Impacts of “Fake News” on Society

This paper focuses on the growing problem of fake news and its harmful impacts on society and culture. It provides methods that Information and Communication Technology professionals can practice to eliminate the root cause and origin of fake news.

Running head: IMPACTS OF “FAKE NEWS” ON SOCIETY
Impacts of “Fake News” on Society
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Authors note

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IMPACTS OF “FAKE NEWS” ON SOCIETY
Introduction
It is a well-known fact that not everything that is published in the newspaper or
magazine is true. The news that are consists of false information, the news that contains no
actual information but only junk and hoax are collectively termed as “Fake News”. Fake
news are made up of imaginary and manipulated information with an intention to misguide
the consumers of content (Lazer, Baum and Benkler 2018). This is generally done by the
journalist or media people so that they can lure the consumers and finally spread it virally.
Thus, fake news can be defined as propaganda that is published by the media that consists of
hoax information, which is disguised as authentic news. It is generally spread in order to
damage a person’s, organization’s or any entity’s reputation and standard (Yap, Snyder and
Drye 2018). These kinds of stories are cooked up to alter the views of people. The priority of
these news are generated to push the political agenda and break the trust of people that they
have for certain entity.
Thus this paper focuses on the growing problem of fake news and its harmful impacts
on society and culture. The paper further illustrates important mitigation techniques that will
help to control the fake news generated by the online social media platforms or journalists
and reporters (Roets 2017). It mainly provides methods that Information and Communication
Technology professionals can practice in order to eliminate the root cause and origin of fake
news. The major source of fake news is social media (Corner 2017). Majority of
misinformation comes from social media platforms such as twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Discussion
Fake news has become a streaming topic since 2016. As compared, earlier people got
real news from authenticated source. There were strict rules and code of practice that has to
be followed by the media and journalists (Jang and Kim 2018). Traditionally they do not tend

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to violate the rules and malpractice these things. But, with the rapid growth of internet has
provided them a new trend of sharing information (Shu, Sliva and Wang, 2017). The news
are now published in social media sites that are often biased and incredible. Social media has
been a boon to a ma’s loge but it can also be disastrous if mishandled. Fake news came to
limelight when the elections in United States was held in 2016 and humongous fake news
were spread across US. Good and Facebook has been deliberately criticizes for giving
contribution to the fake news. According to Torres, Gerhart and Negahban (2018), Donald
Trump described negative press and media coverage as fake news. Fake news are basically
humors that are designed to increase profit. Moreover, this has been a profitable practice for
the reporters since get are paid a good amount for delivering humors. Some of the fake news
are been generated by organizations and Politian to promote their business and to fool the
public to build trust with them (McNair 2017). Fake news helps them to gain the faith of the
pubic by making them believe something that is not real. The main source of unreal news are
the users of Facebook who post fake blogs and article to get famous and recognized. Since
social media is such a platform that can make a person popular, so there are some people who
uses thee opportunities and spreads sensational news that will help in getting more followers
and shares in their post.
Fake news is so dangerous that it even uses genuine information and changes its content
which can hurt the sentiments that agency or person. These fabricated news that are
consumed by the world has varied intentions (Rashkin, Choi and Jang 2017). The satire news
was been generated to cause no harm but to trick and fool the consumer. Misleading contents
are those which consists of information that depicts some kind of issue. Imposter context are
made up of genuine sources which is impersonated. Fabricated content are implements with
an intention to cause serious harm and is totally a false information (Quandt, Frischlich and
Boberg, 2019). There are six categories of fake news that has been identified:

