You sit back on the couch after a long day and browse the internet on your phone. Everything is business as usual until you see a news article that grabs your attention and infuriates you. In a blind rage, you send all your friends and family the article you read, commenting on how stupid the world is and how your political leaning is ‘correct.’ However, in your anger and rush to prove your point you have forgotten to fact check the article in question. It turns out that the article you sent was false; it was click-bait meant only to gain revenue for the website. However, it is too late; your friends also shared the article and then their friends shared that article. Now this fake news is beyond your circle of influence, and people now believe a lie that could have easily been prevented if you just fact-checked. This kind of thing happens every day, and these websites are not always obscure websites that get no traffic, some of these fake articles come from the biggest and most trusted news sources out there. This epidemic of fake news has spread so far that only 65% of people trust the news on traditional media and 34% of people trust the news they receive on social media (Statistics & Facts about Fake News). With fake news coming left and right at you, how do you know who to trust, and how you can make sure the news you’re seeing is truth?
Although the problem of fake news seems new, the epidemic of false facts being spread for monetary or partisan purposes is not a new thing. Early French philosophers (called Philosophes), who helped form the ideas that founded America, stated that a free press would open up facts to the public, and that truth and rationality would win out among the sea of information. Looking back on this, it seems idealistic and a bit optimistic, because that is not how the world operates. People naturally progress to what they want to hear, not what it actually true. President John Adams famously scoffed at the idea of a free press market leading to less misinformation, as news about him circulated through all kinds of newspapers (Mansky, Jackie). The media and John Adams had a large rivalry, with trusted papers as the Philadelphia Aurora calling him “old, quirelous, bald, blind, and toothless Adams (Mansky, Jackie).” However, one of the most popular versions of fake news of the past is yellow journalism. Yellow journalism is attention grabbing fake newspapers that were especially popular in the late 1890’s. These newspapers had headlines that were designed to grab the attention of those buying newspapers. A newsie, usually a young boy who stood in the streets selling newspapers, would yell out the headlines of newspapers in hopes that someone would buy it (Mansky, Jackie). This problem was later resolved with the introduction of subscriptions, however. Nevertheless, Yellow Journalism newspapers were infamous for making people lose trust in newspapers. All these things reflect our modern-day problem of fake news (Mansky, Jackie). All these fake news stories came from people’s needs to be correct, regardless of facts.
Some of the social effects of Fake news is a distrust of media, and a divided nation. Unlike hundreds of years ago, we are surrounded by news. Social Media consumes a lot of our everyday lives, and we always have virtual newspapers in our pockets. Twitter is a huge proponent of fake news, and elections have been swayed by things that may or may not have been true on twitter. During the 2016 election, there were 700,00 twitter accounts that connected over 700 conspiracy theories (Mitchell, Amy). Many of these accounts still thrive today. This problem is so bad that 64% percent of Americans show a great deal of confusion when dealing with stories on social media. In addition to that, at least 23% percent of people have unknowingly sent a fake news story online. All these stories had a profound effect on the 2016 election. According to the Knight Foundation, “Consistent with other research, we find more than 6.6 million tweets linking to fake and conspiracy news publishers in the month before the 2016 election (Knight Foundation).” This social epidemic is not harmful on just a grand scale, it has been dividing communities. The partisan nature of fake news only serves to further divide Republicans and Democrats more than they already were. People are quicker to share something that leans toward their bias, even if it is not true. It also creates an echo chamber where either side is not being exposed to new ideas. In that sense, it divides communities apart. Both sides are blinded with ignorance and an air of superiority because they both feel like they have information the other side does not.
