Assignment 1 Position Paper One Media Society

Assignment 1: Position Paper One Media & Society

Strayer University

Society and the Media

SOC105

Fake News vs Truth

These days it is hard to distinguish between true news and fake news, and this is how lies spread faster on social media than truth does. Over the last few years, reported news has been broadcast via social media from even from the President statements that had proven to be untrue and incorrect without checking the facts before going public. Is there a remedy to prevent the spread of fake new? With the rise of the accessibility of the internet through cellphone use as they are mini computers, new technology has drastically changed how we receive information. Over the last fifty years of so, news stories were vetted prior to being printed. However, the end to printed newspapers are very close. Before the rise of social media so many American heavily relied on printed newspapers, nightly news, morning news, midday news, magazines and even tabloids. Democracies still need an investigative, confrontational press it can trust and not reality TV news.

There is a great concern regarding how false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic and social well-being (Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018, March 09). Based on a study, false news reached more people that the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people (Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018, March 09). What this means is that people are more prone to believe a lie that than the true because it sounds better and it is more exciting that the true. It like of state of perversion where false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise while true stories inspired sadness, anticipation, joy and believe it or not trust. Furthermore, in study the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data gather showed that 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times (Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018, March 09).

Is there a remedy to help prevent fake news from reaching the masses? To understand how fake new is circulated it has to do with algorithm or robots who help spread true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans are more likely to spread it. A few possible remedies are being explored, such as the enlisting of the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN)

Referenced

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018, March 09). The spread of true and false news online. Retrieved from http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

Fox, M. (2018, March 9). Want something to go viral? Make it fake news. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fake-news-lies-spread-faster-social-media-truth-does-n854896