The world of social media has quickly and suddenly been bombarded with disinformation. Disinformation is also known as fake news. Disinformation on social media can impact users' opinions on important topics such as medicine, politics, education, etc. (Olan et al., 2022). All of these topics are important to our livelihood and we depend on the things that we read to help us make important decisions. We would like to be able to trust what we read. As Lawrence (2022) says in our textbook, "many of the mechanics of social media, such as sharing and media previews, cater to the spread of disinformation” (p. 140). Readers can be swayed from one side of an important topic to the other solely based on something they have read that may or may not be true. The image below shows the impacts of disinformation or fake news.
Olan et al. (2022) shares that “fake news, although unvetted, has a credible and professional appearance, ensuring that people cannot always distinguish it from true news” (para. 2). Because of the appearance, readers make the assumption that it is trustworthy. I truly feel like technology has trained us to be such an “instant feedback” world that so many people do not want to take the time to read information to determine whether it is fake or not. We quickly judge a book by its cover, read it, and let it sway our opinion on whatever the topic is that we are reading about. According to Lawrence (2022), “when a Facebook user shares a news article to their feed, there is a fairly limited amount of information: a headline, an image, and a description” (p. 140). Everyone wants to read the title, share it, and then move on to the next piece of information. Because the information is limited and we do not dig into what we are reading, many social media users' opinions are so easily swayed. Meanwhile, they do not realize they are sharing disinformation with their family and friends, and very likely swaying their beliefs while they're at it.
It is important for everyone to understand how to disseminate between disinformation and factual information. There are a few obvious ways to tell if you are looking at fake news, we just need to be educated on how to do it. Here is an article that gives us 10 ways to spot disinformation on social media.
10 Ways to Sport Disinformation on Social Media
With such important topics being influenced by disinformation that affect our everyday lives, we need to be sure that what we are reading is credible, reliable information. We as parents, professionals, and American citizens need to be able to make informed and sound decisions which in many respects have to be made based on what we read, see, and hear from news outlets. Let’s fight the spread of fake news on social media by digging deep when we see something shared and decide whether it is true before sharing it ourselves. If we all ban together, eventually the culprits behind the disinformation will get frustrated and move on.
References
Lawrence, D. (2022). Digital writing: A guide to writing for social media and the web. Broadview Press.
Olan, F., Jayawickrama, U., Arakpogun, E.O., Suklan, J., & Liu, S. (2022). Fake news on social media: The impact on society. Information Systems Frontier. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-022-10242-z
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DeleteMallory, I enjoyed reading your blog. My Facebook feed is bombarded with disinformation about Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce. I have learned the sources that are more reliable and ignore the others. “Social media platform providers should ensure that there is continuous monitoring of online activities triggered by spread of fake news (Olan et al., 2022, Part 6). Facebook offers businesses the chance to utilize our data for delivering precisely tailored advertisements and the data obtained was from our accounts (Lawrence, 2022, p. 83).
ReplyDeleteHey Mallory, I enjoyed reading your post on disinformation. I agree we are definitely bombarded with it. The scope of social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube is just so vast. "There are also approximately 500,000 new Facebook users who join every day, and 300 hours of new video are uploaded every minute to YouTube" (Lawrence, 2022, p.87). We just have to not let our defenses down and always be sure to corroborate information before we pass it on to someone else. I found the website with the ten ways to spot disinformation on social media to be helpful. In the "Fake News on Social Media" article (2022), it mentions the need for social media platforms to use fact-checking technologies to help reduce disinformation. While I believe fact-checking is important and even necessary, I am skeptical about how popular platforms go about fact checking in a non-biased way. I think the fact checking should be done by the people that use the platform or visit the website, almost similar to how people leave reviews on Amazon.
ReplyDeleteMallory, I enjoyed reading your blog about disinformation because I see this all of the time on my Facebook and Instagram. "The nature of the web and social media leads many writers to author outrageous or salacious headlines, often called clickbait" (Lawrence, 2022, p. 85). People can be so misleading now and sometimes make it hard for small businesses to utilize their social media platforms as a way of advertisement because of fake pages being created.
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