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 Clickbait: This kind of news are made up to get more traffic to the website. The
motive is to increase the revenue of the website by creating exclusive headlines that is
capable of grabbing attention of the public (Vargo, Guo and Amazeen 2018).
 Parody: This kind of fake news are generated by social media sites for the purpose of
entertainment.
 Propaganda: Here, the news are built to mislead the public in order to prove a point
that is biased especially in case of politics ()Kogan, Moskowitz and Niessner 2017.
 Mislead headings: This does not usually requires changing the whole content but
only making false headlines. It gets viral immediately (Spohr 2017).
 Biased news: This contains news feeds of Facebook that are made by anyone to give
their opinion which can also be false.
 Sloppy journalism: This is published by the media reporters without confirming the
authenticity of the news (Pennycook, Cannon and Rand 2018).
Fake news and Social media
The internet can be considered as the platform that facilitates the fake news to spread
over the world. It takes the content of others and manipulates it to get attention. The person is
first creates a website where he will be posting all sorts of hoaxes and stories (Wang 2017).
Then the person practices click bait. He steals such information which he thinks can be
sensational if altered a little. They often keep the same content and only change the headlines
of the news (Mele, Lazer and Baum 2017). They copy the meaningful contents and reposts
them as their own to get popular. These fake news will require consumers which is provided
by social media. As social media is a wide platform of consumers where public share their
interest and time so the owner of the fake websites posts their headlines three which upon
clicking opens their website (Reuter, Hartwig and Kirchner 2019). To control these social
media sites had adopts ethical code of voluntary. It made them delete inappropriate posts and

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objectionable contents. Not only humans, but bots are also responsible to spread fake news.
According to the reports, there are about 23 million bots present on twitter, on Instagram
there are 27 million bots and on Facebook there is estimated to be 140 million bots (Ahmed,
Traore and Saad 2017). They are created by IT professional with the help of algorithms who
resides on social networks. The bots are programmed in such a way that they searches for
non-curated news and post them all to spread it on the web. They continuously tweet fake
information and replies or comments on the post of any user. The social media is tried to
detect the fake accounts and presence if bots to eliminate the spread of fake news (Golbeck,
Mauriello and Auxier 2018). Facebook adapted some techniques to fight back against the
spread of fake news. It made use of software which will notify the readers that the news that
is published might not be 100 per cent real and it can be fake (McNair, Bruns and Schapals
2018). It immediately identifies and checks for any third party interruption and flag news.
The fake news are stories which are created in order to make others believe something this is
not real in order to buy a product or to make them visit to a particular website.
Impact of Fake News
In the present era of technology, the consumption of news and information is
changing with increase of internet. Traditionally, the news was only published in newspaper
but today it is also been published and posted on social networking sites (Torres, Gerhart and
Negahban 2018). This has potentially created both positive and negative impacts in the
society and culture. Social media has been the new medium of showcasing the information
online which on the other hand has become the origin of fake news. The government and the
president of Australia is also using social media to engage and promote their supporters
(Rubin, Conroy and Chen 2016). As the result, online voting, journalism and several acts are
associated with social media which have been transformed as a remarkable platform for
entertainment as well as news. The negative impacts of fake news on society is on rise. There

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are some journalist who are not much educated and publishes needless allegations and issues.
The fake news are mostly related to politics which successfully spreads because of the social
media.
According to Masip, Suau-Martínez and Ruiz-Caballero (2018), the rapid growth of
fake mews can be a threat democracy and will affect the society adversely. The fake news
increases the revenues if the websites. He further declared that it is the nature of hum to trust
on bad news rather than good news (Wasserman 2017). Therefore, fake news is dangerous
and one must think seriously before spreading any kind of news. It can disrupt the political
process by generating misinformation. This will hamper the society and will polarize the
values and concerns. It will tend to misguide the society and will cause major disturbance
between the mass of people (Wang 2017). Since the fake news is more likely to be spread
than the actual news, it will make the people live in solitary. It can also create terror among
the people with the consequences of communal violence. Fake news is capable of polarizing
society which will also effect international relations. In relation to cultural impacts, the
celebrity scandals has also been developed (Kogan, Moskowitz and Niessner 2017). An
example of this an iconic celebrity was found dead at his house. This has profoundly hurt the
sentiments of his family. Many such fake scandals was been made that has impacted the
lives of people.
Mitigation of Fake News
Technology plays a vital role in mitigation of fake news. It can serve as a tool to
diminish the effects and facilitates their impact of fake news. It is not possible to completely
eliminate the practice of fake news (Yap, Snyder and Drye 2018). But at least there are
certain methods which will help to diminish its impacts and prevent any issues due to these
kinds of news. This can be done by encouraging digital literacy and to limit the spread of fake

