A headline from an online Huffington Post article uploaded shortly after the election read: “Bernie Sanders Could Replace President Trump With Little-Known Loophole.” If Internet users had clicked on the headline and actually read the article, they would learn that there was not a morsel of truth in the headline, and that the article was meant to be a lesson to the public that we have become too trusting of media outlets.
BuzzFeed News recently reported that teenagers in Veles, Macedonia are exploiting this trust in the media by posting fake news articles that generate huge amounts of traffic and earn them money. One such article titled, “Hillary in 2013: ‘I Would Like To See People Like Donald Trump Run For Office; They’re Honest And Can’t Be Bought,” generated 480,000 shares, comments, and reactions on Facebook, while an article about Trump’s tax records written by the credible New York Times only generated 175, 000 Facebook interactions.
This election cycle was unique in countless ways, one of them being the extent to which social media influenced voters. While social media had already taken off during the previous election 4 years ago, this year it was used by more candidates and reached more people than ever before.
Patrick Ruffini, political strategist and founder of the digital media firm, Engage, calls this result a “feedback loop” in which the candidates post on social media, those posts make the news, and then those news stories circulate on social media.
While we should be able to applaud the accessibility that social media grants to the public, many social media users and journalists have taken advantage of their audience’s fatal flaw – the tendency to believe that everything they hear or see on the Internet is true.
An uninformed public is a dangerous thing, but a misinformed public is even worse. Social media advocates may shake off this critique by affirming that social media provides a democratic forum for everyone to share their views. While this is true, the hidden danger lies in the ability for anyone to publish inaccuracies and the subsequent tendency for readers to believe it.
Since it is highly unlikely that we can radically alter the way in which the media operates, we must change the way we, as consumers, get our information. One route to take would be to become a cynic and take everything you read or hear with a grain of salt, but that can be a pretty frustrating way to live life. A better option would be to become a savvy consumer, reading entire articles instead of just headlines, fact-checking the articles you read, and avoiding blatantly biased media outlets. If one person does this and then shares the information they have read, the feedback loop will become a positive one.
Sources:
http://www.govtech.com/social/2016-Presidential-Election-Circus-Is-Social-Media-the-Cause.html
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hu…