All you need to know about tech and politics
Written by Oshina and Unnikrishnan
On December 1st, 2016, a Salisbury, North Carolina, father of two who enjoyed playing Pictionary with his family attempted to persuade two friends to join a rescue operation.Welch warned his friends that a "attack" on a "pedo ring" might need "sacrificing the life of a few for the sake of many." He walked into the restaurant three days later, equipped with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a.38 handgun, and a folding knife, and moved toward the back, where children were playing ping-pong.
The claim that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile began in a Facebook post, traveled to Twitter, and then went global with the support of far-right platforms like as Breitbart and Info-Wars, according to several media outlets. On Oct. 28, 2017, someone purporting to be a high-ranking intelligence officer began posting on 4chan under the name "Q." The messages went on to suggest that satanic pedophiles controlled not only Comet, but the entire planet, and that they drank children's blood to stay young. Q claimed to bring them to justice with the help of Trump and other government insiders. TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtags have been viewed more than 82 million times in recent months. Google searches for PizzaGate have skyrocketed.
The rise of social media has altered our perceptions of and interactions with information. For many people, social media has supplanted traditional news sources. Never before has it been so simple to get information, publish it, and share it.Users are more prone to distribute news without verifying its authenticity, especially when it involves content that is controversial or emotionally sensitive.
Social media and politics
People tend to build relationships with like-minded people on social media rather than users with opposite tastes and interests. As a result, users who are connected are more likely to share latent interests in news articles.
The top 20 fake news articles that were circulating on social media right before the 2016 election generated more engagement — that is, likes, shares, and comments — than the top 20 true news pieces that were on social media.Undecided voters were more likely to vote for President Trump in the 2016 election if they accepted bogus news about Hillary Clinton they saw on social media, according to a study.
Who produces fake news
Fake news items can be found on a variety of websites. Some websites, for example, are solely dedicated to publishing articles that are purposefully manufactured and deceptive. BuzzFeed and the Guardian conducted separate investigations and discovered that teenagers in the small Macedonian town of Veles ran over 100 fake news websites.
Many phony news sites, including NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, and WashingtonPost.com.co, are owned by a US company named Disinfomedia, whose owner claims to employ between 20 and 25 writers. A 2013 report that President Obama used his own money to keep a Muslim museum running during the federal government shutdown was one of his most widely repeated stories. Horneralso published a high number of mostly pro-Trump items during the election.
Why is fake news produced
There appear to be two primary incentives for spreading false information. The first is monetary: when consumers click to the original site after reading a viral news piece on social media, the original site might get significant advertising money. Teenagers in Veles, for example, won tens of thousands of dollars by writing stories that favored both Trump and Clinton. The ideological motive is the second. Some fake news outlets aim to help candidates they support. Endingthefed.com was run by a Romanian. For example, the founder of com states that he founded the website primarily to support Donald Trump's campaign.Other distributors of right-wing fake news claim to be left-wing and intended to shame people on the right by demonstrating that they would willingly spread false information.
Demographics more susceptible to believing fake news
In general, research has revealed that those over the age of 65 are more likely to believe bogus news. Those who are strongly conservative on the right are more inclined to believe fake news. And some of it stems from a general mistrust of the mainstream media that they've developed in recent years. Fake news is more likely to be believed by white men. Republicans, for example, are more likely than Democrats to believe that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Similar patterns can also be noticed among college students. When it comes to spotting fake news on social media, college students continue to fail. Fake news is more likely to affect kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
Why do consumers fall for it
People believe what they want to believe despite contrary facts, and social media platforms like TikTok escalate the problem by using algorithms to push certain beliefs. According to the authors Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, “It seems that people fall for fake news because they do not stop and reflect sufficiently on their prior knowledge … and not because their reasoning is hijacked by political motivations.” Other studies have found that inattention and emotion, rather than ideology, drive the spread of misleading news on social media. “The social media context itself,” write Pennycook and Rand, “distracts people from prioritizing the truth when they decide what to share.”
Pennycook and Rand's research appears to be partially validated by the weird reemergence of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory on TikTok. The theory's popularity among younger users appears to be driven by entertainment value, inattention, and a desire to share rather than hostility and suspicion of elites, as it was in its first version.
Different countries response
Leaders from Europe to Asia are rushing to pass anti-fake news legislation. Germany also passed an online hate speech law earlier this year, requiring platforms with more than 2 million users to remove “obviously illegal” terror content, racist material, and fake news within 24 hours or face fines of up to €50 million (£44 million). Other inappropriate content must be removed within seven days. India hastily retracted a sweeping new directive permitting the suspension of any journalist suspected of propagating false news, only 24 hours after it was revealed, after being criticized for conducting a "full-frontal assault on mainstream journalism."
However, Malaysia has established a law that imposes fines of up to £88,000 and prison sentences of up to six years for anyone who distribute fake news through traditional news sources, digital publications, and social media, including from outside the country.Thailand, too, has a cybersecurity law that makes spreading false information punishable by up to seven years in prison, while Singapore is preparing a report on measures to combat "deliberate online falsehoods" and the Philippines is considering anti-fake news legislation that could result in up to 20 years in prison for offenders.