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news. The application of ICT has helped in mitigating of fake news (Roets 2017). The
Automatic News Verification is the best information system that can help in reducing the
effect of fake news. It has been developed by using the concept of machine learning that has
the ability to verify whether the information is true or false (Corner 2017). Presently the
mitigation process involves humans who performs fast checking. The use of metadata has
also helped in predicting any fake news and prevent any damage to the real content. The
automated fast checker machines identifies any news that are fake.
Fact Mata is a kind digital checker that verifies any such articles. These kind of
technologies will help in reducing cost and time. It will help in performing the crucial process
of checking and reduce the growth if fake news (Jang and Kim 2018). With the help of graph
databases it is possible to detect and mitigate the fake news. It can easily navigation through
the database and investigate the reports of the journalist. The use of twitter to spread fake
news during 2016 elections has made the graph to analyze (Shu, Sliva and Wang 2017). The
database was able to detect hidden connection, posts websites and flags. This helped in
shutting down fake profiles.
One of the method is to stop the publication of fake news. This can be done by
interrupting the server of the publisher. The servers that are generating bad content must be
interrupted. China and Iran has already implemented this method and has potentially blocked
the access of any such websites that is generating false information (Torres, Gerhart and
Negahban 2018). Another method of reducing fake news is labelling. In this method, social
media sites such as Facebook adds an additional information after every post and story which
will warn the user about the consequences of sharing and spreading a fake story.
The consumption of fake news must be limited in order to minimize the spread of
fake news. The identification of news is important aspect that the consumer have to develop.

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The fast checking technology will help in the same (McNair 2017). The concept of artificial
intelligence will be beneficial in identifying fake news. AI can scan the entire content of news
and could detect the min part where the content is false and made up. AI facilitates the
method of content analysis and recognizes the bad part and then rejects the whole news
(Rashkin, Choi and Jang 2017). The origin of the fake news must be identified first, then the
medium of propagation must be looked at. Fake news are also propagated by some bots. The
specialized algorithms that are used in artificial intelligence plays a major role in eradicating
the issue if fake news.
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that everything that is posted in
newspapers and aired in news channels are not genuine. There are various news which are
published by channels and newspapers and is believed by people but are complete hoax.
These news are known as fake news, they consists of imaginary as well as manipulated data,
and the fake news is created in the intention of misguiding people. Fake news is usually
created by journalists and some more similar professionals in order to make it more
interesting for people. The competition among the new channels as well as bands of
newspapers lead to creation of fake news, this does not affect the creators but it has a huge
impact on the society. Fake news are generally not identifies by people and hence it fails in
putting down the image of the news channels and newspapers. Fake news can be described as
propaganda which is published by media which consists of fake data. Fake news is spread in
order to damage a particular person or a group of individuals’ standard as well as reputation.
Sometimes fake news might create a sense of hatred among people regarding a particular
entity and hence spoil their career and life.
Recommendations

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There are various ways by which these fake news can be avoided, these
recommendations are as follows
Being cautious: people must be cautious while sharing posts and news in social
networking sites, social networking sites are the best tools for spreading fake news (Torres,
Gerhart and Negahban 2018). The links that are provided with posts especially the ones that
are click baits, must never be trusted because they might be links to fake news.
Danger of mis-information: people tend to take written data as truth and assume that it
is genuine unless they know that it is not the fact. When people read something regarding a
topic which they are not knowledgeable about, they assume that author has the credentials to
post that data (Torres, Gerhart and Negahban 2018). Misinformation about drugs as well as
health remedies might be deadly for people all over the world. Misinformation through the
emails or span on social media has high chances to expose people to fraudulent phishing
various web sites (Vargo, Guo and Amazeen 2018). Misinformation related to investment
advice might lead to personal financial losses.
Avoiding websites: people should avoid various websites that ends with lo such as
“Newslo”. These sites collect pieces of data and then package them with other misleading
and false facts. People should watch out for various websites that end with .com.co because
they are fake versions of actual news sources (Wang 2017). If a person comes across a certain
news, he must check if the same news is being forecasted in popular and well known news
channels. Sometimes due to lack of coverage, it might result in the corporate media bias as
well as other factors, there must be more than one source that reports on a specific topic or an
event (Yap, Snyder and Drye 2018). People might be cautious regarding odd names of
domains because they generally provide rarely truthful news. Lack of attribution of author
might signify that the story of the news needs proper verification.

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