There are many examples of fake news in society today. With the technology we have today, anyone can make any video look like anything. One can manipulate videos to make it look like an object was doing something it was not. For example, there was a video floating around of a jet airplane doing a 360-degree spin before landing. This outraged many people, and the video went viral. However, the video is completely fake. The plane spinning was made in post-production by the power of CGI. As Geoffrey A. Fowler of The Washington Post so eloquently stated the problem, “Everyone now knows the Web is filled with lies. So then how do fake Facebook posts, YouTube videos and tweets keep making suckers of us?” (A. Fowler, Geoffrey) In addition to that, there are “deep fakes” and “deep voices.” Deep fakes are digital recreations of someone’s face that is placed over another face. As long as someone has a decent picture of the person they are trying to recreate, they can plaster their face on anything. This can be used for something as harmless and humorless as replacing Obama’s face with Nicolas Cage, or as dangerous as President Trump giving a fake speech he never actually gave (Schwartz, Oscar). Here is where deep voices come in. With as little as a 37 second sample of your voice, some technology can create an accurate recreation of your voice. Now, someone can type anything, and the technology behind deep fakes would make it sound like you said it. The longer your samples are, the more human inflections you voice would give (Cole, Samantha). Now, imagine a world where anyone can look like they were doing anything, and their voice was used to show it was real. That is the world we are heading to now. The danger with this is obvious. If a deep fake video about Trump or any future president declaring nuclear war circulates too quickly, this could be disastrous. This could be a whole new level of fake news, where we can’t trust things that should be evidence. As The Guardian put it, “You thought fake news was bad? Deep fakes is where fake news goes to die (Schwartz).”
When it comes to the problem of fake news, people are hard-pressed to come up with a solution that would solve the problem, although there are things that we can do to lessen the problem at least a small amount. The problem with dealing with a problem such as fake news is that the problem comes from a human’s natural inclination to want to be correct above all things. It is often hard for us to look at the facts and admit our mistakes. Often times, it is easier to shrug off, ignore, or stay ignorant to facts that might contradict our opinion. Other times, there is monetary incentive to create the most clickable headline and get easy views for traffic. There is no one solution that will solve the fake news: there is no algorithm to place on websites, there is no training all journalists to look past their biases all the time, there is no perfect method to tell whether what you are looking at is fake or not. As Geoffrey A. Fowler of The Washington Post put it, “Detecting what’s fake in images and video is only getting harder. Misinformation is part of an online economy that weaponizes social media to profit from our clicks and attention. And with the right tools to stop it still a long way off, we all need to get smarter about it (Fowler, Geoffrey A.).” In fact, it is so confusing that 64% of people show great confusion when dealing with news stories on social media (Fuller, Steve). That is why the fake news problem is so frustrating, the problem will take years to fix, if it can be fixed, and no one seems to be able to fix it. This is why many people think fake news will never truly go away, but there may be ways to lessen the effects of it. One of the many proposed solutions to lessen the problem of fake news is to create a place for people to crowd-source stories. This way, people could review stories. This may help for more fact checking, and to punish journalists who don’t do the work to get their story straight. Although this does come with some problems of its own, mainly the public can’t take the time to fact check like journalist, it is better than nothing. Another proposed solution to the Fake News Problem is to have tech companies hire people to fact check things that people post, to make sure people aren’t spreading blatantly false things (Dizikes, Peter, and MIT News Office). Another tool that could be implemented are algorithms that could look for patterns or people who constantly post fake news and delete them. An example of this is The Facebook Journalism Project. It is a system that Facebook is creating that will monetarily de-incentivize people from spreading fake news. “We want to empower people to identify misleading news content when they encounter it — on any platform," Facebook reported on the six-month update of the project (IT Business Edge). Other solutions tech companies are currently working on are placing more heavy punishment on people who spread fake news and creating Artificial Intelligence to counteract it. Another solution shows program NEO4J going through post histories, accounts, and databases to detect fake news and subsequently lower people’s chances of seeing it (Williams, Dan) (Attachment 1) However, all these attempts seem to be in vain. Although they are helping lessen the problem, there is no true way to fix our problems with fake news. It has to be a shift in the human mindset that may be impossible to pull off. It would require people to put off their biases, both politically and monetarily, and push for what is truth. Only then can fake news be stopped.
