or even worse: they fall prey to fake news.

Fake news

If someone would tell you that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, you would call that person stupid, right?

Very surprisingly, 22 million Americans do think that this statement is a fact. Besides that, 79 million Americans aren’t aware that the earth revolves around the sun.

How is it possible that people still rely on other truths than what we would consider as common knowledge?

Being Executive Director Digital of Al Jazeera, Dr. Yaser Bishr is concerned about his role as content provider.

According to him, there are two reasons that explain why lots of citizens are misinformed and currently left behind by the media.

Algorithms amplify the confirmation bias

First, Bishr states that our beliefs are constantly being confirmed by algorithms. By looking for content on the web our past click behavior, search history, type of computer, location and so on go into a “filter bubble” and define what we get to see.

Due to these algorithms we are fed our own formulated interests and personalized search subjects. As a consequence, no information really challenges our beliefs anymore.

It is of course easy to have your beliefs confirmed all the time. But what about having your point of view challenged and to establish some new insights?

News is being weaponized

A second theme of the misinformation of citizens is the “weaponizing of news”. It is easy to see how political and corporate actors may deliberately create and spread misleading content to favor their own agendas.

For such parties, fake news is just a means to an end, and may very well pose a threat to for example democratic processes.

Bishr gives the example of how Italian political communities have tried to influence their country’s public opinion.

During Italian elections, actors spread fake news stories of criminal conduct by immigrants, actively trying to bend the public opinion in favor of their political agenda.

Is the media ready?

From a deontological perspective, the priorities of media have remained the same: inform the public in an objective and truthful way.

If journalism wants to remain relevant in modern times however, it will have to learn how it should apply this rule of thumb to the challenges Bishr described.

In any case, Bishr addressed a highly relevant challenge for everybody who deals with content, both professionally and personally. He deals with very basic questions on representation and truth.

As the answers on these questions emerge, they surely will have a far-reaching impact on various areas in marketing, journalism, politics and law.