Fake News Report: Analyzing Video Content and Impact

This report analyzes a video discussing fake news, a growing issue in the digital age. The report begins by defining fake news and its prevalence, emphasizing its potential to spread rapidly through online platforms and traditional media. The report highlights key points from the video, including the comparison of fake news to rumors, the importance of media literacy, and practical steps to identify fake news sources. These steps include checking the website's name and authenticity, examining image sources, and reviewing the website's disclaimers. The report also discusses the potential negative impacts of fake news on society and emphasizes the importance of critical consumption of media. The report concludes by advocating for measures to combat fake news and protect the public from its harmful effects.

Running head: FAKE NEWS
FAKE NEWS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1FAKE NEWS
Fake news is categorized as propaganda or yellow journalism where disinformation is
spread deliberately through online media and also traditional media (Conroy, Rubin & Chen,
2015). It is considered to be one of the biggest threats to the democracy. This paper is going to
provide a summary about a video and reflect on fake news.
In the video, the host, Adam Hills uses humour to reflect on a serious and growing issue
which is fake news. Fake news in recent times has become mainstream (YouTube, 2019). Fake
news has become a new thing especially in the age of digitalization as it has been easier to spread
fake news to people across the globe through the internet. Fake news is compared to rumours as
rumours have always intrigued and attracted people the same way fake news does. However,
rumours often have consequences and the same happens with fake news thus it is important to
stay alert and understand to differentiate between authentic news and fake news.
Adam Hills here provides some tips that can help people to spot fake news. The first step
is to check the name of the service provider. Often it can be detected from the names about the
authenticities of the site however, there are names of websites that sound real and genuine
however spread fake news. He gives an example and talks about a website named World News
Daily which sounds genuine and makes people believe that they might post authentic news about
the world and the real issues but does not do that rather posts stories like Somalian camels being
refrained from entering the United States due to the Muslim ban (YouTube, 2019).
The second step is to check images. Fake news websites often use images taken from
image libraries. Authentic websites always use their own photographs and mentions the source of
the images if they are from some other website or some other person’s creativity.

2FAKE NEWS
The third step is to review and check the publication. Everyone should read the
disclaimer of the websites where they do mention that the website might carry fictional stories
which the website, World News Daily does have it in their own disclaimer as well (YouTube,
2019)..
These fake news are often posted in such an authentic manner that there are actual news
agencies that run these as legitimate news stories as these agencies do not know how the story
actually started and do not want to be behind in terms of posting news.
Adam Hill hilariously reflects on a serious issue, the growing rate of fake news and the
consumption of these news by the people. He gives an example of a news article which is
harmless however; there are fake news that has the capability to harm the society and the world.
Fake news have become a new trend and there are several websites who create news to
attract people and for their publicity. There are consequences to fake news that may have a
negative impact on the society. Thus it is important to stop consuming fake news by following
the steps mentioned in the video. Banning fake news websites and stop reading these articles will
help the people as well as the society.

3FAKE NEWS
Reference
Conroy, N. J., Rubin, V. L., & Chen, Y. (2015). Automatic deception detection: Methods for
finding fake news. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and
Technology, 52(1), 1-4.
YouTube (2019). How To Spot Fake News | The Last Leg. [online] YouTube. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvopZOzg1Qo&t=3s [Accessed 25 Aug. 2019].