Many things in today’s world can be traced back to Camus’s ideas of life being an absurdity. Fake news in part, is a continuation and a proof of Camus’s ideals holding true. In this absurdist world we are living in, our perceptions and beliefs hold up the illusion of the world we have created, according to Camus. Therefore, anything that shatters our barrier of built up security terrifies us, and we want to keep that barrier there, even if it means stretching the truth. According to Camus, all things in life are meaningless, therefore we fill that void with ultimately meaningless things. As Laura Maguire put it, “He thought that life had no meaning, that nothing exists that could ever be a source of meaning, and hence there is something deeply absurd about the human quest to find meaning (Maguire, Laura).” For many, part of that barrier includes topics like politics, and our perception of it forms our shield from the truth of the absurd world. Camus would look at the problem of fake news and use it as another point for all things being meaningless. He would say that when people create fake news, they are only contributing to an illusion society is trying to create to hide the fact that everything is meaningless. He would also see the attempts to stop the fake news epidemic as also ultimately meaningless, as it is just as much as an illusion as the fake news itself. In Camus’s opinion, everything is ultimately meaningless, so it is all the same in the end. However depressing Camus’s viewpoints on the world are, one cannot help but join him in thinking that all this fake news and prevention of fake news feels very arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.
In the end, the epidemic surrounding fake news is very depressing. There is not much any one person can do about the fake news problem that our society is facing today. For as long as journalism has been prominent in our society, fake news has existed, and it does not look like that will change in the future. The incentives for people to create fake news are too strong, including things like money, fame, and upholding a barrier of security that they’ve created for themselves. For the person reading the fake news, it is equally as hard not to contribute to the problem. They see an article with a catch title, they click, the give the writer of the fake news money through ads, the see a point that validates them, they share, and they leave. The average person does not have time to research every article they see. Because of that, fake news will always be something that we as humans will have to deal with. However, that does not mean that all hope is lost. Although there is not one person, computer, program, or algorithm that can stop fake news, we as a society can help to drastically reduce it. We can fact check what we read, and if we find a site or publisher consistently pushes fake news, we stop reading them. No one person has the power to fix this problem, but if we as a society agrees this is a problem we should work on, then we can help fix the fake news problem.
Works Cited
Cole, Samantha. “'Deep Voice' Software Can Clone Anyone's Voice With Just 3.7 Seconds of Audio.” Motherboard, VICE, 7 Mar. 2018, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3k7mgn/baidu-deep-voice-software-can-clone-anyones-voice-with-just-37-seconds-of-audio
Dizikes, Peter, and MIT News Office. “Could This Be the Solution to Stop the Spread of Fake News?” World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/want-to-squelch-fake-news-let-the-readers-take-charge/.
Fowler, Geoffrey. The Washington Post, WP Company, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/18/i-fell-facebook-fake-news-heres-why-millions-you-did-too/?utm_term=.ccbbeb5661be
“How Can We Fix the Fake News Problem?” Null, IT Business Edge, www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/how-can-we-fix-the-fake-news-problem-10.html.
Knight Foundation. “Disinformation, 'Fake News' and Influence Campaigns on Twitter.” Knight Foundation, www.knightfoundation.org/reports/disinformation-fake-news-and-influence-campaigns-on-twitter
Mansky, Jackie. “The Age-Old Problem of ‘Fake News.’” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 7 May 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/age-old-problem-fake-news-180968945/
Maguire, Laura. “Camus and Absurdity.” Philosophy Talk, 27 Feb. 2015, www.philosophytalk.org/blog/camus-and-absurdity
Mitchell, Amy, et al. “Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion.” Pew Research Center's Journalism Project, Pew Research Center's Journalism Project, 26 Apr. 2018, https://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowing-confusion/
Schwartz, Oscar. “You Thought Fake News Was Bad? Deep Fakes Are Where Truth Goes to Die.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 Nov. 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/12/deep-fakes-fake-news-truth
Williams, Dan, and Cambridge Intelligence. “Detecting Fake News with Neo4j & KeyLines.” Neo4j Graph Database Platform, neo4j, 24 Oct. 2018, https://neo4j.com/blog/detecting-fake-news-neo4j-keylines/
(Attachment 1)
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